James Axler - Deathlands 002 - Red Holocaust

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In the world of Deathlands

There were, of course, survivors…

The world was not destroyed—just a way of life. The global population was cut

down to perhaps one-fifth of what it had been. The ecosystems were utterly

disrupted. The climate was transformed.

In what had once been North America, the survivors struggled to prevail in a new

age of plague, radiation sickness, barbarism and madness. There were days of

seemingly endless night, eerily lit by fires in the sky. Pyrotoxin smogs blanketed

the earth. Fetid strontium swamps created new and terrible life forms. Two-

hundred-mile-an-hour winds hurtled across the landscape, and when by some

freak chance a storm cloud swept in from the sea, it was acid rain that fell— pure

acid that stripped a man to the bones in sixty seconds of shrieking agony.

In spite of this, life returned.

In isolated pockets, survivors fought back against terrible odds. And won.

Sort of.

RED HOLOCAUST

JAMES AXLER

A COLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • PARIS • AMSTERDAM •

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STOCKHOLM • HAMBURG

ATHENS • MILAN • TOKYO • SYDNEY

This is for MH who made me believe in the reality of the deus ex machina.

With thanks and the best of friendship.

First edition September 1986 ISBN 0-373-62502-

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 permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill

Road, Eton Mills, Ontario, Canada MSB 3K9.

All the 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 al! the incidents are pure invention.

The Worldwide Library trademark, consisting of the words GOLD EAGLE and

the portrayal of an eagle, and the Worldwide trademark, consisting of the word

WORLDWIDE in which the letter "O" is represented by a depiction of a globe,

are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

Printed in Canada

Chapter One

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RYAN CAWDOR BLINKED, wincing as he tried to sit up. The lights still

glowed in the patterned metal plates set in the floor and ceiling. The armored

glass walls were pale blue streaked with gray. Instinctively his hand fell to the

smooth butt of the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm pistol on his hip.

There was the now-familiar feeling of nausea as he backed against the wall,

shaking his head to clear the cobwebs of the mat-trans jump. Only a frozen

moment ago he and his colleagues had been facing death in the Darks, the

mountainous region that had once been called Montana. Now they were…?

"Where the firestorm are we?" he muttered.

It was their fifth jump within an hour. Each one had been accompanied by a gut-

wrenching sickness and a whirling in the brain, as if every single particle of tissue

was being dissolved and spun through a suction pump.

Ryan couldn't even begin to think how the complex machines might work.

Probably nobody now alive had any ideas. All of that came from before the war.

NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS had passed since Doomsday—high noon on the

twentieth day of January in the year of our Lord 2001. The last day of our Lord.

The missiles rose and the skies darkened. The death toll was countless and

humanity stood on the brink of extinction. But there were survivors. There will

always be survivors.

From the caves and mines and shelters, they emerged to find a changed world

where a nuclear winter raged for nearly a generation. But again there were

survivors. And they bred and their children bred.

Three generations and close to a hundred years passed. Most of the United States

was changed. Deserts in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico became fiery nuke hot

spots where storms carrying rain of undiluted acid howled in from the Gulf. Most

of California had slipped unprotesting into the seething Pacific. Volcanoes and

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earthquakes had changed the maps forever.

Except that there weren't any maps.

On the East Coast, the big cities crumbled in the endless rain. From the lawless

elements rose a new breed of leader, barons who ran their own fiefdoms like

medieval lords, paying armies of mercenaries to protect and expand their borders.

In the middle of the country, known as the Deathlands, civilization was reduced to

several scattered communities linked by a frail network of poor roads. Along

these roads came the merchants, trading in food or supplies or medicine or

blasters, and roving bands of freakish muties that set ambushes and raped and

killed. And, on occasion, indulged their taste for human flesh.

Best known of the merchants was the man called the Trader. And the most

respected, was his first lieutenant, Ryan Cawdor.

RYAN SAT STILL, fighting to steady his breathing. Sweating, he wiped his face,

his fingers touching the patch over his left eye. Then he traced the long, puckered

scar that ran down the right side of his face, then tugged at the corner of his

narrow mouth.

His mouth was dry and he licked his lips. His first firefight back East had

occurred when he was twelve. That was nineteen years ago. A skinny kid with a

mop of curly black hair, hefting a battered Armalite. For the first time, killing a

man. Funny how you remembered the first. Remembered the first man you killed.

First woman you made love to.

Both times Ryan had been twelve. On a trip into the Appalachians he'd met a web-

fingered mutie and blew half his guts away, spilling the loops of greasy intestines

into the man's lap. First woman had been a mulatto whore in a bawdy house near

Butcher's Creek.

What brought all that back? "Yeah," he whispered, to himself. "Mouth gets dry

and your hands get wet. Mebbe should be the other way round."

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Hearing a low groan, he looked to one side of the chamber. It was Finnegan. Fat,

jolly Finn, with a red stain drying to brown on his hip, where Hennings had bled

on him as Finn hauled his friend to safety. Henn lay still, his breathing ragged and

harsh, blood still oozing from the ax-cut along his thigh. Hun-aker was corning

around. She was on her hands and knees, fiercely shaking her head, forcing the

clinging darkness from her mind. She sensed Ryan watching her and looked up at

him, running her hand through her cropped green hair.

