James Axler - Deathlands 036 - Skydark

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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 1997

ISBN 0-373-62536-7

SKYDARK

AH rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of 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.

Printed In U.S.A.

"Iron covered the fields and roads: iron points reflected the rays of the sun. This iron, so hard,

was home by a people whose hearts were harder still." —From Bullfinch's Mythology,

"Legends of Charlemagne,"

attributed to Ogier the Dane, circa 800 A.D.

"From what same clay are both heroes and tyrants made?" —From Relativism and Reality in Modern

Political Thought by Dr. Dorm Tretheway, D.D., Patti Party Press, Sandpoint, Idaho, 1999

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a worid born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 dial was the bitter

outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always bangs 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 bean 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 Deamlands with the legendary Trader. Doctor Theophflus Tanner: Tom 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. 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 worid he knows, and yet he is the

seedling bearing die promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity's last hope....

Prologue

There was no escape from the nightmare of Death lands after the nuclear holocaust in 2001. Ryan

Cawdor understood that, take it or leave it, this was Ms world. He never forgot that no court of

law, no army of deliverance, no rescue squad would be there to put things to right-ever.

What population was left existed without laws or moral guidance, other than to obey the savage

rules of survival. Nature lay waste, ruined, contaminated, the tragic price humanity paid for the

blind worship of science. And there was hardly a steeper price than the kind of severe genetic

scrambling that created those mutated humans who were monstrous in body and mind.

Life always meant peril in the Death lands, but the mutants seemed to symbolize the unconscious

dread of the disintegration of the species. So they were often targeted for summary execution by

the norms, and those mutants who were able and of a like mind energetically returned the favor.

Through this world Ryan Cawdor and his warrior survivalists roamed, with predark wags if a lucky

find provided scarce fuel. But even with the wags travel was

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a high risk enterprise, and increasingly the mat-trans units in the redoubts offered the best

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option for a change of scene or quick exit from a hotspot.

Built before skydark, the redoubts and their mat-trans gateways had endured the nuke barrage

because they were entirely self-contained, blast-proofed and powered by their own nuclear

reactors.

In the course of dozens of locational jumps with the units, they had come across only a very few

people who had discovered the secret of the gateways.

All that was about to change.

And not for the better.

Chapter One

A whisper of chill, stale air crept along the mat-trans chamber's armaglass walls, and with it

came a whiff of something sharp and electric. As the raised metallic floor plates began to glow

brighter, Ryan Cawdor scanned the faces of his five friends.

Only Krysty returned his gaze, her green eyes steady. Though she held her head high and her long-

limbed, statuesque body defiantly erect, he could tell mat deep down she was anxious about the

jump: her prehensile, mutant red hair had drawn close to her nape, retracting in response to

danger.

The woman's anxiety was understandable. The danger was very real, and close enough to taste.

Mildred Wyeth sat beside Krysty with her eyes shut and her head bowed. The multiple beaded plaits

of Mildred's hair swayed slightly as she clenched her hands into fists at her sides, her stocky

form tensed as if to absorb a body blow. Whip-lean Jak Lauren stared blankly off in the middle

distance; though the expression in his ruby-colored eyes was unreadable, the tendons of his jaws

flexed like steel cables under the waxy white of his scarred cheeks. J. B. Dix gripped the brim of

his beloved fedora with both hands, twisting it down

DEATHLANDS

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to seat it more firmly on his head. Behind the Armorer's round, steel-rimmed spectacles, Ryan

caught the glimmer of a sardonic smile. What was that old predark saying? When the crapfall really

got heavy, it was time to screw on your hat.

Ryan turned to Doc Tanner last. The old man's eyes were tightly closed, his lips moving as he

muttered softly to himself. He repeated a short phrase over and over. Under the present

circumstances, on the verge of molecular disassembly, any whisper might have been taken for a

prayer. Though the phrase Doc was repeating sounded vaguely like a plea for mercy or salvation, it

wasn't

The one-eyed man recognized the strange words. Doc, a fountainhead of obscure, dated and often

arcane knowledge, had taught Ryan the phrase and its meaning.

Morituri te salutamus.

As Doc had explained, the words were in Latin— one of many human languages long dead before the

nuke shit hit the fan. Morituri te salutamus was a Roman gladiator's oath to his emperor before

entering mortal combat, which signified submission and allegiance to a higher power and an

acceptance of one's own fate.

"We who are about to die salute you."

Ryan figured the part about accepting fate was a flat-out given; what the rest meant was a mystery

to him. He had no idea who or what Doc thought he was saluting, .or if the old man even knew. The

experience of

having been time-trawled into the future had done something to the old man's mind. He didn't

always talk rationally.

