Chapter One

 

The third planet from the sun seemed to explode in the old calendar year of 2001. In some parts of the now-hemorrhaging world, the continual explosions were of such terrible force, they could be seen by orbiting spacecraft. Whole pieces of continents ceased to exist as they were obliterated in expanding mushroom clouds of radioactive dust and debris.

 

Satellite cameras on high recorded the horrific images for the unbelieving observers below, and for their eventual descendants to view one day via decaying videotape.

 

The exact date of destruction has been recorded as occurring precisely at noon on the twentieth day of January, early in the new year. In Washington, D.C., where the power elite chose to live and work and plan and play, the first blast of the countless more to follow fell on a bitter cold dayperfect weather to welcome in the end of the world.

 

All within a five-mile radius were instantly vaporized.

 

The actual battle was over in minutes. However, the ramifications of what had happened took longer. In mere hours, chaos reigned in the rapidly shrinking pockets of survival in every country of the worldand as the verbal accusations and the barrages of hellfire and destruction flew back and forth, the doomsayers with their predictions in tabloids and the self-appointed prophets with their poster boards of admonitions were proven right at last.

 

The world was endingwelcome to the new millennium.

 

That one black day when the fighting began and ended in less than twenty-four hours was forever known by those who lived through it as skydarkthe time when the very sun appeared to have fallen from the sky to be reborn in a conflagration that enveloped the Earth. The firestorm that burned the green away, and replaced it with the blackness.

 

Yet, there were survivors. A small percentile who were in the right place at the right time, or who were in locales where the rad blasting did not occur and the nuclear rains did not fall. Slowly, hesitantly, in packs and pairs over the long years following the conflict, men and women painstakingly crawled out of the wreckage. They looked with weary eyes upon the new world their leaders and their hidden agendas had wrought.

 

Overhead, the sky had changed from a bright blue to a smoky purplepurple being one of the dozens of colors the sky took depending on which section of the former United States one lived in. Everything was losteven the color of the sky; an eternal reminder that things would never be the same again.

 

These survivors bravely decided that, yes, while most everything of value had indeed been turned to shit, there was still life to carry on.

 

Staying alive at all costs was such a frank, unadorned methodology that it revolted some. Still, it was better to wake up tired and paranoid than not to wake up at all. The world wasn't a very nice place to live in anymorein fact, it was worse than ever before.

 

The current incarnation of what some called "Old California" would have been unrecognizable by using the old maps. From the air, this stretch had been transformed into the multitude of floating hot spots called "The West Coast Islands." Any sane man stayed as far away from them as possible. The former California coastline had been hit hard at the beginning of the war by a planted barrage of earthshaker bombs, seeded from Soviet submarines. These seeds of death had been left behind to decimate their intended targetsthe many winding fault and fracture-lines of the lands underneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

 

At the same time these hidden devices had been activated in conjunction with the sneak attack in the Soviet embassy in Washington; the Cascades, from Mount Garibaldi in British Columbia down to Lassen Peak in California were showered with ICBMs and sub-launched missiles. The combination pulverized the entire stretch from the lower regions of Washington State past Los Angeles. The volcanoes from Mount Rainier and Mount Saint Helens and Mount Shasta literally blew their stacks, blasting rock and magma into the arid sky.

 

The San Andreas Fault opened like a cheap zipper on the back of a jolt-addicted whore.

 

Today, if one came inland from the West Coast Islands, all that was left in the resculpted southwestern United States was desert.

 

One section was notorious. The Barrens. A place of heat and sweat.

 

There was nothing here in this festering hellhole to greet a visitor but a few valiant, brittle attempts at flora and faunaand, in this particular area, an innocuous gray half dome rising from the sand. The one-story building had no windows or doors. The only apparent way into the place was via a rectangular shaped portal. The portal was smooth, without any kind of handle or other sort of push/pull opening system. A single numeric keypad with a red liquid crystal readout display was recessed into the wall next to the entry way.

 

These types of code protected portals were familiar to the group of seven people who had disappeared inside the nondescript bunker-like installation.

 

The people who had just arrived weren't in the Barrens for the view, nor did they give a damn about the single dwelling jutting against the orange mustard color the sky had chosen for today. They knew what was inside the dome, and what was below the placid, boring surface. From the crumbling to dust protective body suits in the labs down under, to the red and white strident warning signs, to the emergency decontamination chambersall of this and even more evidence was housed withinpointing to this lonely lair as being the nest of a plague sower.

