Chapter Two

 

 

The keen edge of the camp ax halted only inches from Ryan's face. He kept the mutie's wrist trapped in his grip and tried to fight his way from under his two adversaries as they worked to keep him pinned.

 

"Sacred grounds, outie," the ax wielder shouted. "You and yours should've stayed away." He fought to free his weapon, his other hand scrabbling for Ryan's eye.

 

Ryan turned his head as the broken fingernails bit deep into his scarred cheek, curiously having no sensation as they tracked across the nerve-dead areas.

 

The other mutie had drawn his blade free of the sand and was taking aim again.

 

"Ryan!" J.B. yelled. "Company's coming!" The rapid, ringing cracks of the Armorer's Uzi testified that the three muties who'd attacked Ryan hadn't come alone.

 

As the mutie with the knife settled into position, leaning heavily on Ryan's chest, J.B.'s Uzi rattled off a short burst and the creature pitched forward. Ryan grabbed the dying mutie's shirt and pulled him off his chest. The other mutie had gotten smarter and was transferring his ax to his off hand.

 

Shots rang out, some heavier and some higher pitched than the snarl from J.B.'s Uzi.

 

"Fireblast!" Ryan cursed, throwing his weight to one side as the mutie took a cut at him. He blocked the man's arm to the side and rolled, but before he could get to his feet, he got tangled up with the corpse of the man whose head he'd smashed with the Steyr's butt.

 

The mutie gave no quarter. With a yell, he launched himself at Ryan again. Bullets ripped into the swell of the dune behind him.

 

Still on his knees and tangled with the dead man, Ryan reached for his SIG-Sauer P-226. The pistol ripped free of the well-worn leather, coming up as natural as the one-eyed man could take a breath. His finger found the trigger unerringly, and he squeezed through on double action, then followed up with two more rapid shots.

 

The hollow point bullets took the mutie in the chest. The impact knocked him backward, and he was dead before he landed in the sand.

 

Ryan raked the terrain with his gaze, counting at least a half-dozen more muties. All of them were in the advanced stages of rad sickness. His nervous system was still jangling, warning him of danger all around, not just in front of him. He darted a quick look over his shoulder and caught a hint of movement there.

 

He spun toward it, the SIG-Sauer before him.

 

Nothing was there.

 

Ryan blinked, his breath already ragged and thready because of the desert's thin air and the blistering heat. The shimmer moved again, less than twenty feet away.

 

Bullets tunneled into the sand around Ryan's feet, urging him into action. He followed the itch and stayed away from the area where he'd spotted the shimmering movement. His boots shoved deep into the sand as he ran, slowing him considerably. He had to lift his legs high and drive hard to maintain any kind of speed, and his heart hammered with the exertion.

 

He threw himself behind a tangled section of fence that offered protection from the muties' rounds. He changed magazines in his pistol and stuffed the empty one into a thigh pocket of his pants. It was easier to find ammo than magazines.

 

Lying prone, he pulled the Steyr into his shoulder and sighted through the scope. He squeezed off two shots, making them both count. One mutie was surely dead, and the other not long for the world. Considering the depth at which they were operating inside the installation, he figured the rest of the group would be unaware they were under attack.

 

"We can't hold them," J.B. called out. "We stay out here, we're going to get chilled ourselves."

 

"I know. We're going to have to fall back to the installation."

 

The shimmering movement shifted outside the corner of Ryan's eye. He snapped his head around in time to see a mutie suddenly swept up from the ground and suspended in the air.

 

The man yelled and screamed, hanging nearly eight feet from the ground. The shimmering motion Ryan had noticed was all around the mutie.

 

"Dark night!" J.B. swore in amazement.

 

The other muties froze and dropped to their knees in benediction. They laid their arms down, then pressed their hands and faces flat into the sand before them, prostrating themselves.

 

The shimmering movement was a cloud around the suspended man, who fought against whatever held him at the same time he verbally offered himself up to it. Skin broke open along his midsection, partially blurred by the shimmer. Then blood poured out in heaving gouts, followed by the snaky length of the man's intestines spilling out onto the dry sand.