A swirling gray mist appeared near the chamber's ceiling. Tendrils of the mist drifted down,

obscuring everything.

A curious person caught in the same situation might have wondered if the fog really existed or if

it was an illusion, a figment of a mind already being systematically deconstructed, cell by cell.

Ryan Cawdor wasn't a man to linger over questions that served no immediate purpose. He was a stone-

hard pragmatist, a bottom liner, which was why he and his friends used the mat-trans units. Having

journeyed across post-Armageddon America on foot and in the Trader's war wags for many years, he

knew how dangerous Chose alternate modes of transportation were. The odds were heavily stacked

against the long-term survival of conventional travelers, no matter how well armed they were. Of

the many thousands of human fatalities he had seen in Deathlands, few had been quick and painless.

Ryan fell through the space where the floor should have been, spiral ing downward, faster and

faster through black emptiness. Somewhere in the middle of his wind milling fall, he completely

lost consciousness. Mercifully everything went blank. But not for long. The mind dreamed in

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transit, and the dreams were always bad.

The instant of deathlike oblivion was shattered by a

DEATH LANDS

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surge of color, sound and the full range of physical sensations; the jump dream had begun.

It was night.

He hit the ground running. His bare feet slapped against moist soil as he raced toward a distant

tower of flames. And as he ran, he knew it wasn't his own body that carried him. It was too light,

too quick, too strong for its size. The differences—the raw speed and the agility—amazed him.

Effortlessly he closed the gap between himself and a crude defensive wall of skinny, unpeeled logs

seated in heaped, tamped earth. A narrow section of the tree-trunk barrier was smoking, the ax-

sharpened tops of its logs shattered into fans of splinters as if by a lightning strike. He

slipped through a break in the wall and into the midst of a tiny, triple-poor ville. Ryan knew he

had never been there before, but he had seen many outposts just like it, clinging for life at the

edges of Deathlands. The nameless ville's packed-dirt courtyard was surrounded by a jumble of

thatched-roof shanties. Most of its two dozen mud-and-stick huts were already burning. Beyond

their steeply peaked roofs, at the rear of the compound, he could just make out the sawtooth top

of the log wall.

All around him the humid darkness echoed with animal shrieks of pleasure and cries of pain. The

air hung heavy with a maddening perfume: the metallic scent of freshly spilled blood and the sour

smell of wood smoke. He caught the dim shapes of white limbs moving frantically at the edges of

the firelight—the arms

and legs of others like him, gleefully killing with bare hands and feet

His kin had already found their prey.

He caught himself gasping, not from the exertion of the full-out run, but from the intensity of

the excitement he felt. Heat radiated from his very core, surging through his limbs and his face.

It was the heat of desire, of an unquenchable hunger. Not a hunger for sex; this lust wasn't

focused in his loins, but in the center of his torso, between heart and stomach. Even as the heat

billowed outward, it seemed to compress his lungs in hoops of steel, forcing him to sip greedily

for air. And from his own throat came a strange mewling sound, liquid, plaintive, sinuous. The

vibrations of the soft cry cascaded over his chest like a caress.

He turned slowly, taking in every detail of the grim scene: the fires, the brutal murders of the

ville's people and their livestock, the wanton destruction. Everything he saw as he turned,

everything he felt was new—and fascinating.

A staccato crackle of gunfire froze him. It was from a single blaster, inside the ville's

perimeter. There was still at least one survivor. He crossed the courtyard, homing in on the

source of the sound.

When he tried the front door of the shabby hut, it wouldn't open, even to a full-force kick. It

was heavily barred from the inside. Without a thought he climbed the hut's front wall, as quick as

a lizard, scampering up onto the thatched roof. He peered down through the ragged hole that had

been torn in the thatch. The room

DEATHLANDS

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below him was lit by rows of guttering candles, illuminating several corpses around a long table.

Ryan dropped twenty-five feet, landing softly on the killing floor.

Three adults and four children lay facedown in the middle of their evening meal. He sniffed at one

of the crude wooden bowls, recognizing boiled mashed roots, boiled mashed beans, boiled prickly

leaves. It was a gray-green, tasteless last supper. The rough-hewn table was puddled with the

blood of the seven diners. From the eye sockets up, the tops of their skulls had been ripped off,

the contents plundered, splattered and smeared over the clay-colored interior walls. Their arms

and legs were cracked and twisted into impossible positions, their necks grotesquely bent.

