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MORTAL RIFTS
When Doc is taken captive by a band of marauders in what was once Nebraska, Ryan and the companions rally to get him back. But they aren’t just fighting the local muties. They’re also up against the area’s terrifying terrain, which shifts and morphs at a moment’s notice. With their options dwindling in this mazelike region that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, the team joins forces with a beautiful and deadly woman who evens the odds on the battlefield. But while this warrior seems to be on their side, she has a secret agenda that could spell the end for them all…
THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
Since the nukecaust, the American dream has been reduced to a daily fight for survival. In the hellish landscape of Deathlands, few dare to dream of a better tomorrow. But Ryan Cawdor and his companions press on, driven by the need for a future less treacherous than the present.
Doc heard scuffling down by his feet.
“What now? Rats, I suppose, come to feast on my flesh.” He reached around for a rock to throw but found nothing. “Begone, vermin!” The scuffling got louder.
Suddenly, he heard a different sound from the same place, a distinctive sound that could not be mistaken for any other. Giggling.
Doc’s heart hammered in his chest. He meant to snap some words of defiance to try to intimidate, but before he could, his visitor scrambled forward.
Hands grabbed hold of Doc’s ankles and wrenched his legs straight with an iron grip. Then he heard a voice, high-pitched and girlish in the lightless void. “You’re mine now. All mine.”
And all of a sudden, there were many more hands, coming from all directions. And all of them were grabbing at him…
Deathlands: Child of Slaughter
James Axler
Man, a mere inhabitant of earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.
—Jules Verne,
The Steam House
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
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
Title Page
Quote
The Deathlands Saga
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Copyright
Chapter One
The blast took Ryan Cawdor and his companions by surprise, knocking everyone off their feet before they knew what had hit them.
As Ryan crashed to the ground, he twisted and gaped through the smoke for a glimpse of who or what had attacked them.
A slender mutie stood not fifty yards away, his crimson skin glinting in the blazing sunlight. He scowled at Ryan from behind the sights of a shoulder-mounted, jury-rigged gren launcher.
There was no time to shout a warning. The mutie’s hand was on the firing mechanism.
Ryan swung up his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster, which already had a round chambered. Sucking in a deep breath to steady his hand, he sighted on the mutie and squeezed the trigger.
The one-eyed man was an experienced marksman. His shooting skills had played a major role in his surviving for so long in the hellish Deathlands—all that was left of the United States after the world blew up in 2001. So he knew for a fact that as soon as he pulled the trigger he’d fired a kill shot.
Ryan felt an unsettling stillness all around him, like the calm that descended before a terrible storm. Then he experienced an odd sensation, a combination of powerful suction and expulsion all at once, equally balanced.
Suddenly, a wave of force slammed into him. His body buzzed and shivered as he hung in the wave’s grip, caught like a moth in a spiderweb.
The wave held him there for a split second, then it let him go with a shock like a blow below the belt. As he gasped at the wrenching release, he saw the sun-scorched ground between him and the mutie ripple as if it was the surface of a lake.
A low hum started, building to a deep rumble that Ryan felt in his chest and bones. Then a flash of light exploded in front of him. When it faded, he saw that a tall rock wall now stood between him and the mutie.
It wasn’t an optical illusion. Ryan grimaced at a puff of dust springing from the striated reddish-brown rock wall. It was kicked up by the bullet he’d fired, the one that had been frozen and unfrozen in midair on its way to the mutie.
“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed.
“What the hell? Where did that come from?” asked J. B. Dix, Ryan’s longtime friend and one of his traveling companions. Known as the Armorer because of his mastery of all manner of weapons, J.B. was on the ground a few feet away. He’d been toppled by the gren blast like the rest of the team and was staying down out of the line of fire.
“Beats me.” Ryan rolled over to face forward again. Fresh rounds were punching across the flat land up ahead, fired from the blasters of the muties in the trenches. For the moment, at least, the greatest danger lay in that direction.
Lining up a nearby mutie in his sights, Ryan fired his Scout, grazing the side of the enemy’s head. Ryan’s companions smoothly followed his lead. J.B. flung himself around on his belly and whipped up his Mini-Uzi to open fire on the nearest trench.
“Where any this come from?” Jak, an albino who spoke as few words as possible, flipped onto his knees and aimed his .357 Magnum Colt Python at another trench. “Land look solid before. No trenches.” At the first sign of a mutie popping up, he cracked off a shot and the mutie’s head exploded like a watermelon on a target range.