 

The cabalistic prayers died away, and the mutie began screaming hoarsely in renewed pain and fear. He pummeled whatever was holding him with both gnarled fists.

 

Ryan gathered himself, rising to his feet. It wasn't quite a hundred yards back to the entrance Jak had found into the structure. J.B. was sixty yards in front of him, in a seated position behind a jagged, upthrust section of the volcanic glass left over from the nuclear holocaust. The Armorer held the Uzi at the ready, his Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun hanging by its shoulder sling muzzle down so he could get to it in an eye blink.

 

A wild, ululating howl rose in Ryan's wake, swelling into a crescendo. Even without the sudden chatter of J.B.'s subgun, he knew the pursuit had begun again. The skin across the back of his neck tightened and cooled despite the burning glare of the sun. He knew the muties weren't the only thing burning up his backtrail.

 

He forced himself up the incline, feeling the perspiration roll off him in fat drops. His foot found a soft spot, trod just for a second at an angled edge of something that felt hard and registered as metallic to his imagination, then slid and dropped through the shifting sand to midthigh.

 

He fell forward, lunging for distance, keeping his hands locked around the Steyr. He pulled the rifle to his shoulder and fired as quickly as possible. It was almost impossible to miss the charging group of muties, and the high-powered jacketed bullets ripped through one mutie and hit another one behind him.

 

Then Ryan was aware of the shimmering movement circling him from the left, almost hidden on his blind side. He tried to turn and bring the rifle on target, but the creature was too fast. It was on him, scuttling, cluttering an obscene noise that registered a mad hunger and left a track of shivers down Ryan's spine.

 

Blood from the dead mutie painted the apparition in places, making visible the short, coarse hair that seemed to cover it and the three black, depthless eyes set deep into a nightmare face.

 

Two of the thing's ropelike limbs shot out and seized Ryan. One of them wrapped around his left arm, knocking the Steyr from his grip with an iron strength, while the other encircled his waist.

 

It drew him closer.

 

With the proximity, Ryan could see what the muties' god was a spider, covered in some kind of camouflage skin that was more effective than any lizard's natural gift the one-eyed man had ever seen. Fetid breath blew across Ryan, filled with the foul smell of carrion dining. The maw opened, big enough to take Ryan's head and shoulders in a single bite. Black-and-green ichor dripped from fanglike projectiles as it drew him in.

 

"Ryan!" J.B. shouted. The Armorer unleashed a burst of 9 mm rounds that chewed into the giant spider's body and splattered green splotches.

 

With a cluttering hiss, the spider reared on four of its back legs, lifting Ryan high and moving to devour him again.

 

Awkward as it was, Ryan curled his right hand around the haft of the panga sheathed at his left side. He pulled it free as the spider dropped him toward its mouth.

 

 

 

THE ROOM WAS DARK and filled with old death. The sick, stale smell of it had rotted into the metallic bulwarks around it for decades. Mildred Wyeth wrinkled her nose in disgust as she forced herself to enter the room, evidently a research lab of some kind. Computer equipment littered the floor, some of it arranged in long lines where several operators had monitored whatever information they'd been working on, while other, independent stages were arranged in a horseshoe shape to oversee various sections of the area.

 

Skeletons were scattered across the steel floor. Many of them were dressed in faded and worn U.S. Air Force uniforms. Mats had been laid, consisting of sleeping bags, parachutes and tarps, whatever had been at hand. More tarps were hung from thin steel cable that traversed the huge room at various points, forming small pockets of privacy.

 

She'd been in worse places, she told herself. But not much worse.

 

Unlike Ryan and the others of the group, Mildred was relatively new to the hardscrabble existence of Deathlands. She'd been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, a week before Christmas in 1964, which would have put her at over 130 years old by the calendar. However, Mildred hadn't lived by a conventional calendar.

