Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels
BETRAYED BY TOMORROW
A hundred years after the nukecaust, the tortured landscape of postapocalyptic America offers a brutal fight for survival. Yet tech secrets lie hidden, useful to those brave and strong enough to believe that hope can carry them toward ever-elusive peace.
BAD TO THE BONE
Violent gangs, a corrupt mayor and a heavily armed police force are the hallmarks of former Detroit, a mutie-infested, rubble-strewn metropolis. When Ryan and the companions show up, the Desolation Angels are waging a war to rule the streets. After saving the companions from being chilled by gangsters, the mayor hires Ryan and his friends to stop the Angels cold. But each hard blow toward victory proves there’s no good side to be fighting for. As Motor City erupts into bloody conflagration, the companions are caught in the crossfire. In Deathlands, hell is called home.
“They’re right behind us!” Mildred yelled
Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley hand blaster echo out of the stairwell, and started moving toward the window.
“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty frame. He promptly slipped from out of his cover and fled to the street.
Securing escape was more important than discouraging the stickies from following, and Ryan raced for the front door. The other companions were hot on his heels.
Ryan burst out of the building. The humidity hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. Quickly he took in how profuse the vegetation was, grass and flowers pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement.
Then he noticed the tall, skeleton-thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk strolling around the corner of the building across the street. But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying and aimed it at Ryan.
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
Strontium Swamp
Shatter Zone
Perdition Valley
Cannibal Moon
Sky Raider
Remember Tomorrow
Sunspot
Desert Kings
Apocalypse Unborn
Thunder Road
Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba Book I)
Dark Resurrection (Empire of Xibalba Book II)
Eden’s Twilight
Desolation Crossing
Alpha Wave
Time Castaways
Prophecy
Blood Harvest
Arcadian’s Asylum
Baptism of Rage
Doom Helix
Moonfeast
Downrigger Drift
Playfair’s Axiom
Tainted Cascade
Perception Fault
Prodigal’s Return
Lost Gates
Haven’s Blight
Hell Road Warriors
Palaces of Light
Wretched Earth
Crimson Waters
No Man’s Land
Nemesis
Chrono Spasm
Sins of Honor
Storm Breakers
Dark Fathoms
Siren Song
End Program
Desolation Angels
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
—Lydia Maria Francis Child,
1802–1880
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs 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 heart 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 Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn 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 world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…
Contents
Chapter One
“Ryan! Wake up! We’ve got a problem!”
Mildred Wyeth’s urgent voice cut through the dreadful jump disorientation and summoned Ryan Cawdor’s soul back to his pain-racked body. His stomach felt as if it had been wrenched inside out.
Bad one, he thought. Been through worse.
When he opened his eye, he was already being helped up by a firm, dry grip on his forearm. That would be J. B. Dix, Ryan’s chief lieutenant, best friend and the armorer of the small group of companions who traveled the Deathlands.
“Tell me something new,” Ryan said, slurring his words. He swayed as he got to his feet and was steadied by J.B. “Is everyone else awake?”
J.B. didn’t have time to answer the question.
“Muties!” Ricky Morales screamed. There was no mistaking the hideous shapes visible through the opaque armaglass walls of the mat-trans unit.
Ryan was back in command of his body, and he slammed the heel of his hand on the big red button by the keypad that controlled the workings of the gateway. The LD button was a fail-safe designed to transfer the companions back to their last destination.
No one had a desire to return to what remained of the ville of Progress, but that was the least of their worries.
Nothing happened.
“So we’re stuck here,” Mildred said after several moments.
The stocky black woman, her hair in beaded plaits, didn’t even flinch as a face pressed itself against the glass, becoming nearly visible through the opaque wall. Its nose was two holes above a wide-open mouth full of jagged teeth. Its eyes, though unnaturally round, were disconcertingly humanlike. Enough to show an almost intolerable rage.