“Nice shot!” Ricky Morales scrambled up beside Jak. If he felt any aftereffects from the gren blast, he didn’t show it.
Ricky swung up his De Lisle carbine and swept it left while Jak swept his Python right. Seconds later, both young men were filling the noonday air with sizzling lead and hitting mutie targets on opposite ends of the middle trench.
Mildred Wyeth and Doc Tanner chimed in soon enough, adding to the storm of blasterfire over the flats. That left only one member of the team whose blaster was silent.
That member was Krysty Wroth, Ryan Cawdor’s life mate.
Quickly noticing the absence of the bark of her Glock 18C blaster, Ryan checked left, then right. There she was, twisting in the dust some twenty yards away, hands tangled in her long red hair.
“Krysty!” Ryan shouted over the cacophony of weapon fire, but she didn’t seem to hear him.
Though the battle was in full swing, Mildred looked his way instantly. Following his gaze, she caught sight of Krysty.
Stuffing her .38-caliber ZKR 551 revolver into the waistband of her fatigue pants, Mildred scurried on hands and knees behind the firing line. A predark physician as well as a fighter, she was well used to putting her neck on the line to provide medical care for her teammates.
When she got to Krysty, though, Mildred saw no blood or bullet wounds, which was good…but that also meant the cause of her friend’s distress was still unknown.
And it was getting worse by the minute, apparently. As Mildred reached for the side of Krysty’s throat to get a pulse, the redhead swatted the physician’s hand away.
“What’s going on back there?” In the midst of the raging fight, Ryan kept looking over his shoulder at Krysty and Mildred. His right eye—he’d lost the left one long ago in a fight with his brother—was wide with concern for the red-haired beauty who made his life of constant struggle in the Deathlands worth living.
“I don’t know yet!” Mildred yelled.
“Some form of seizure, perchance?” Doc suggested between blasts from his .44-caliber LeMat revolver. The blaster was a replica of a famous weapon from the mid to late 1800s—a time period, amazingly, that Doc called home. A man of the nineteenth century, he’d been snatched through time by a group of predark scientists. Then, when Doc had proved to be a difficult test subject, he was shunted to the future, to the Deathlands, where he’d been ever since.
Just then, a mutie’s shot sliced past, close enough for Mildred to hear the hiss of its passing. Startled, she let out a surprised cry and fell back from her knees to her butt. “Keep me from getting killed, and you’ll be the first to know!” she snapped.
Doc, who was on his belly like Ryan and J.B., pulled his blaster farther to the right and squeezed off a round. He wasn’t the best shot of the group, but this time he winged a mutie’s shoulder, sending the copper-skinned enemy screeching back into his trench.
“My dear Dr. Wyeth, I am doing my utmost to achieve exactly that desired outcome!”
“Less talk, more kill! That my desired outcome!” shouted Jak as he, too, cracked off a shot.
Ryan, meanwhile, forced himself to shut out the chaos and deepen his focus. He had to set aside his worries about Krysty and find the best way through this mess without losing his people.
The situation was pretty clear-cut, except for the apparently shifting geography. Quite simply, the day had gone sideways, as days often happened in the Deathlands.
Ryan and his companions had jumped via mat-trans to a redoubt near Ogallala, Nebraska, at the southern edge of the Sandhills. Finding the redoubt nearly stripped of supplies and transport, the companions had set out on foot, heading north in search of food. But they’d gone only a few miles when a heavily armed band of hostile muties had ambushed them.
Now the muties had Ryan and his companions pinned down; the enemy’s ranks were thinning, but the companions were still outnumbered.
“J.B.!” It took all Ryan’s willpower to ignore Krysty’s cries and call out to the Armorer. “Let’s rain down some hell on these bastards?”
J.B. grinned and unclipped a red-jacketed gren from his belt. “I like the way you think!” He tossed the bomb to Ryan, then freed up another for himself.
“Jak, Ricky,” Ryan called. “You ready for an up close and personal gopher shoot?”
“You know it!” Ricky shouted.
“Enjoy flush outta holes,” Jak said. “See how run.”
“Move on my signal.” Ryan nodded at J.B. “Count it.”
“You got it.”
Ryan tightened his grip on the plunger of the gren and pulled the pin with his teeth. He let loose another round from the longblaster, driving down a mutie who’d been climbing out of a trench, then rolled on his side and hauled the gren back for a big throw.
“Three!” shouted J.B., also winding up for the pitch. “Two!” He rattled off one more series of shots from the Mini-Uzi, then finished the count. “One!”