"Hurts like a bastard, don't it, Ryan? Like a fuckin’ bastard."

"Yeah," he agreed.

Okie, the tall, good-looking blaster, heaved herself to her feet in a single, fluid

movement, cradling her M-16A1 autocarbine, its eleven-inch barrel like a material

extension of her own sullen aggression. Ryan noticed that her wounded shoulder

had nearly stopped bleeding.

On the other side of the chamber, J. B. Dix wiped the back of his neck. His eyes

blinked twice behind wire-rimmed glasses, and he coughed, clearing his throat.

"Not so bad, this time." J.B. was a man of few words.

Next to him, Krysty Wroth stirred. For her, the passage had been worse than

usual, and she was doubled over, coughing and retching dryly. Her long red hair,

brighter than fire, tumbled to the floor, seeming to move with its own sentient life.

Ryan watched her, still prey to his own warring emotions. The girl they'd rescued

from muties only a few short weeks ago had managed to affect him as no other

woman ever had. With her dazzling green eyes and wonderful body, Krysty had

attracted every man on the war wagon. It had seemed utterly logical that she and

Ryan should make love.

But only in the last couple of hours had the realization dawned on him that the girl

was a mutie. Under extreme stress she could produce a burst of violent muscular

energy that was awesome. He still hadn't sorted out how he felt about falling in

love with a mutie.

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"How's Doc?" he asked, moving unsteadily across the hexagonal room, stooping

by the hunched figure of the old man.

Doc was huddled over, his hands clasped between his legs. His cracked boots

were smeared with drying mud, and dirt was smeared across the shoulders of his

faded frock coat. His battered stovepipe hat was at his side, its crown dented.

Tangled gray hair spilled over narrow shoulders. As Ryan nudged him with the

toe of his boot, Doc stirred and moaned, his mouth sagging open, showing his

peculiarly perfect teeth.

"C'mon, Doc," Ryan said. "Let's find out where you've taken us this time."

"Time, my dear sir," spluttered the old man. "Time is present and also past and,

perhaps, even present in the future. Is that where we've jumped?"

"Where?" asked J.B. standing beside Ryan.

"Where what?" replied Doc.

"Leave him be," said Krysty, pulling herself up, straightening her hair. "Poor old

bastard's never all here."

The truth was that Doc was never quite anywhere. They'd rescued him some days

earlier from a tortured thralldom in a township called Mocsin, southeast of the

Darks. The boss of the town had been Jordan Teague, whose corpse now lay

somewhere among the smoldering ruins of Mocsin. Ryan and the others had

narrowly escaped the enmity of Teague's head sec man, Cort Strasser. Strasser had

been Doc's prime tormentor and had used his malign ingenuity to constantly

fashion new humiliations for the old-timer.

There was something uncanny about Doc. Despite his frequent ravings and long

silences, he seemed to have arcane knowledge of the past. Even the far past,

before the wars. But his brain had been so addled by Strasser's cruelty that

coherent thought seemed beyond him. Ryan doubted that Doc would ever return

to what men called normal.

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"Everyone ready? Henn, how's the leg?"

"Not bad, Ryan. I got me another if'n this one buys the farm."

"One leg less to piss down," sniggered Finnegan, ducking Henn's attempt to knock

his head off with a roundhouse right.

"The shoulder, Okie?" Ryan asked.

"Stiffening. Never saw what hit me. Arrow, mebbe? I'm fine. We goin' out?"

Ryan moved toward the heavy door to the gateway, but J.B. stopped him. "Best

check the weapons. Sooner's better'n later."

J.B. had been the armorer to the Trader for more than nine years, joining the

Trader's group about a year after Ryan Cawdor. Despite his mild, almost scholarly

appearance, J. B. Dix knew more about armaments than anyone alive. When the

world exploded in 2001, every single industrial center vanished in a nuclear cloud.

Since then, the manufacture of guns had virtually ceased. But all over the country

were hidden stockpiles that had been packed with the requisite tools of war nearly

a century ago. And J.B. Dix knew about all of them.

For a couple of minutes the chamber echoed with the clicking of bolts and the

testing of springs. Ejected cartridges rattled brassily on the metal floor as the

group tested the action of their handguns and rifles.

Ryan drew his panga from its scabbard, felt the honed edge with his thumb,

nodded his approval and slid the eighteen-inch blade back out of sight.

Krysty removed her three slim, leaf-bladed throwing knives from the bandolier

across her chest, flicking them casually from hand to hand, finding the points of

balance.

Only Doc had no weapon. He dusted off his tall hat and attempted to brush his

frock coat clean.

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"Ready?" said Ryan, getting nods of approval all around. "Then let's go."

The door opened smoothly with the hiss of an air lock. As he led his group into

the adjoining room, Ryan heard the faint sound of a distant siren and stopped to

listen, but it faded out.