 

A happy home for the most deadly of biological weapons.

 

Chemicals were used in the conflagration that sparked the end of the civilized world, but used far less than might have been intended once the nuclear fire began to burn relentlessly across the globe. More intelligent denizens of the appalling new world that followed suspected that mere radiation couldn't account for the perverse genetics that had been spawned after skydark. A released biological agenta single mutagen or perhaps an infinite number of dozens from unknown originsapproached the truth more about the many humanoid mutations that had come about following the holocaust.

 

All of the new mutations striving for survival alongside the "norms."

 

However, no truces were forthcoming. Along with the rewritten genetics that created the mutants came what one long forgotten wag termed as "brain rot."

 

 

 

The Barrens

 

THE TRAVELERS had arrived at the redoubt after an arduous journey across barren wasteland. Their mode of transport had been a fantastic mix of ancient chariot and powerful motorized carriage, but the vehicle's engines were nearly drained. An electrical recharge would have been needed if they intended to carry on farther, but fate had intervened. They had reached an intended destination safely and had gone inside to initiate their locational remove from the gateway. Then something had occurred to Ryan, and he cursed at himself. He should have thought of it before. Now they were all outside the vanadium doors again. "I don't think we were followed," J. B. Dix said, taking what he hoped was a final look at that stretch of California. He reached up and pulled down the brim of his battered fedora to shield his eyes against the sun. "If anyone was on our trail, they're too far back to try anything now. Flat as it is around here, we would've seen them if they got too close."

 

"Let's keep it that way," Ryan Cawdor muttered by way of a reply. By his very carriage and attitude, it was obvious the lean man with the scarred visage and eye patch was the leader of the group. Ryan had taken the controls of the vehicle and kept them on their course for the duration of the journey back to the redoubt, trusting his comrades to keep a watch on their potential pursuers.

 

Miles away, back along the path they had come, was the city of Aten, a construct of ancient Egypt standing hale and hearty on North American soil. Aten was where the Pharaoh Akhnaton had once reigned, until a final, fatal run-in with Krysty Wroth, one of the two women of the group. A hypnotic mix of man and mutation, the pharaoh had been named Hell Eyes by complacent followers, a title bestowed upon him in a mixture of awe and fear.

 

Ryan Cawdor was in a triple bad mood. He could still taste the grit between his lips from his desert flight. The air was hot, like breathing vapors from the back of a overheated war wag. When they had first arrived here, guesses as to their location had included the Sahara and the Gobi. Logistics aside, that's still what it looked and felt like.

 

Ryan sighed. They needed to keep moving.

 

"We can't leave this contraption here," he told them. "Jak and Dean, you will take the chariot out back of the dome. If anybody does come looking, no need to advertise this is where we stopped."

 

"Right, Dad," Dean replied, as he and Jak, a whipcord lean, ruby-eyed albino teenager stepped up. Ryan passed over a fleeting desire to burn the sturdy little vehiclethe smoke plume would be visible for miles.

 

"We could always bury the damn thing," J.B suggested, echoing Ryan's own unvoiced worries.

 

"You feel like trying to dig in this bastard heat?"

 

J.B. grinned tightly, his teeth hidden behind thin lips. "Hell no."

 

"What are you two talking about?" Mildred Wyeth asked as Dean and Jak returned from the rear of the building.

 

"Way the wind tends to kick up out here, our tracks won't be around for longI hope," Ryan stated, pointing at the obvious trail left by the tires of the chariot. "But leaving this thing here out front is a red flag in a bull's pasture."

 

"Pardon me, my dear Ryan, but might I make a suggestion?" The request came from the skeletal man in the faded frock coat who had been hovering around the edges of the conversation, listening intently, one hand stroking his narrow chin and the other working a black sword stick through his fingers like a baton.

 

"Not now, Doc," Ryan replied.

 

"No need to be so abrupt, lover," Krysty Wroth interjected, her long prehensile red hair resting gently on her shoulders. "Let Doc speak his piece."

 

Krysty's green eyes caught Ryan's single blue orb.