The sweet stench of gore suffused the warm, moist air, and made it even harder for Ryan to

breathe. A surge of internal heat, more powerful than anything he had yet felt, slammed him. And

he had the sudden urge to throw himself into the pool of blood spreading across the tamped earth

floor, the urge to roll and wallow in it. At some deeply submerged level of mind, Ryan recognized

the alien nature of the thought and recoiled. Though he tried, he couldn't stop himself from

kneeling and touching the spilled blood. Nor could he stop himself from feeling disappointment

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when he realized it had already gone cold.

He examined the floor. Multiple bloody footprints led away from the red pool. And then he caught a

faint whiff of a familiar, fishy odor: kin on the hunt

His strange new body's response was automatic. Once more the strangely pleasurable mewling sound

erupted from his throat. As it did, a horrendous, sustained burst of gunfire rang out, this time

so close it seemed to shake the hut's walls. Ryan leaped over the blood and through the yawning

doorway beyond. It opened onto a cramped, dark room where rude straw pallets were spread out on

the ground. At one end of the room a door to the outside stood ajar. He peered cautiously around

the jamb. The doorway looked onto a small lane that separated the ragged line of huts. Lit by the

nearby burning rooftops, the dirt track lay heaped with still-thrashing white bodies: his kin

tangled up in yards of their own spilled bowels.

Only one creature remained standing in the narrow lane.

The enemy.

A tall, rangy and powerfully built man bent over a fresh corpse, trying to pry the first six

inches of a long-bladed knife from the center of its bony chest. With his back to Ryan, the black-

haired foe braced the sole of his boot on the dead face while he savagely levered the knife handle

back and forth.

The sight sent a wave of righteous hatred and rage coursing through Ryan's blood. Under the hate

and the rage—and more terrible than either—he felt a surge of pure delight, delight in what he

knew to be his own vastly superior physical strength, delight in the destruction he was about to

visit upon the unwary man.

In a single, catlike bound, he crossed the space be-

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tween the doorway and his target. He launched himself with his arms outstretched, and when he

slammed onto the enemy's back, he caught hold and drove him forward, but not down as he had

planned. With a combination of balance and strength, the man managed to keep his feet despite the

sudden impact. Ryan's arms whipped in a blur, hands tearing at the broad shoulders. Cloth gave

way, presenting him with bare, warm skin. Ryan snatched hold and pulled as hard as he could. The

skin stretched and stretched until it could stretch no more, and then it began to rip loose from

the dense layers of muscle underneath.

The man screamed and whirled, punching, kicking, trying to throw him off.

Ryan held on, riding his enemy like a wild horse, and when the man paused for breath, he

repositioned his grip. As he moved his hands, he saw the torn strips of skin, the bright, slick

blood and the rows of round red welts he had left behind. Suddenly everything made sense. The

speed. The uncanny climbing ability. The animal urges. Even as Ryan realized with a pang of horror

what the welts meant, what kind of subhuman, mutated body he possessed, his body slapped a hand

against the side of the man's face. The tiny suckers that lined his fingers and palms seized the

flesh of cheek, nose and forehead. Bracing a knee in die middle of his enemy's back, he used all

his power to twist the straining, corded neck and draw the chin toward him over top of the

bleeding shoulder.

The dark-haired man had a single eye, blue and full

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of hate. The empty socket on the other side of his face was covered by a patch, which only partly

concealed the old blade scar that split eyebrow and cheek.

It was like looking into a mirror.

The life Ryan Cawdor was about to take was his own.

Then something even stranger began to happen: it started to hurt.

Bad.

For a terrible instant Ryan floundered in a jumble of conflicting viewpoints and sensations. His

world blurred as two different sets of images, from two different sets of eyes—murderer's and

victim's—were superimposed on one another. His consciousness inhabited both of the struggling

dream-bodies at once, but he couldn't control either. Though he ordered the aggressor to let go,

it wouldn't obey; though he commanded the victim to break free, the attacker on his back was too

strong. Ryan simultaneously felt exquisite pleasure and unendurable pain as the tendons that

anchored face to bone snapped, and the brutally drawn flesh tore free from the front of his skull.

Victim Ryan's head wrenched back with such force that his neck vertebrae shattered, severing his

spinal cord.

Blackness cut through Ryan's consciousness like a sword slash, dividing him from the slumping

human form.

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And once more there was only one creature standing in the narrow, corpse-Uttered lane.

Straddling the broken human body, Ryan the victor

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clutched in his suckered fist a bloody rag of muscle and sinew and, dangling by its torn nerve

bundle, one intensely blue eye.