* * *
“
R
YAN,”
K
RYSTY
W
ORTH
CALLED
. The statuesque beauty was staring at the base of the armaglass walls. Her sentient red hair was still coiled tightly to her scalp, as it tended to do in times of severe stress. “Water’s building up in here.”
“Great,” Mildred moaned. “Isn’t this a bit coincidental? I mean muties, yeah. Muties are everywhere. But we jump in here and the place decides to flood right now?”
“With the chamber door closed securely, that should be nearly impossible,” said a tall, silver-haired man. He shot the cuffs of the dingy white shirt he wore beneath his black frock coat with an elegance that belied the shabbiness of the garment. Doc Tanner knew a little about the workings of the network—and the white coats who built them—because they’d trawled him out of his own time in the 1890s to use and abuse as a subject for their experiments in time. And when Doc proved to be a most unwilling subject, he was sent into the future to what was now the Deathlands. Their experiments had prematurely aged him. Although he appeared to be a man in his late sixties, Doc was really in his thirties.
Ryan drew his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right hand and his panga with his left.
“Get ready to blast out of here,” he said. “J.B., you do the honors.”
The one-eyed man took in his little group with a sweeping glance. Krysty stood resolutely at his right shoulder, gripping her Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 revolver in both hands. Mildred stood just behind her, holding her more substantial .38 ZKR target revolver at the ready. Doc had drawn both his LeMat replica handgun, with the stubby shotgun barrel beneath its immense cylinder holding nine rounds of .44 Special, and the blade concealed in his ebony sword stick with the silver lion’s head. Ricky held his Webley top-break .45 revolver.
Ryan stood right behind J.B.’s left shoulder. The Armorer had his Uzi slung muzzle down over his shoulder and his Smith & Wesson M4000 riot shotgun held level. Jak Lauren stood at J.B.’s right.
“Ready?” Ryan asked. More muties seemed to be crowding into the anteroom.
“Ready as we’re going to be,” Mildred said. The others voiced their agreement.
“Hit it,” Ryan told J.B.
He maneuvered the lever that opened the door, and water swirled in, almost to the tops of Ryan’s boots. With it came stink of sewage so thick the one-eyed man almost choked.
J.B. was already striding forward through the anteroom with his scattergun held level. The mutie that had pressed its hideous face against the armaglass swung a black-taloned hand at the Armorer.
He blasted it in the belly with a charge of #4 buckshot. The weapon’s report almost imploded Ryan’s eardrums in the walled confines of the jump chamber. The mutie vented a high-pitched squeal and doubled over, clutching its ruptured gut with three-fingered hands.
The Armorer dealt it an uppercut with the butt of his longblaster. Its round head snapped up on its stalk neck and it fell over backward. It raised a splash of foul-smelling water that was already up to the tops of J.B.’s ankles. By now the rest of the companions had left the jump chamber and were all through the anteroom and into the control room.
The other muties closed in as Ryan and Jak fanned out to the sides. Ryan stepped forward to close with a mutie slashing overhand at him. He blocked with his left forearm and hacked at the creature’s upper arm with the panga.
It felt more as though the weapon was hitting dense mud or clay rather than flesh, but it struck bone. The mutie keened and struck with its left claw. Ryan kicked it in the belly, and it staggered back with thick blood oozing from the gash in its arm.
A mutie attacked from Ryan’s left. Doc stepped forward and thrust his sword through the creature’s head. It fell.
Four of the muties were down. The other four hung back as if uncertain. Unfortunately, they were between Ryan’s group and the door.
A loud
crack
almost like thunder echoed through the facility. The floor shook once, hard, beneath Ryan’s boot. Raw sewage sloshed up the walls and on the inert, dark comp stations that lined them.
A grinding squeal sounded behind Ryan’s left shoulder. He snapped his head around. A section of concrete wall as high as his head split open, and a sheet of greenish-brown water shot into the control room. It splashed down.