 

He glared backannoyed at the interference when their safety was uppermost in his mind. Then he let himself relax. The fight or flight adrenaline was raging inside him, the survival instinct keeping him on edge. As far as Ryan's weary body was concerned, until they were far away from the Barrens, they weren't safe.

 

"What's on your mind, Doc?" he allowed himself to ask.

 

"Might I suggest we take yon chariot into the redoubt with us?" the oldish-appearing man said. "While this installation is much smaller than the usual military installations we're used to taking refuge in, I think we can spare the room this once."

 

Ryan and J.B. exchanged embarrassed glances their combined years of training in tactics had been dulled enough by near exhaustion so that they completely overlooked the obvious. The dome's portal was plenty wide enough to pull the vehicle inside once the door was fully open.

 

"Damn straight, Doc," Ryan replied. "Good thinking."

 

"Naturally," Doc Tanner replied modestly. "I am a college graduate."

 

 

 

DOCTOR Theophilus Algernon Tanner was more than a mere college graduate, much, much more. In fact, despite his elderly appearance, he was beyond mere agehaving lived within the constraints of three lifetimesa reluctant time traveler plucked from the year 1896 and drawn forward to 1998 as part of a secret government project known as Operation Chronos.

 

"Hell of a lot of candles to stick on a birthday cake," Ryan had once said.

 

"I never cared for birthdays," Tanner had replied.

 

The concept behind Operation Chronos was simple to describe and impossible to truly understand in terms of what passed for so-called current day physics. Whitecoat scientists might toss jargon around about using a quantum interface in conjunction with a matter-transference booth to pierce the space-time continuum to pluck random subjects from the past or future and bring them safely, intact, whole and breathing, to the current day, but when the veneer of scientific babble was stripped away, they really had no idea of how the setup worked since the builders of this magical device were compartmentalized. Technicians might never even see the engineers.

 

The military leaders of the operation referred to the time travel process as "trawling," since there was no visual or physical confirmation available on what they picked up during the experiments. The work was dangerous and crude. The Chronos scientists had no idea whoor whatthey might latch on to and bring back into their midst, and all involved had heard stories and rumors of the fates of previous teams who had locked upon the whirlwind.

 

Doc was one of the few living "trawling" success stories. At first, his captors were elatedif they were able to pluck a man from one hundred years in the past, surely they could go back even further.

 

However, as months passed, they discovered their transport of Doc had been a fluke. Virtually all of their other trawling expeditions had failed horribly, bringing back nothing but hunks of wet meat mixed with shredded flesh and splintered bone into the hexagonal mat-trans chambers. The temporal storms of time weren't forgiving to their crude attempts to shuttle living tissue from one era to another, and even the rare living creature brought back physically intact was always a fragmented mess mentally.

 

Doc, who had been isolated for study in a cell in the sprawling Chronos laboratory, found his jailers to be more insistent than ever. No longer was he allowed to lie idle, watching television and reading books as he struggled to acclimate himself with his new world. Now he was constantly questioned, prodded, hypnotized and drugged.

 

What was different about this one man? What made him appear intact and sane, while other humans and animals were brought into the present as unrecognizable masses of gore, or with their bodies relatively intact but their minds forever twisted into knots of insanity? Even non-living tissue was disrupted by the time jumps, although there was a higher rate of success in beaming back simple objects and hunks of rock and metal.

 

Perhaps what none of the Chronos scientists could bring themselves to admit aloud was that Doc Tanner possessed an unstoppable desire to live. Even then, they knew that physically, Doc's body had accelerated due to the forces he endured during the journey. But there was a bright fire burning within his weakened frame. His life, his world, all had been stolen, and Tanner had rolled with the punches and still asked for more.

 

He retained his antiquated speech patterns, and clung to his out-of-date attire and identity, defying the scientists who questioned him to figure out how he still lived. He clung with a parent's possessiveness to his memories of his long-dead wife, Emily and his two young children, Rachel and Jolyon, and their faces and names kept him sane. Tanner wasn't an old man when they had first latched upon his body and ripped him away screaming into the void, but the shock of transport had altered him somewhat. His very skin seemed to tighten on his skeletal frame, his entire gaunt physique always sunken down inside his faded academic frock coat.

 

By December 2000, the whitecoats had had enough of Doc's uncooperative attitude and his attempts to escape, and had thrust the defiant Doc Tanner one hundred years into the future, into a world that had become bitterly known as the Deathlands.