THE HUGE BONFIRE BEAT against Mildred's bare back in scorching waves. Of their own accord, her

legs responded to the erratic rhythm of the heat, propelling her around the edge of the blaze in a

jittery, jerky, arm-waving dance. Between her toes the earth was gooey soft, churned to muck by

the footsteps of the dozens of others who circled the fire with her. Numbed by the pleasure she

felt, Mildred danced through roiling clouds of rank smoke, through showers of golden sparks.

Beside her the fire roared like an engine from hell.

It hissed and whistled, squealed and screamed.

As Mildred jigged and hopped, her arms pumping overhead, something in the heart of the pyre

exploded. The soft whump hurled chunks of flaming wood, like miniature comets, across the

courtyard. Wood wasn't the only thing burning—or flying. Hot, wet gobbets of flesh spattered her

bare breasts, stomach and thighs.

For the first time Mildred looked down and took note of her dream-body. Its stark whiteness

stunned her. She stopped dancing, letting the other celebrants brush past her. Her limbs weren't

dark brown as they should have been, but pale as ash. And they were the wrong shape, too. Not

muscular and heavy boned, but slender, almost fragile.

When she turned over her hands, she saw the rows

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of tiny suckers that lined their mutated palms. A chill of horror crept up the back of her neck.

A wall of blast-furnace heat rolled over Mildred. It was so intense that she had to jump away or

have her skin blistered. As she whirled, the burst of heat penetrated her from head to foot, and

like an exotic drug, lubricated her joints, her belly, and made her brain bubble and froth.

Instantly her concern over what she had become vanished—and the lithe, pale body resumed its

erratic dance.

At the edge of the firelight she could make out the smoldering ruins of the little ville. A group

of scrawny, white-limbed figures rushed from the deep shadows, bearing more fuel for the pyre.

Some carried great armloads of thatch, broken pieces of furniture, piles of the pathetic personal

belongings of the ville's inhabitants— lice-infested straw beds, flea-ridden furs and coarsely

woven blankets. Others ran forward in pairs, dragging limp human bodies between them by the heels

or wrists. Four of the pale firebugs carried a struggling, screaming, dismembered hog. With all

its legs torn off, it looked like an enormous, grotesquely bloated, pink grub.

Into the great fire went the thatch, the people and the pig. Fountains of sparks shot into the

black sky, then the night echoed with overlapping shrieks of agony—the great sow wasn't the only

still-living thing that had been tossed into the blaze. Trembling charred hands reached out

through the curtain of fire, clutched at nothingness and fell back.

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Mildred's human spirit retreated in horror from the sight, even as her strange new body delighted

in it, spinning and capering in ecstasy. In her wild exuberance she collided with a fellow

reveler. The impact bounced her from the dance track at the edge of the bonfire. She stumbled and

slipped on the muddy ground. As she caught herself with a hand, she looked up.

Fifty feet away, at the edge of the light, stood another figure, impossibly tall and as still as a

statue. Obviously, enormously male, its gleaming, oiled body was hairless and naked, but for a

knotted loincloth and combat boots.

"Kaaa..." she said automatically, the sound rippling up from her throat like the purr of a cat.

What the cry meant, Mildred didn't know.

But it felt delicious.

The grant had odd, piebaldlike markings on his skin: brown cloud shadows crawling over his snowy

whiteness. A bandolier of black-tipped cartridges hung across his massive chest and shoulders—ammo

for his weapon, the mother of all shoulder-fired blasters. In his hands the M-60 machine gun

looked like a child's toy.

He didn't have the look of kin, Jior the familiar, rank-sour smell.

He looked and smelled like the god he was.

Mildred prostrated herself before him, pressing her face deep into the mud. Kill or die—mere was

nothing she wouldn't do for him. When she raised her face, he

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gestured sharply with the machine gun, acknowledging her supplication and releasing her from it

"Kaaa..." Mildred purred, crawling backward on her belly.

When she rose and turned again to the pyre, a great plume of sparks shot skyward. Her kin had just

fed it more fuel. Fresh screams cut through the throbbing roar. Mildred's body responded to the

sudden surge in heat with an instant jerk-dance. Then something bounced out of the fire, landing

almost on top of her feet.

A baby.

It writhed in its own miniature ball of flame, screeching like a teakettle.

A pang of human conscience pierced her mat-trans dream state. For a second Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the

trained physician, the care giver, fought for control. Though she felt the baby's pain and wanted

to save its life, she also felt an opposing and even more powerful need: to kill all those not

kin, to burn the corpses and stomp the dry bones to powder. The woman struggled to make the alien

body respond to her will, but it was as if her true, human self was stuck to flypaper—she could

only drag herself a short distance before she was pulled back, exhausted. And before she could

reach the dying baby and put out the fire, another pale and scrawny figure stepped up and kicked

it back into the heart of the blaze.