With that, Ryan wrenched his arm forward as hard as he could and released the gren. He saw it spin through the air, J.B.’s arcing alongside it.
Seconds after the two grens fell, a pair of explosions erupted in the trench, spraying rock and dirt and body parts in all directions. The ground shook, and screams pierced the air.
The barrage of blasterfire stopped, at least for a moment, and that was all the time Ryan’s team needed. He gave his people the signal he’d promised, which in this case was to leap up and lead the charge himself, longblaster left behind and SIG-Sauer at the ready.
Muties in the rear trenches popped their heads up like rabbits, but it was too late. Ryan, J.B., Jak and Ricky were on them in a flash, racing through the cloud of smoke and dust from the explosion like avenging angels roaring through the gates of hell.
Each person cut loose with everything he had, determined to make the most of the opportunity. Now that they had the high ground and the run of the battlefield, they intended to end this conflict, which they’d never asked for in the first place.
Only two muties remained at the far ends of the first trench after the gren blast, throwing off wild shots among the burned and battered corpses of their dead brethren. These survivors went down in short order under Ryan’s and J.B.’s blasters, screaming as their bodies spouted fountains of blood.
Meanwhile, Jak and Ricky vaulted the first trench without slowing and sprinted to the next. The two young fighters opened fire as soon as the barrels of their blasters crossed the rim, pelting the occupants with a shower of blistering slugs. More screams and spurting blood filled the air from below as half a dozen muties danced a jerky dance of death.
With the first trench quickly cleared and the second in the process of being scoured, Ryan and J.B. leapfrogged to the third. This time, though, they encountered opposition beyond the wild shots of panicked muties.
Just as Ryan and J.B. jumped the second trench, a mutie popped up from the third with a shotgun pointing in Ryan’s direction. As the shotgun roared, the one-eyed man threw himself down hard, dodging the spread of buckshot; then he rolled over fast and came up on one knee with his SIG-Sauer P-226 searching for a target.
He didn’t have to worry about the mutie with the shotgun, though, as J.B. was already peppering him with rounds from the Mini-Uzi. But as soon as that mutie dropped, two more popped up from the same trench…and five more from the next one back. All of them were armed with longblasters, revolvers or shotguns, and every blaster barrel was pointing in Ryan’s or J.B.’s direction.
At that exact moment, Krysty let out a piercing shriek, the loudest yet.
Gritting his teeth, Ryan forced himself not to run to her side. Instead, he methodically fired rounds at the two nearest muties, driving one back underground and killing the other with a shot to the eye socket.
That gave the five in the fourth trench time to get off a series of shots—but the barrage didn’t last. Fresh from clearing the second trench, Jak and Ricky moved up and added their blasters to the front line.
Together, the four companions unleashed their own barrage, forcing the five muties down; then they advanced. As J.B. took care of the single shooter left in the third trench, Ryan, Jak and Ricky hopped over it and darted to the rim of the fourth. Bullets flew up at them, preventing them from getting a clear look over the edge, so they settled for flicking out their blaster barrels and laying down fire where the shooting was happening.
As screams erupted and the blasterfire from below became sparser, Ryan, Jak and Ricky grew bolder and leaned over the rim for a better view. By then, only three of the muties were still on their feet; Ryan and Jak each picked off one, and J.B. joined the party and took out the third.
“Think we got ’em all?” J.B. threw down more rounds from the Mini-Uzi, making sure everyone in the trench was dead for real.
“Who know?” Jak swung up his Python and turned a slow circle, looking around. “This place full surprises.”
For a moment, the landscape was quiet except for the soft trickle of settling dust in the bullet-riddled trenches.
Then, suddenly, Krysty let loose the loudest scream of all. It was so long and loud and full of pain, it could have been a howl released from the depths of torture or childbirth.
Ryan whirled in her direction, ready to run…and then he froze. A familiar stillness closed in around him, like the calm he’d felt before the rock wall had appeared between him and the grenade-launching mutie.
Once again, he had that feeling of something lurching out of place, followed by powerful suction and expulsion in perfect balance. When the balance broke, a wave of force shot through him, holding him paralyzed.
An instant later, the wave let him go. The release spun him and nearly bowled him over, but he stayed on his feet through sheer force of will, which meant he had a ringside seat to see what happened next. J.B., Jak and Ricky had fallen around him, but Ryan was upright and alert.
As he watched, dizzy and shaking, the ground at his feet rippled and changed. There were flashes of light, popping across the plain one after another like giant fireflies, and the trenches that held the corpses disappeared, becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the flatland.
