James Axler

The ceremony was over

“I don’t know what it is we’ve stumbled into, but I’m thinking it looks mighty big, J.B.,” Ryan said.

“Agreed,” J.B. said, quickly glancing behind them.

The Armorer pointed to the open door ahead and Ryan took the lead, jumping onto the raised step and ducking through the door and into the car. J.B. followed, trotting up the step and out of the sunlight.

The interior smelled of incense, heavy and cloying, and thick drapes hung over the windows, blocking out the dawn light.

A lone figure sat at the table—a woman wearing a hood.

She looked up as they entered, lit by the candle before her, and Ryan saw the deep lines of age crisscrossing her face.

“Come in, gentlemen.”

Ryan glanced behind him, checking to see if the sec men had followed them into the car, but no one was there.

As they stepped closer to the elderly woman, Ryan saw what it was that sparkled on her cheeks—twin tears of blood. And then he felt the world drop from beneath his feet.

Fury’s Pilgrims

Pandora’s Redoubt

Shockscape

Rat King

Deep Empire

Zero City

Cold Asylum

Savage Armada

Twilight Children

Judas Strike

Rider, Reaper

Shadow Fortress

Road Wars

Sunchild

Trader Redux

Breakthrough

Genesis Echo

Salvation Road

Shadowfall

Amazon Gate

Ground Zero

Destiny’s Truth

Emerald Fire

Skydark Spawn

Bloodlines

Damnation Road Show

Crossways

Devil Riders

Keepers of the Sun

Bloodfire

Circle Thrice

Hellbenders

Eclipse at Noon

Separation

Stoneface

Death Hunt

Bitter Fruit

Shaking Earth

Skydark

Black Harvest

Demons of Eden

Vengeance Trail

The Mars Arena

Ritual Chill

Watersleep

Labyrinth

Nightmare Passage

Sky Raider

Freedom Lost

Remember Tomorrow

Way of the Wolf

Sunspot

Dark Emblem

Desert Kings

Crucible of Time

Apocalypse Unborn

Starfall

Thunder Road

Encounter:

Plague Lords

Collector’s Edition

(Empire of Xibalba Book I)
Gemini Rising

Dark Resurrection

Gaia’s Demise

(Empire of Xibalba Book II)
Dark Reckoning

Eden’s Twilight

Shadow World

Desolation Crossing

JAMES AXLER

®

Alpha Wave

®

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM

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TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

Hitherto every form of society has been based…on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence.

—
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto,

1848

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 premoni-tions 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.…

Krysty’s head throbbed. The pain had been getting steadily worse for the past three hours, ever since they had left the redoubt.

She gazed up as the sun poked through the angry clouds scudding across the violet sky, trying to keep her mind off the pain. As she did so, Krysty could hear the concern in Doc’s voice as he spoke with Ryan and J.B. a few paces ahead.

“Look at her, Ryan,” Doc said, gesturing over his shoulder at Krysty. “That’s not a normal reaction.

Something is clearly having a negative effect on our usually effervescent Krysty.”

J. B. Dix, the armorer for the group, glanced briefly at his lapel pin rad counter, his walking pace, much like his expression, unchanging.

“Anything?” Ryan asked, though he already knew the answer. J.B. was a man of shrewd logic, and wouldn’t even waste the intake of breath to confirm it unless the situation had changed. Ryan’s single eye stared out across the empty landscape, before he turned back to address Doc. “Radiation’s at normal, and there’s nothing here we haven’t faced a hundred times before.

Dust and muties, mebbe, but nothing new.”

“Sand,” Doc corrected. “Not dust, Ryan—sand.”

Doc was right. All around them, as far as he could see, horizon to horizon, was nothing but sand. Sand and sand-colored rocks and sand-colored pebbles, gradually getting smaller and smaller until the pebbles were just grains of sand and the cycle started over again.

It had been like that ever since the companions had stepped out of the redoubt eight miles behind them.

Ryan Cawdor marched ahead of the others with long powerful strides, his dark hair catching in the wind, the SSG-70 Steyr blaster swinging against his shoulders as he set the relentless pace across the wasteland.

Next to Ryan, dressed in a battered, brown fedora and a leather jacket far too heavy for the temperature, trekked J. B. Dix. Where Ryan marched, J.B. simply walked, light-footed and watchful of his surroundings, his movements economical and appreciably silent.

Then there was Krysty Wroth, the red-haired beauty who was Ryan’s lover. She was a reliable whirlwind of energy and joy around which they all revolved. Strong, emotional, Krysty was a strange contradiction of facets.

She had some mutie abilities—bursts of supernatural strength drawn from the well of the Earth Mother, Gaia; occasional prescience; and her mane of red hair, strangely alive and responsive to her emotional state.