Mildred tried desperately to wake up, to end the nightmare, but to no avail. Buffeted by the heat,

she

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continued to dance like a automaton, drool sliding down her chin and throat and glistening between

her rock-hard breasts.

KRYSTY DREAMED she was climbing, hand over foot, up an incredibly steep incline. She moved

joyously, as light and quick as a spider across a great, mist-shrouded, gray cliff. As she scaled

the face, reality began to shift and skew. The incline's sheer, vertical surface started to sway

and ripple under her weight. It felt more like a net ladder woven from rope than a mountain of

rock. As she continued upward through the blinding fog, she realized that it wasn't made of rope,

either. The hand-and footholds she climbed were warm and smooth, and electric to the touch.

Then the wall she climbed but couldn't see began to sing.

Hie sound of a thousand flutes surrounded and enfolded her. They chirped, they tweeted, they

trilled up and down three octaves. If any of the flutes played a melody, it was lost amid the

chaos of random notes. The volume pulsed louder, reaching a mighty crescendo like a cheering

crowd, then it trailed off to near-silence. It roared again, and again faded. Louder, then softer,

over and over. The sawing, atonal music stirred something inside Krysty, sending a tickle of

excitement rushing from the base of her skull to the base of her spine. Without warning, the fog

around her lifted, and everything came into sharp, startling focus.

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Not only was the cliff, the net, the wall beneath her alive, but it was in constant, undulating

motion.

It was made up of thousands of creatures, their arms and legs laced together, interlinked chains

of pale, naked beings. Krysty raised her bare foot to a shoulder and gripped the front of the

thigh above, pulling herself higher. She smelled sour sweat from the bald head of the creature

upon whose back she climbed, felt the seething animal heat. The brush of skin against skin told

her that she, too, was naked. She looked up to see that the tapestry of bodies hung from some

indistinct point out of sight overhead. And it wasn't made of a single sheet of living beings, but

many sheets, laid one on top of another, and layers of individual creatures locked as she was now,

chest to back, chest to back, chest to back.

From below, a hand closed around her ankle and yanked. Krysty braced herself and lashed out with a

savage mule kick. Her heel made solid contact with a face, and the hand released her foot She

glanced over her shoulder and saw a white body pinwheeling away from the living wall, and as it

did, it crashed into the climbers below, creating a chain reaction, an avalanche. Dozens of white

forms were knocked free and sent tumbling thousands of feet before they disappeared into the mist.

Their deaths panicked and momentarily froze the hundreds of other pursuers swarming up die web.

Krysty felt a delirious exaltation. No one could stop her. As she climbed higher and higher, the

interlinked creatures she passed over became noticeably larger and

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stronger—they had to be in order to maintain their position in the chain of bodies.

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The strongest of all were at the very top.

They were die most desirable mates.

Mates!

Even as Krysty understood the purpose of her dream-body's superhuman effort, she felt a strange

pull, an arching ache in her groin. She looked down at herself in astonishment. She had no

breasts, and she was most definitely a male. A sexually excited male.

Her initial impulse was to laugh aloud.

Prior to her first sexual experience—with Carl Lan-ning, the son of Harmony ville's

blacksmith—Krysty had wondered what it would feel like to have masculine apparatus. Predark

shrinks might have diagnosed her as suffering from a mild case of pern's envy. After that first

time with Carl, she was no longer envious—or even curious. Her body had told her, had shown her,

mat die Gaia power she possessed, the mutant abilities passed down to her by her mother, Sonja,

dwarfed anything that male physiology could ever hope to do.

The man thing jerked upward, seemingly with a will of its own.

Watching it, she felt a tangible sense of loss. Whoever, whatever she was now, she was no longer

Krysty Wroth, no longer connected to a long line of highly evolved females. Her Earth Mother power

had been replaced by the more obvious—and much less imposing—prod between her legs.

Even as she grieved for her femininity, a passion, an

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animal need, swept over her. It was like nothing she'd ever felt before. The body she inhabited

knew what it wanted. The body would not be denied.

The body climbed.

She could see a creature moving above her, with small breasts and sturdy thighs and hams. Waves of

heat washed over Krysty's face and down her chest. Unable to control the body, she retreated into

herself, drawing as far away from the alien sensations as she could.