Still, the ripples continued to flow forward, heading for the trio of human targets in the distance.
Heart pounding with urgency, Ryan ran toward them. He saw Krysty continuing to writhe on the ground, flinging her head from side to side while Mildred tried in vain to restrain her. Doc stood over them both with his sword in one hand and the LeMat in the other, shouting something as he watched the ripples flow toward them.
Impact would come in mere seconds. Ryan ran as hard as he could, his legs pumping like pistons in the engine of a speeding wag, but he knew he wouldn’t reach his friends in time.
“Krysty!”
The ripples on the ground rushed up ahead of him and encompassed his three friends. Krysty, Mildred and Doc all seemed to quiver at once; even the air around them seemed to vibrate.
As Ryan increased his speed, redoubling his effort to reach them in time, the quivering effect intensified. He felt the hum again, the same as before, building to a rumble in his chest and bones…in his heart. It was an irregular thrumming rhythm in counterpoint to his own pulse and footsteps, distorting his natural cadence.
Ryan fought through it, determined to reach Krysty and the others. If the effect was going to do something to them, he wanted to share the same fate. He was determined not to be separated from his lover and his friends.
Up ahead, the oscillation reached a fever pitch, accelerating until it blurred his view of his friends, creating a shivering patina of light and color in their place. Then there was a blinding flash of light.
The ground under Ryan heaved, knocking him off his feet. He landed on his back and quickly pushed himself up to see what had happened.
In that instant, he experienced a wave of panic. Instead of his three friends, all he could see was a rocky hill that had mysteriously appeared between his position and theirs.
Scrambling to his feet, Ryan ran for the hill. As he circled it, he felt a terrible sense of doom and fear that the woman he loved more than anyone in the world was gone now and forever.
His heart was slamming in his chest as he dodged around the far edge of the hill, dreading what he was about to see. His eyes zoomed to the spot where Krysty had been and he saw that she was still there, with Mildred by her side.
Instantly, a flood of relief coursed through Ryan’s body. Krysty was no longer writhing and twitching on the ground. Instead, her body was limp, her face relaxed for the first time since they’d been ambushed by the band of muties.
But Ryan quickly realized that not everyone’s situation had improved. Looking around, he saw that the third member of the group was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Doc?” Ryan asked. “What happened to him?”
Mildred shook her head. “Damned if I know.” She was scowling, her face crusted with dirt. “He was here just a second ago.” Her brown eyes flashed to the hump of rock. “And if you ask me where that came from, I’ll tell you the same thing. I don’t know what the hell just happened.”
Krysty’s eyelids fluttered open, and she gazed up at Ryan. Though she was no longer rolling and screaming in pain, her green eyes still looked dazed, her face haggard. “There’s something horrible here…something unnatural.” Her voice was hoarse as she spoke.
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
She looked at him, her fiery red tresses flowing around her face like a parted veil. “Something here is warping Earth itself in a way I’ve never felt before. I feel as though it’s killing Gaia…and me.”
Chapter Two
Doc had vanished into thin air.
The companions recced the area where they’d been attacked by the muties, but they found no trace of the old man and no trace of any opening into which he might have fallen.
“Where Doc go?” Jak asked as he finished his latest search pattern and met up with Ryan. “If trapdoor or tunnel, I not see.”
Ryan sighed. “People don’t just disappear, Jak.”
“Walls not appear, either.” Jak nodded at the rock wall that had materialized during the battle. It stood not thirty feet away, as solid as if it had always been there.
The companions had examined that particular formation with great care, guessing it might hold some clue to what had happened to Doc. But they had all come to the same conclusion: if the rock wall contained any clue, it could not be detected by their senses.
Just then, Krysty approached, grimly shaking her head. “I’m coming up empty,” she said. “If Doc is anywhere nearby, I can’t feel the slightest trace of him.”
“But you still think his disappearance is connected to the…disruption you felt?” Ryan asked.
“How could it not be?” Krysty shrugged. “The disturbance, the changes in the land we saw during the battle. Then Doc disappears.”
“Not coincidence,” Jak said. “That for sure.”
“Then, what the hell is it?” Ryan gazed at the stark Nebraska landscape, watching as his friends continued to scour the area for a clue to Doc’s whereabouts. They were coming up just as empty as Krysty and Jak had.
It was beyond frustrating. In the Deathlands, problems tended to be straightforward: battles in need of fighting; hardships in need of surviving; helping allies deal with tangible threats. A person had to be tough and wily and able to think outside the box…but a person didn’t usually have to think outside the bounds of reality. The companions didn’t usually have to face the impossible.