Rectangular and roughly five paces long by three wide, the room was similar to

those that he'd seen in other gateways in other redoubts. There was a plastic table

on one side and four shelves on the other and nothing else in the room except a

polished copper bowl on the table. Hunaker picked the bowl up and peered inside.

"Nothin'. Mebbe somethin' dried at the bottom. Brown crust like blood."

She banged it back down, and it rang like a temple bell, the noise surprisingly

loud. Ryan glared at her, and she tried an apologetic half smile. With Hun that

was better than nothing.

The far door was shut. If this was like the other redoubts they'd briefly explored,

the room beyond would be the main control site for the matter-transmitter

complex. Ryan drew his handgun, the weight of the fifteen-shot SIG-Sauer

comforting. Around him, the others readied themselves. That was one of the good

things about the Trader's training: nobody needed to be told what to do in this sort

of situation. You got your finger on the trigger, nerves stretched tight, eyes

moving. It was a time when mistakes got made and men died.

One of the things that Ryan liked about the P-226 was its safety. The pistol fired

when you pulled the trigger. Not before. Not when you dropped it. He

remembered Brecht, the bearded tail gunner from War Wag Two, dropping his old

Beretta 92. That was enough to set it off and the bullet hit Karen Mutter, the

oldest woman aboard any of the war wags, in her left buttock. Her scream could

have shattered crystal at a half mile.

She had been among the dead at Mocsin.

The door opened on a greased track, and Ryan Cawdor stepped through the

doorway. It was just like the others. Consoles of whirring instruments, lights

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flashing red and blue and green. Banks of comps with tape loops that jittered on as

they had for a hundred years. It was a great tribute to the technical skill of the

engineers before the Chill that these things still functioned after a century of

neglect.

He sniffed the air, trying to catch some clue that might prepare him for what lay

behind the massive door to the gateway. His limited experience told him it should

open on a corridor that was part of a fortress built like some of the stockpiles that

they'd found in the last few years.

He flicked on the rad counter in his lapel. It cheeped and muttered quietly, but

there was nothing of the fearful crackling that would indicate a hot spot.

"Clean," said J.B., rubbing a finger along the top of one of the consoles, showing

it to Ryan.

"Don't spill any dirty blood, Hennings," warned Finnegan, chuckling at his own

joke. The tall black limping along at the rear of the party didn't bother to reply.

To the right of the polished metal door was a green lever set at the single word

Closed. Cautiously Ryan eased the lever upward toward the word Open.

There was a whisper of gears meshing, and the door began to move sideways. As

soon as it had opened a couple of inches, Ryan stopped it. Very carefully he put

his good eye to the gap, looking both ways. Sniffing again.

"Anythin'?" asked Okie.

"No. Blank wall. But…I think…seems like I can smell food."

"Food?" Finnegan quickly repeated.

"Yeah, it smells like meat cooking, but it's very faint, maybe from some days

ago."

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The rad counter was silent, surprising Ryan. What kind of place was this, he

wondered, that had virtually no radiation? Had to be a place where there'd been no

fighting. Or where they'd used some low-yield weapons with short half-lives.

"Any idea where the fuck we are, Doc?" he asked, leaving the door barely open.

"Not a clue, my dear fellow. Trouble with these jumps. All the control instructions

long gone. They took care that the redoubts held nothing, in case any Russkies

came sauntering along. All coded and tucked away. All gone?"

"Russkies?" said Krysty Wroth. "Back in Harmony, my Uncle Tyas McNann used

to talk to Peter Maritza, about Russkies."

"Russians," J.B. said. "Used to call 'em reds, 'cause they killed so many people.

Huge land out west of us beyond where the coast all fell in. Mean bastards—so

the old books I read kept sayin' about 'em."

"I'm openin' the door." Ryan pushed the lever all the way up, and the door slid

open, revealing a blank wall and a narrow corridor running in either direction as

far as they could see. Not that they could see very far; the passage was gently

curved, its ends out of sight.

Joining Ryan, they entered the corridor, fanning out with guns ready. He tasted

the air again, still catching the elusive but undeniable scent of cooking.

"I can smell it, too," whispered Finnegan. "Good meat stew and fresh bread. That

way," he said, pointing to the left.

"Best go that way," said Hennings. "Fat little tub ain't never wrong 'bout food.

He'd ride the tongue of the mouth of hell for a mug of broth."

"Left it is," agreed Ryan, leading them off, his bootheels ringing uncomfortably

loudly on the stone floor.

This redoubt was different from the others they'd seen. There were no rooms

opening off the main corridor, just a long bare passage with a high domed ceiling.

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摘要：

d9IntheworldofDeathlandsTherewere,ofcourse,survivors…Theworldwasnotdestroyed—justawayoflife.Theglobalpopulationwascutdowntoperhapsone-fifthofwhatithadbeen.Theecosystemswereutterlydisrupted.Theclimatewastransformed.InwhathadoncebeenNorthAmerica,thesurvivorsstruggledtoprevailinanewageofplague,radia...

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James Axler - Deathlands 002 - Red Holocaust

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