Though her body tried to overtake the creature, it couldn't; its quarry had too great a lead. The

creature reached the top of the chain, and once there, clasped itself onto the back of what looked

to be a huge male. Despite her attempt to curl up and hide, Krysty found herself experiencing

everything her body felt. She was a helpless passenger as it moved into position on the creature's

back, as with a suckered hand it guided its upstanding member under the unprotected buttocks,

nosing it into the warm, moist crevice it found there.

Trapped inside the male body, swept away in its hormone storm, Krysty momentarily lost touch with

her real-world identity: she wanted only what the body wanted. A chirping sound erupted from her

throat as she thrust deep into the clinging softness.

Ecstasy swallowed her up.

As her body's hips fell into a rocking rhythm, a hand from below gripped her foot, then her hip.

Krysty felt the weight of another creature on her back. It was enormous. The vibration deep in her

belly became an earth-

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quake as a rough hand reached under her buttocks, as something thick and hard nudged against her.

Pleasure—very familiar, very feminine—exploded between her legs; it brought her back to herself in

a headlong rush. The unmistakable sensation told her that her dream-body had two sets of sex

organs, one male, the other female, both fully operational.

As did all the creatures in the living web.

As her hips reared back for another jab, the huge creature hanging on her shoulders thrust, and

she was penetrated. As her body lunged forward, the creature she rode turned its head and opened

its wet mouth in a gasp. Krysty stared into a white, flabby face framed by a bald pate. The eyes

were unreadable, flat, as dead as a doll's. The teeth like yellow nail points.

Stickie!

Krysty's spirit fought with all its strength, but there was no escaping the predicament. Unable to

break free of the grip of the creature that had mounted her, wedged in, front and back, lost in

the tweeting chant, the lubricious, thrusting pleasure, Krysty panicked, flailing in the darkness

of the alien skull. Her real self wasn't just lost and adrift; it was drowning. It was dying.

There was no Gaia power in this feverish universe, nothing and no one to come to her aid.

As more and more stickles added links and layers to the chain, the mass humping built to a frenzy.

Krysty knew with a terrible certainty that she would be impregnated by the great thing on her

back, that her belly would swell and swell until she staggered under its

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weight, and that soon she would give birth to a gaggle of needle-toothed, dead-eyed monsters.

That's what this elaborately choreographed exercise was all about

The birthing of monsters.

As that realization sank home, at the edge of consciousness she sensed an onlooker, a shadowy

presence lurking beyond her field of view. A presence of pure and perfect evil—which stepped

forward, into the light of her mind.

Not just a bystander, this, or a mere watcher.

This was a laughing ringmaster.

With steel eyes.

RYAN AWAKENED on his hands and knees on the gateway floor. As he clung to it, the gleaming surface

seemed to dip and swirl, and the chamber's violet-tinted armaglass walls spun wildly around him.

Strands of acrid bile dangled from his parted tips. His mind reeled with more than the usual

postjump confusion. He had suffered an awful defilement, a rape of soul that not even a lifetime

of Deathlands' horrors had prepared him for.

Against his will he had been forced to share space, breath, heartbeat with the mutated and

inhuman.

The gateway chamber reeked of vomit Ryan dry-heaved from the stench, his stomach threatening to

invert itself and climb out his throat All around him, amid the groans of his companions, he heard

what sounded like dozens of tiny lips blowing soft, wet

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kisses. Slowly, like a curtain rising, the mat-trans haze lifted from his brain.

It was then he realized there were too many legs, arms and bodies inside the sealed chamber.

With an effort he focused his eye.

Inches away two huge eyes looked back at him from a pale, hairless face, black eyes, alive but

dead to feeling, to sympathy, to mercy. Below the eyes were tiny nostrils centered in moist flab,

and its mouth was lined with rows of pointed, vulpine teeth.

Before Ryan could make his body react, the stickle lashed out. A cold, sucker-lined hand slapped

against his face, covering mouth, nose and cheek. But the suckers failed to attach themselves to

the man's flesh.

As he bounced the back of the stickie's head onto the floor, Ryan glimpsed other muties sprawled

and tangled in the hexagonal-shaped chamber. His companions were outnumbered two to one.

He started to reach for die handblaster on his hip, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer semiautomatic, but thought

better of it. At point-blank range, in the close confines of the chamber, the high-velocity, full-

metal-jacket slugs would undoubtedly drill through the stickles and hit either his companions or

the armaglass walls. Hopping into a low crouch, Ryan drew his panga from its sheath. The stickie

screamed up in his face as it, too, started

to rise.

Instead of using the razor edge of the eighteen-inch knife to behead the mutie—there wasn't enough

clearance behind him for a sideways swing—Ryan brought

the knurled steel pommel of the handle down on the hairless head in a full-power arc. The top of

the skull crunched under the impact and caved in, punching bone shards deep into the brain cavity.