“What next?” Jak asked.
Ryan shifted the weight of his Steyr Scout longblaster cradled in his arms. Keeping the weapon at the ready was crucial; if the muties could take them all by surprise once, they could do it again.
“We keep looking. The land here changed before. Mebbe it’ll change again, and this time we’ll see where Doc went.”
“Not give up on friend.” Jak nodded firmly. “Always good plan.”
“Something has to turn up.” Ryan met Krysty’s green-eyed gaze, searching for confirmation of his hope.
Krysty smiled. “It always does,” she said before turning away to resume her search, leaving Ryan to wonder how much of the conviction in her voice was for his benefit.
* * *
AFTER A FEW more hours of searching, sundown came and put an end to it. Going over the same barren ground after nightfall made no sense. If the trail was nonexistent in broad daylight, it wouldn’t likely become visible in the beams of flashlights.
Still, the group stayed in the area and pitched camp at the rock wall, in the hope that Doc might reappear.
The companions broke open their packs, dining on MREs they’d scrounged from the redoubt they’d jumped to.
“How long are we going to stay here?” Mildred asked as she threw down her bedroll in the dirt.
“Until we find a lead on what happened to Doc.” As he said it, Ryan stole a glance at Krysty, who was also rolling out a sleeping bag. The truth was, they couldn’t stay long at all, not if the place was killing Krysty. He wasn’t about to risk losing her.
J.B. flashed him a look that said he could see right through him.
“I hope that lead turns up damn soon,” the Armorer said.
Ryan nodded. “You and me both.”
“Supplies low,” Jak said, smacking the side of his backpack for emphasis.
“I know that,” Ryan replied.
“Can’t build fire,” the albino added. “No firewood near.”
Ryan nodded. He knew Jak and Ricky had looked hard for it, to no avail. This part of Nebraska—the Sandhills, according to a map in the redoubt—was rich in sand and rock and not much else. If there was a stick of wood or a growing thing anywhere in a five-mile radius, they hadn’t come across it yet.
“We’ll take it as it comes, like we always do.” Ryan met the eyes of his companions, each in turn, projecting all the strength and confidence he could muster. “For now, we need some shut-eye.” Gripping his longblaster tightly, he stared into the moonlit night. He didn’t ask for anyone’s opinion; he was taking the first watch, looking out for muties on the move.
So was J.B. “I kind of hope one of those damn muties shows up.” Mini-Uzi in hand, the Armorer walked up to stand beside Ryan. “Mebbe he could give us a lead on Doc.”
“You think the muties took him?” asked Ricky, who was sitting with his back against the base of the rock wall, cleaning his Webley Mk VI revolver.
“Good chance of it, if you ask me,” J.B. stated. “They seemed to know exactly what changes were coming, and when. It was like they could read the phenomenon.”
“Or control it,” Mildred suggested. “If that’s even possible.”
“Why not?” J.B. shrugged. “We know certain people can be attuned to the Earth Mother.” He glanced over his shoulder at Krysty. “Why not control her, as well?”
“Whatever they’ve done, whatever’s happening here, it’s awful.” Krysty scowled and rubbed her temples. “It’s wrong. Beyond wrong.”
“And Doc’s out there alone in the middle of it.” Mildred stepped up alongside J.B. and cast her gaze into the night. “Either that, or he’s…” Her voice trailed off.
No one wanted to finish her sentence.
Chapter Three
“Am I dead?”
As Doc blinked his eyes open, he could see nothing but darkness. He tossed his head one way, then the other, and the result was the same. More darkness.
But not emptiness. He could feel a solid surface beneath him, like rock, and he could sense some kind of walls around him. “Hello? If this is the afterlife, I’m really not complaining, you know. Life in the Deathlands has rather worn thin, to be perfectly honest.” When he spoke, there was no echo; he could tell from the sound of his voice that he was in an enclosed space.
And more than that, he was somewhere dank and damp. He could smell moisture in the air, feel a chill against his skin.
But there was no draft of any kind, no air moving anywhere in that space, not even the faintest breeze.
Wherever he was, it didn’t feel as if it was out in the open, which was odd, because that was exactly the last place he could remember being. Out in the open.
Reaching down, Doc felt a cold, damp sheet of smooth stone. Bracing against it, he boosted himself up to a sitting position, instantly regretting it when his head collided with a rock-hard ceiling.
“Ow!” He dropped back down, clutching his aching skull. “That hurt!”