 

Three days after Christmas in the year 2000, she'd been back in her hometown for a social visit with her family and to undergo abdominal surgery for a possible ovarian cyst. Her body hadn't reacted well to the anesthetic, and she'd nearly died before the medical team was able to successfully put her on ice in a cryogenic chamber. Ironically cryogenics had been her field of study and interest, and she'd been trapped by it for a hundred years before Ryan and his band had discovered her and freed her. Apparently the cryonic process had reversed the ill-effects of the anesthetic.

 

She held the Czech-built .38-caliber ZKR 551 pistol with serious conviction as she moved through the roomthe woman had been a champion pistol shooter. Her ebony skin was dappled with gleaming beads of perspiration, and she'd used a red bandanna to keep the beaded plaits of her hair back out of her face. Her fatigues were already clammy with sweat.

 

"All dead. Some die rad. Some die gunshot. Some knife."

 

"I see that, too." Mildred didn't turn to face Jak Lauren, who'd come up behind her like a ghost.

 

Besides moving like a ghost, he looked like one, too. He was true albino. His long white hair fell to his shoulders, framing a scarred white face with feral ruby eyes. Youthfulness remained in the harsh features, but innocence had been stripped away by a life that had never known anything but violence and death. He resembled a mottled shadow standing in the darkness behind her, dressed in camou-style clothing with iridescent patches of brown and gray.

 

At less than five and a half feet, and barely over a hundred pounds, bred and blooded in the Cajun country in Louisiana, Jak was a pure product of the Deathlands. Even though she was bigger than the albino teenager and was more cautious on the surface, Mildred felt safe with him. Jak was death on the move, with hair-trigger reflexes.

 

He stood relaxed, the .357 Magnum Colt Python hanging lazily at the end of his right arm while he played his torch around the deathscape. "They separate. Live own life. Shut others out."

 

Mildred swept her own torch around, taking in the twisted remains of the people who'd lived and died in the computer nerve center. "They must have thought they had something worth protecting," she said. "Especially if they believed they had to protect it from the others in this compound."

 

Jak faded away, not making a noise as he moved out to recon again.

 

Bone and concrete bits crunched under Mildred's feet. She could move quietly by most standards, but the cavernous hollow picked up even the smallest sounds. Still, she felt chagrined to realize the only noises that were being amplified were hers.

 

A small, skeletal foot caught Mildred's attention. A chill shuddered through her as she brought the light back to it. Then she closed her mind off to the momentary weakness and walled it away.

 

The foot was part of a child's skeleton. Bleached bone white by the torchlight and by time, it lay curled within the protective grip of a woman's corpsethe sex identified by a patched Air Force blue skirtbeneath a long table. The blankets that had been used to make a bed were from military stores, but had grayed with time.

 

Mildred knelt, drawn by the pathetic sight. It was nothing new, but here, where they'd only found the bodies of adults, the child's death seemed more pronounced. She played the light over the two corpses. Neither appeared to have died from radiation sickness or violence.

 

Metal gleamed around the woman's neck, and Mildred reached out for the stainless-steel dog tags. When she tried to move the chain from around the neck, the effort dislodged the skull from its tentative hold on the neck, and it went rolling away. The child collapsed more and seemed to meld in a jumble of bones into its mother.

 

Mildred studied the information stamped on the dog tags Lieutenant Jacqueline Dawson, followed by her service number and other pertinent facts. She'd only been thirty-one when the end had arrived.

 

"Wall you off from the world," Mildred said in a thick voice, "still you think you gotta believe in love. Silly bitch. Love grows in safe houses, places where you worry about the mortgage getting paid on time, not whether you're going to survive."

 

But she knew that was an unfair assessment. The child could have been the result of a reaching out for creature comfort after the unit had been forced to cut itself off from the rest of the installation.

 

A pile of toys, shaped from bits of wood carved in the shapes of animals and trucks, filled a plastic basket at the foot of the bedroll. Machined blocks of metal and polished stones were mixed in with them.