The stickie's screaming stopped as if cut off by a switch; the huge black pupils of its shark eyes

floated on seas of bright red. Blood jetted from the tiny nostrils as it slumped, twitching

feebly, back to the gateway floor.

Even as it fell, the other stickies began to rouse themselves, sitting up and blinking in the

harsh, artificial light.

Ryan gripped the shoulder of Doc's frock coat and gave him a hard shake. "Rad-blast it, Doc, get

up!" he shouted. Jak and J.B., though obviously still dazed, pushed themselves to their knees.

Ryan stepped to Mildred's side and shook her, too. "Get up and fight!" he told her. "Fight now or

we all die!"

Krysty was the only one who didn't respond to his war cry. She lay curled in a fetal position, her

back against the violet armaglass, separated from Ryan and the others by a knot of stickies.

The band of killer muties screamed in unison and hurled themselves across the slippery floor,

charging their enemies.

Discarding the ebony sheath of his swordstick, Doc set to work in a frenzy that more than matched

his inhuman opposition. Fearless in the face of the stickies* fury, his narrow, straight, double-

edged blade flicked like a steel serpent's tongue, driving in and out of the pale bodies in a red-

tinged blur. Doc avoided the blade-

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seizing trap of the bony sternums, and sought out the soft and tender parts, piercing bowels,

stomachs, hearts.

Ryan pivoted around the stickle charge, skating on the nasty, slick floor to get between Krysty

and the pair of muties who had turned to attack her. Bracing himself, he made a mighty, two-handed

slash with his panga. The keen blade clipped through both of them at waist height, cutting off

their arms at the elbows, dropping their coiled guts to the floor.

As Mildred tried to stand to meet the attack, she, too, slipped in the slimy mess underfoot. Her

faltering step made the onrushing stickle lose its target. The suckered hand missed her head by

less than an inch and slapped against the armaglass wall. It stuck there, trapped by its own

suckers for a second—long enough for Mildred to unholster her ZKR 551 pistol. The Czech-made

blaster was a precision target weapon and chambered for the relatively light .38-caliber Smith &

Wesson round.

Light was just what the doctor ordered.

Without worrying about the possibility of a through-and-through, Mildred pressed the muzzle of the

blaster against her attacker's breastbone and fired. The tiny gateway chamber rocked with the boom

and flash. The stickie's arms flew back, opening wide as if to better display the blackened,

starburst hole burned into the center of its chest. As the creature hurtled like a rag doll toward

the far wall, it knocked down four of its comrades.

Ryan moved in on them with his panga. He gripped

it like a baseball bat, hacking at the heads and necks of the flopping muties. The deaths he gave

them were neither quick nor clean. Still infected by the dream, Ryan exorcised his loathing for

the debased species, making these few pay dearly for his nightmare. The stickies shrieked under

the rain of heavy but indifferently aimed blows.

While the one-eyed man worked off his fury, Jak ducked under the crazed rush of a trio of muties.

The teenager spun and struck like a poison-spitting cobra, with perfect aim. Too fast for a human

eye to follow, leaf-bladed throwing knives leaped from his hand to the unguarded necks of the

stickies. The metal handles of his deadly blades appeared as if by magic in the sides of their

throats, slicing through the clustered arteries and sending bright blood spurting. The sudden,

complete loss of blood pressure to their brains dropped the stickies where they stood.

There was a loud hiss behind Ryan, and a blast of fresh, cool air hit his back. As he whirled, he

saw the last surviving stickie. Screaming in rage, it clung to JJJ.'s back, riding him out of the

open chamber doorway.

Fighting to keep his balance, the Armorer tripped over the portal and crashed to the floor of the

brightly lit room outside. The stickie's weight came down on top of him, but J.B. already had the

slim, polished steel of his Tekna knife clutched in his fist. He thumbed the button in the butt of

the knife's handle, and the metal sheath flicked back, exposing a bright scalpel blade.

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As the stickie ripped off his hat and glasses, J.B. reached back and slashed at the join of the

mutie's hip and thigh, deftly slitting the femoral artery. Though its blood pulsed out in great

gouts, the stickie refused to die. It grabbed hold of its enemy with both hands and started

tearing at his neck.

Ryan jumped from the gateway chamber and with a downward slash of his panga cleaved the creature's

right arm off at the shoulder. Before the massive wound could even begin to bleed, he brought the

long knife swinging around in a tight horizontal arc. The stickie's head fell from its neck and

skittered across the floor, rolling under a gunmetal gray desk.