When Krysty was happy her hair shone like a beacon, when she was angry it crackled, curling like a vine around her head. Right now, her hair sat disheveled, drooping over her shoulders listlessly.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth walked with Krysty. Healer and caregiver, Mildred had never adopted the bleak outlook of the others. But she could still kill when the situation required it, and kill quickly.

Not as quickly as the albino Jak Lauren, the teenage survivor of unspeakable tragedy in New Orleans. Jak marched to his own beat. Even now he was off somewhere, scouting ahead or checking behind them, out of sight, using the area’s natural hiding places to camouflage himself from possible predators. Ryan was a deadly killer, but at least he was stable. Trying to tame Jak was like trying to bottle a forest fire.

And then there was Doc himself, with his ornate walking stick and his centuries’ old frock coat, his archaic turn of phrase. Theophilus Algernon “Doc”

Tanner was an anachronism from a simpler age when wars were still fought face-to-face, man-to-man, not by the push of a button and the snuffing of ten thousand lives at a time.

“Doc, we go on,” Ryan told him, snatching the man from his reverie. “You know what I’d give for her,” he added quietly, glancing toward Krysty with his good right eye before looking back at Doc. “Whatever’s affected her hasn’t done spit to the rest of us, far as we can tell. Could just be a bad reaction to the jump.

Catches all of us sometimes, you know that.”

Doc nodded his agreement. Ryan was right. Nine times in a row you could step through that gateway, blast your atoms halfway across the old United States, and come out the other side as right as rain, just like waking up. Yet the tenth time could bring dizziness and nausea and a person might think he or she would never be able to stand again. Krysty just got trip number ten this time around. It would pass.

He looked back at Krysty and smiled reassuringly.

It would pass.

JAK SPRINTED across the plain, clouds of sand kicking up in his wake.

He chanced a look back over his shoulder in an unconscious survival instinct, making sure that nothing was following. The razor blades and jagged glass sewn into the fabric of his camo jacket glinted in the sun until another angry, toxin-heavy cloud passed overhead, cutting off the light.

Somewhere off to his right—the north—he could see a storm in full fury, attacking the Earth like a cat playing with a wounded bird. Streaks of blood red lightning flashed down, repeatedly punching at the ground. The storm was traveling away from him, farther into the north. Caught up in its fury, a full-grown man could lose a limb to those potent bolts of electricity, or have the flesh washed from his bones by the acidic content of the rain. But Jak knew something about weather patterns, however unpredictable others might think them; he could tell this one wouldn’t be bothering them anytime soon.

He took a half step, skipping over the train tracks that ran across his path in the sand. Some tracks saw use here and there. When was the last time these saw use? He wondered. Like so much in the, most train tracks were just another obsolete transportation system from a more complicated time. A time when the everyday had consisted of more than simply surviving another twenty-four hours.

What he had found out here, away from his friends, was worth further investigation. He couldn’t quite tell what the thing was, but he knew that Ryan, J.B. and the others would be intrigued. So he ran, fists pumping, across the sandy plain to rejoin his companions.

“I THINK SHE’S GETTING WORSE,” Mildred announced.

Doc slowed his pace and looked back. Mildred and Krysty were fifteen feet behind the group now. Mildred was walking beside Krysty, an encouraging hand on her companion’s elbow. Krysty had paled significantly, the blood drained from her face, and though she stood under her own strength, she did so with a hunch to her shoulders, as though suffering stomach cramps.

Doc raised his cane, went to tap Ryan on the shoulder before thinking better of it. You never quite knew with Ryan—his instincts were so sharp that he might just chill a man before acknowledging who the assailant was. Doc settled on a less invasive attention grabber.

“Gentlemen,” he called, “we have trouble.”

Trouble. That was the watchword. That was the heart stopper. Tell Ryan that they had company, tell him that they had no food, tell him that they had radiation poisoning from the nukecaust, and Ryan would shrug and continue marching forward. But trouble was different.

Ryan stepped back to talk to Doc before the pair walked over to join Mildred and Krysty. J.B. remained at the front of the expedition, scouring the horizon in silence.

“What is it, Mildred?” Ryan asked.

“I think Krysty’s getting worse,” she told him.

Ryan looked at Krysty. Her muscles were bunched up, and she leaned her weight against the doctor. “You think, or she is?” he asked. It wasn’t Ryan being rude; that wasn’t his nature. Mildred knew that. There was just something in him, the way his brain was wired, that demanded absolutes. There could be no room for error, no room for questions or shades of gray.

“She’s worse,” Mildred stated firmly. “Without a full examination, I can’t tell how much worse, Ryan, but she’s definitely in worse condition now than when we left the redoubt.”

Ryan turned to Doc, as though for a second opinion.

Doc wasn’t a medical doctor, his nickname stemmed from the Ph.D. degree he’d received from Oxford University, but he had wisdom and experience, and Ryan had always appreciated that.

Doc looked at Krysty for a moment, then turned to Ryan. “Her health is deteriorating,” he decided.