 

However the child had arrived, effort had been made to care for it.

 

Mildred said a small prayer for them, the words coming easily. Her father had been a Baptist preacher. She started to back out of the area when she spotted the locked journal in the folds of the blanket. She picked it up, then held the torch close to the ragged clothing that fell apart at her touch. The key to the journal was in an empty tin of analgesics. It wasn't much bigger than her thumbnail, with two forked teeth on the end.

 

Standing beside the workstation, Mildred fitted the key into the lock and turned. The tumblers inside gave reluctantly, and she opened the front cover without trepidation. Whatever secrets the woman had held had died with her decades earlier.

 

"Lt. J. Dawson" was written in a strong, clearly feminine hand. The blue ink was partially washed out by time and the yellow glow of the torch. The narrative began on the next page.

 

 

 

1/29/01 The world died nine days ago at approximately 1700 Greenwich mean time. It was noon in Washington, D.C., and 1000 hours on base. We'd been watching the presidential inauguration.

 

 

 

A quick scan of the next few pages told Mildred that Dawson had been trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Information had died immediately when the bombs fell and attacks in space destroyed satellite links. The base hadn't known who'd started the attack and had been unable to renew any kind of communications on the backup systems that had been installed.

 

The story wasn't new. In the places where Ryan had led his group, others had kept similar journals. She flipped through the pages. At first the entries had been inscribed with a regularity that told her the lieutenant had been trying to impose her own sense of security on the confusion that had broken loose around her. She looked at one only a few weeks later.

 

 

 

2/13/01 We've just been notified that we're all trapped here. The radiation is going to be too much for any of us for possibly years.

 

 

 

Major Burroughs (the U.S. Army liaison for the project in charge of security) says we're better off than the other sectors of the installation. With the experimentation our unit has been working on, the lab environs and this facility had to be shielded. And we've got enough supplies to last for decades. God, I say that, and I look at it on this page, but there's no way it can last that long. No way we can last that long.

 

The hardest part is listening to the others, people some of us might have known, pounding on the door and begging to be let in. But they've been infected by the radiation. There's nothing that can be done.

 

 

 

Mildred skipped ahead twenty or thirty pages. The entries became shorter, less hopeful and less punctual.

 

 

 

11/28/01 Major Burroughs is going around asking for volunteers to go on a raiding party into the outer sections of the installation. Rumors have started up that no one can lay to rest. We all know what we were working on now. We have to wonder what the other sections of the complex were dealing with.

 

 

And if there are any other survivors.

 

Despite the major's best efforts, the group is starting to divide into factions. It's natural, some of the people say. We're festering inside this center. If we had a goal, maybe everyone would accept a strong leader more easily. Burroughs isn't going to relinquish command without a struggle.

 

The people who engineered the Lydecker Foundation chose well in him, though. He'll kill whomever he has to in order to keep discipline. I don't think the others see that in him yet. Especially the egghead civilians the project was blessed with.

 

 

 

Mention of the Lydecker Foundation gave Mildred pause. It sounded a lot like the Totality Concept. At the same time it offered hope, the presence of the program here also scared her. Those programs had a habit of being as destructive as anything that had blown the world apart.

 

Mildred closed the book. It offered perhaps another couple dozen entries. The last one was dated April 19, 2005. She stuffed the journal in the rucksack she'd commandeered, along with some self-heats and ring-pulls. Whatever secrets and sorrows it held could wait until a better time to go through it.

 

"Not exactly going to be light reading," she told herself in an effort to shake the weight from her shoulders as she gave the dead mother and child a final look.

 

Turning, she almost walked into Jak.

 

"Not alone anymore," the albino whispered, covering her mouth with a leathery palm. His torch was off, put away.

 

She nodded to let him know that she understood, then slipped the Czech blaster from its leather. There was a scrape above her, from somewhere along the catwalk that ringed the computer center.

 

Mildred threw the torch away and dropped to one side a heartbeat ahead of the bullet that split the air where her skull had been.