With Mildred's help, Ryan managed to pry the dead but still-strangling fingers from their friend's

throat.

"Scab-ass bastard," J.B. croaked, massaging his neck, "wanted to take me to hell with him."

"Hey, somebody, need hand here," Jak said from the mat-tram chamber's entry. He held Krysty draped

against his hip. Her head lolled loose on her shoulders, and her prehensile red hair hung in limp

strands. Her long, slender legs wouldn't support her weight.

"I got her, Jak," Ryan said, scooping Krysty into his arms.

There had been a time in Ryan's life when he would have thought twice about stepping forward. As a

wild, young coldheart riding shotgun on the Trader's War Wag One, under the same circumstances he

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might even have turned his back. Before he'd met Krysty, his only concern had been for his own

survival, and for im-

proving the odds for the same. Now he couldn't deny die powerful feelings he had for the red-

haired beauty. As he carried her over to a desktop, he could feel the shallow and rapid rise and

fall of her breathing, and he was grateful for it

Ryan gently laid her down on the desk, then stepped back so Mildred could give her an immediate

examination. Standing idly by and watching the procedure served no purpose, except to make the one-

eyed man feel helpless and impatient, so while the doctor worked he and Jak reentcred the chamber

and retrieved the weapons and gear they had dropped during the close-quarters battle.

Doc leaned against the edge of a desktop, his brow furrowed, lost in a troubled reverie until Jak

prodded him with the tip of his swordstick's ebony sheath. The old man jerked violently at the

unexpected touch. "By the Three Kennedys!" He pointed his rapier at the headless body on the

floor. "Foul incubus! Phantasm of the dunghill! What cruel joke Morpheus has played and made me

its clefted fundament!**

His companions stared at him, waiting for a translation of the archaic syntax and references.

"Though I am loath to admit it," Doc said, "during our recent journey I dreamed I was one of those

unspeakable creatures."

"That's very odd," Mildred said as she completed testing the light response of Krysty's pupils,

"because the same thing happened to me. And it was the most

DEATHLANDS

awful jump nightmare I've ever had. Makes my skin crawl to remember it."

When the doctor looked at Jak, the rubyTeyed teenager scowled back unpleasantly but said nothing.

J.B. was more forthcoming about his experience.

"I had a dream like that, too. And my dream stunk almost as bad as what's in there." He jerked a

thumb at the pale corpses heaped inside the mat-trans chamber,

"Can fix," Jak said. As quick as a cat, he moved to close the door.

"Fireblast!" Ryan swore. "You know better, Jak! If you close the door, more of the earless

bastards can come through the gateway!"

The truth of his words hung in the air, as cold and certain as death.

As far as the six travelers knew, the race of homicidal mutants known as stickies had never used a

gateway before. Now that the stickies had apparently taken their first mat-trans leap, and arrived

as Ryan and company lay on the floor recovering, they had to face the possibility that they had

done it on purpose; if indeed that was the case, the dead-eyed whirlwinds of slaughter and

destruction could pop up anywhere, anytime.

"Mebbe they just stumbled in," J.B. suggested, trying hard to offer another explanation for the

muties* presence in the gateway chamber. "Wandered in like stupes and accidently tripped the unit.

Or mebbe they didn't jump at all. Mebbe they found the entrance to

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this redoubt open and were poking around inside the chamber when we arrived."

"No," Jak said with conviction. "More come through here." He pointed at the floor, which gleamed

under banks of fluorescent lights. Tracks in the yellow vomit on the light gray linoleum led away

from the mat-trans chamber in uncountable numbers, growing fainter as they crossed the broad,

window less room. Jak crouched and touched a footprint with his index finger, then rubbed it with

his thumb, "Still wet,*' he said.

For a second, above the riot of nauseating odors in the room, Ryan could smell them.

Not their puke, Them.

In his life the one-eyed warrior had killed many stickies hand-to-hand, face-to-face, but never

before had he noticed that particular smell. Then he remembered the source of the olfactory cue:

it had come from the nightmare. Trapped in a mutant dream-body, he had recognized his fellow

stickies by the distinctive scent they left behind. Now that he was wide-awake and fully

rematerialized, the telltale stench shouted at him tike a pile of fish guts left three days in the

sun.

Not possible, Ryan told himself. Dreams, mat-trans or otherwise, weren't real. He shook his head

to clear it of still-lingering jump ghosts.

"Stickies are rad-blasted triple stupe," J.B. protested, firmly seating his fedora back on his

head. "No way could they have jumped on purpose. Dark night, most of the time they can't even find

their own pricks!"

"J.B.'s right," Mildred agreed. "None of the stickies

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