At that exact moment, Doc realized two things: one, he was still alive and, two, he was in an even smaller space than he’d expected.
These two realizations generated a terrible thought, a possibility that was starting to seem increasingly likely. If he wasn’t out in the open, and he wasn’t dead…
“Have I been buried alive?” The thought of it made involuntarily clench the pit of his stomach. Fear seized him, as cold and primitive as a stone ax or the plunging beak of an ancient carnivore.
Had the ground opened up and swallowed him, then closed itself over him? Was he doomed to suffocate in this tiny, dark cell in the bowels of the earth?
“Help! Somebody, help me!” As Doc cried out, he scrabbled with his fingers at the ceiling, instinctively trying to dig his way to freedom. But the ceiling was all rock, as unyielding as the stone surface on which he lay.
Panting, Doc dropped his arms at his sides. “Help me!” Even as he shouted, he knew it was in vain. Even if Ryan and the others were directly overhead, they could never hear his wailing through a layer of rock. “Please help me!”
Taking a deep breath of the chilly, damp air, he fought to get control of himself…and won, at least for the moment. He knew panic was never the answer. Calm thinking and resourcefulness were the only qualities that ever saved a person in the damnable Deathlands.
“Perhaps my tools…” Doc reached into the folds of his frock coat, seeking the holster of his LeMat revolver, with no success. Next, he rolled onto his right side, searching the stone around him for the blaster or his ebony swordstick. He did the same on his left side, with the exact same result. He found a hard rock wall within arm’s reach, but no revolver and no swordstick.
“I am bereft.” Slumping back on the stone, he sighed loudly. “Without a tool to effect my escape or another mortal soul to offer solace.”
Just then, Doc heard a scuffling sound in the direction of his feet. “What now?” He pushed himself up on his elbows, staying low enough that his head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. “Rats, I suppose? Some other burrowing vermin come to feast on my flesh?” He reached around for a rock to throw but found nothing. “Begone, vermin!” Noise would have to suffice. “I shall not be your dinner yet!”
The scuffling came closer, got louder. Doc peered toward it but saw nothing in the pitch-blackness.
“Begone, I say!” He drew up his legs, pulling away from whatever was there. “You won’t find me an easy prey, I promise you!”
Suddenly, he heard a different sound from the same place, a distinctive sound that could not be mistaken for any other.
Giggling.
Doc’s mouth fell open in shock. The question was no longer what was over there—it was who.
That was no vermin scuffling in the darkness. It was a person.
Doc’s heart hammered in his chest. He meant to snap out some words of defiance to try to intimidate his giggling visitor.
But before a single word could leave Doc’s lips, the visitor scrambled forward. Hands grabbed hold of Doc’s ankles and wrenched his legs straight with an iron grip.
Then a voice, high-pitched and girlish in the lightless void, said, “You’re mine now. All mine.”
Doc gathered his bravado and snapped, “Now, see here!”
But those were the only words he got out before the person—or thing—in the night dragged him from his stony cell.
And then, all of a sudden, there were many more hands, coming from all directions. And all of them were grabbing at Doc.
Chapter Four
Krysty woke screaming from a deep sleep, her dreams shattered by a lightning bolt of pain.
Her eyes shot open, seeing predawn grayness all around. Dimly, she was aware of other bodies stirring on the ground nearby, snapped awake by the sound of her screams.
Then another bolt slashed through her mind, throwing her into a mindless seizure of agony.
As she writhed on the ground, she heard footsteps running toward her and familiar voices calling out—Ryan’s, J.B.’s, Mildred’s. But Krysty couldn’t sort out the words they were saying or attempt to respond to them. She was too consumed with pain and the crazed need to make it stop…and one other thing.
Dread. An overwhelming feeling of dread at whatever phenomenon the pain might be signaling, just as it had signaled the earlier onslaught that had swept away Doc.
Suddenly the pain abated, and Krysty slumped. Heaving for breath, she fought to clear the haze that had shrouded her senses and stolen her ability to function normally.
“Krysty!” Ryan knelt at her left side, gazing worriedly down at her.
Krysty felt him gripping her hand and suddenly realized he’d been holding it for a while, tight enough to give her pins and needles.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She nodded weakly. “Just another one of those attacks.”
“Easy does it, Krysty.” Mildred knelt at her right side, touching the back of a hand to Krysty’s forehead. “Deep, slow breaths, honey. In and out, in and out.”
“What coming?” Jak’s voice rose up from somewhere nearby. “Last time fit, muties attack and rock wall appear.”
“I don’t know.” Krysty closed her eyes and concentrated, focusing her mind the way she did when she called on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother. Reaching out, she strained to find some thread of the force that had triggered her pain, some whisper of whatever had brought on the bolts of pain.
But there was nothing. Just emptiness and stillness.
Or was there something after all? As Krysty continued to strain, she felt what might have been a faint tension, pressing in the distance.
Scowling, she struggled to tighten her focus even more, to home in on whatever was out there. At the same time, she tried to steel herself against the next bolt of pain that might come.
“Look like find something,” Jak said.
“Not sure yet.” Krysty gritted her teeth and cast her net as wide as she could. Was she tuning something in or feeling something that wasn’t there? She couldn’t tell.
“Krysty.” Ryan leaned closer. “We should get you out of here. You said this place is killing you.”
“No, wait.” Krysty sat up and raised a hand. The tension was definitely there, as if something were being pushed, or pulled…
Or stretched.
“Everybody!” Krysty snapped her eyes open and leaped to her feet. “Get out of here, now!”
“You heard her!” Ryan shouted. “Move! Out the way we came in!”
But it was already too late. Krysty knew it instantly, as the tension she’d felt building suddenly released, like the string of a bow.
Or a fault line in earthquake country.
Before anyone could start running, a familiar wave of force crashed into Krysty. She hung suspended for an instant, her whole body quivering, and then the force let go, whipping her around to slam into Ryan.
As the two of them stumbled, barely holding each other erect, Krysty saw the ground in front of them flutter like a bedsheet. She heard a low hum, followed by a rumble that coursed up through her feet and shook every bone in her body.
Then a flash of light erupted before her like a second sun blazing to life. As the light faded, between the blur of spots left pulsing in her eyes, Krysty saw the thing she’d dreaded, the latest phenomenon signaled by the pain.
The ground was opening up.
“Sinkhole!” As the word left Ryan’s lips, the hole expanded rapidly. In seconds, it was big enough to swallow up a good-size war wag, and still growing at breakneck speed.
The companions were on the move, scattering fast, but not fast enough. Krysty could feel the ground dropping away, disintegrating hot on her heels as she sprinted alongside Ryan.
Suddenly, the hole caught up with her. Like sand in an hourglass, the once-firm ground slid out from under her. Just like that, her feet had nothing solid beneath them, and she started to fall.
Before she could plunge into the widening chasm, though, Ryan’s strong hands seized her arm and hauled her forward. It was all the help she needed. With firm footing restored—at least for the moment—Krysty was able to bolt out of reach of the hungry pit.
Mildred wasn’t as lucky. She screamed in alarm, and Krysty flashed a look in her direction as she ran.
Some twenty feet away, the predark physician was almost completely in the hole. Only her head and shoulders remained above the rim. She was holding on to a hump of rock, her body dangling into the pit as it continued to grow around her.
Instantly, Krysty changed direction and raced toward her friend. She knew Ryan would follow, but she had to prepare as if she alone would mount this rescue.
Dashing toward the dissolving rim of the hole, Krysty focused her thoughts on the familiar power she drew from in times of emergency. Gaia, the Earth Mother, the world itself, provided a wellspring of energy for the few who knew how to tap it, and Krysty counted herself among their number.
Chanting her prayer quickly, she made contact with the power of Gaia, the potent force residing all around her. Embracing the power, she drew a portion of it into her, feeling it churn and crackle within her like a ball of lightning.
Then, as she and the crumbling rim raced toward each other, she let the power explode and infuse every cell of her being.
Leaping just as the rim collapsed in front of her, Krysty landed on the peak of the rock that Mildred clung to. Balancing on the balls of her feet on that peak, Krysty ducked and grabbed hold of Mildred’s upper arms. With one heave, as if she was lifting a child, she pulled Mildred up.
As Mildred looped her arms tightly around Krysty’s neck, the redhead turned, part of her mind wondering if she’d made a fatal error. The bank, which was still dissolving, was nearly thirty feet away.
It would be a long jump, even in her heightened, Gaia-empowered state, but it would only get longer with each second she hesitated. Her odds of survival would only get lower.
So Krysty gathered the power within her and crouched, coiling her muscles for the leap. The bank continued to recede.
Then she took a deep breath, focused the Gaia force and leaped.
Even with the weight of Mildred on her back, Krysty felt light as she sailed through the air. Miraculously, she overtook the dissolving rim and kept going, past the point where the sinkhole might take her as soon as she touched down.
When she did land, Ryan and J.B. were waiting for her. The second Krysty put down Mildred, J.B. had his arm around the woman’s shoulders, urging her forward to flee the approaching pit.
Ryan did the same for Krysty. “Can you keep going?” he asked as they ran.
“Yes.” Whenever Krysty tapped Gaia’s power, she always went through a slump afterward, as if the superhuman exertion had unnaturally exhausted her. But perhaps because of the continued danger, she hadn’t gotten to that point yet.
She and Ryan ran onward after J.B. and Mildred, trying to get past the limits of the sinkhole’s expansion…if there were any. Up ahead, Jak and Ricky had stopped running and were waving their arms, urging them on.
Suddenly, a fresh bolt of pain shot through Krysty’s skull, and she stumbled. She tried to keep running at full tilt, but another bolt caught her, and she stumbled again, heading for a fall.
Ryan’s arms stopped her from hitting the ground. In one smooth movement, he scooped her off her feet and kept going, carrying her away from the sinkhole.
Just then, a shock wave plowed into both of them, nearly bowling them over. Krysty saw the ground around them flow like liquid, and she knew what was coming next.
A blinding flash lit the landscape. Ryan reeled with Krysty in his arms, teetering in the light, and then the flare was suddenly snuffed out.
Instantly, Krysty could feel that the air was different. Everything was quieter and more still than before, with good reason.
The constant rushing of the collapsing ground had ended.
“It stopped.” Looking back, she saw that the sinkhole had finally stopped expanding, leaving the farthest reach of the rim at about thirty feet from them.
“Best news we’ve had all day,” Ryan said. “But why the hell did it start?”
Krysty concentrated, trying to probe their surroundings for a clue, but then the post-Gaia weakness finally struck. Her thoughts scattered like ripples from a pebble tossed into a pond, and she slumped in Ryan’s arms.
Mildred was at her side in a heartbeat. “Are you all right?”
Krysty nodded weakly. “Just worn-out.”
“You just let me know if you need anything.” Mildred patted her cheek lightly.
“What about you?” J.B. put a hand on Mildred’s shoulder, gazing at her with deep concern. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Mildred said. “Not a big fan of this place, but I’m fine.”
“It hellhole,” Jak stated. “We stay longer, it take us like took Doc.”
“Mebbe we should split up,” J.B. suggested. “One group could get Krysty out of here before the next disruption while the other group stays here and keeps looking for Doc.”
“Or,” shouted Ricky, who was standing on the rim of the crater, pointing into the distance, “we could all follow that.”
Ryan carried Krysty to the rim, and the others joined them. As Krysty looked where Ricky was pointing, she saw what he was talking about.
J.B. blew his breath out in a low whistle. “Dark night!”
“Maybe one good thing came out of that crap storm,” Mildred said.
In the distance beyond the giant sinkhole, Krysty saw that a channel now ran through the surface of the earth—a rough-hewn canal filled with a glowing red liquid. The red substance churned and bubbled, shedding plumes of rippling gray steam that revealed, at a distance, just how hot the channel’s contents had to be. Meaning the red liquid could most likely be only one thing.
“Lava,” Krysty said.
“Magically appearing in the middle of the Sandhills, where there’s zero volcanic activity,” J.B. commented.
“That we know of,” Ryan corrected. But how the lava had gotten there wasn’t the important part, and they all knew it. More important by far was what it might do for them.
And whom it might lead them to.
“Don’t you think it could be a trail?” Ricky asked. “Mebbe it’s pointing at the middle of all this.”
J.B. nodded. “The epicenter of the effect.”
“And that might be where they’re taking Doc,” Ricky added.
Ryan nodded. “Might be, at that.”
“Seem like long shot to me,” Jak said. “How know that where taken?”
“We don’t,” J.B. replied. “But we don’t have any better ideas, do we?”
“I think it’s worth a try.” Ryan looked down at Krysty, still resting in his arms. “But mebbe we should still get you out of here.”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t want us to split up.” She shifted in his grip, signaling that she wanted him to let her down, which he did. “I can handle whatever comes our way. Don’t worry.”
Ryan held her gaze for a long moment, reading all that remained unsaid between them. Krysty knew he was aware she was making a sacrifice, and that it would cost her, but she would gladly do it if it meant finding Doc.
And she knew he was well aware of one other fact as well: once she decided to do something, there could be no stopping her.
“All right, then.” Ryan nodded. “Let’s gather up what’s left of our gear and get moving. The longer Doc’s out there on his own, the less likely it is that we’ll ever see him again.”
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