 

However, even in the Deathlands, some areas were safer than others, and the Barrens where Tanner and his friends were now standing were definitely not on anyone's top ten places to stay.

 

 

 

WITH THE CHARIOT now inside the redoubt, they again went along the passageway leading down. Nothing had changed. The passageway leading down appeared the same as they had left itthe concrete floor sprinkled with a light smattering of sand from outside.

 

"Looks clear," Ryan said, still following his safety procedure even if they'd been there a very short while ago. "Let's do it. Triple red until I give the word."

 

Ryan brought up the rear, lingering behind the others. Krysty Wroth hung back too, waiting for him. Her keen eyes searched his face, looking for some sort of outward manifestation to reflect the feelings she knew were churning inside his guts about what happened to them in Aten.

 

Perhaps J.B. had summed up the experience best when he remarked"Like being trapped in one long wet dream without a climax, and even if you could come, you'd still feel like you'd done something wrong."

 

The only one of the group to escape the sexual sadism of the place had been Dean. Perhaps sensing some of the debauchery to come in their destination, Ryan had taken up a man named Danielson on his offer of sanctuary for the boy in the bosom of Fort Fubara safe haven en route to the walls of the Egyptian-styled city.

 

All the way back to the dome-shaped redoubt, Dean had been chattering away with questions. Where did they get the awesome chariot? What had taken them so long in getting back? Why couldn't he go to Aten and see the pyramid for himself?

 

For once, Ryan hadn't even possessed the strength to summon the anger to shut the boy up, but since all of them shared Ryan's exhaustion, no one had bothered to answer Dean's queries, and the boy had soon given up out of boredom.

 

"Lover?" Krysty began, wincing at the hesitation and embarrassment she felt. Feeling ill at ease with Ryan was a new sensation for her, and she didn't like the unfamiliar emotion.

 

"Uh-uh," Ryan cautioned, knowing from her tone she was getting ready to walk down a road he wasn't interested in traveling just yet. "Let's get to the gateway first. Sooner we find out which way the stick floats, the sooner we can plan for the future."

 

Krysty knew Ryan's words were law when he was in this sort of mood, but she didn't care. This was the first instant they'd been alone since escaping the city, and the air had to be cleared before she could allow herself to go forward.

 

She blocked his path, and, choosing her words carefully, said, "That's what I want to talk about. Our future and how the recent past may affect it."

 

"What?" Ryan asked dumbly, his eye questioning her.

 

Krysty's hair undulated, reflecting her own confusion and turmoil. "I know what's troubling you, lover."

 

"You do." His tone was flat, cold. Krysty knew she was inching out onto dangerous ground.

 

"Yes," she said firmly.

 

"Your mutie senses tell you that or are you coasting on feminine intuition?" Ryan asked softly, the tone of his voice easing back the sarcasm of the words.

 

Krysty held his gaze. "Tension's been thick enough to reach out and hold. Not just affecting us. Affecting everybody."

 

Ryan looked away. "It'll pass. Until we know whether or not this bastard mat-trans unit is going to work this time, we're all going to be in a pissy mood."

 

"I'm not talking about the mat-trans unit, and you know it."

 

Ryan shrugged, making a move to step around her. "You weren't responsible for what happened back there."

 

Krysty caught his arm, her strong fingers biting into it. "You say that, but you don't know how sure you are of it," she laughed bitterly. "I was under Akhnaton's will, I can't deny it."

 

"So don't," Ryan replied. "He makes a dandy one-stop scapegoat."

 

"Dammit, Ryan, I love you!" Krysty cried. "I will always love you! My love warred with Akhnaton's mental power even as he tried to make me his own."

 

Ryan's head throbbed, along with his injured shoulder, the blood pulsing through his veins. He wished Krysty could have waited for this discussion. He wished they were all inside the gateway now, their ticket out of Aten punched. He wished he could make her understand he wasn't upset with her, nor had what she'd endured made him love her any less.

 

Krysty reached out and stroked both sides of the beard stubble on his face. "You aren't physically hurt too badly, but your spirit is wounded," she said softly. "Your pride bleeds because you think you were unable to protect me."

 

"I don't 'think,' I know I was unable to protect you."

 

"But, don't you see?" Krysty asked desperately. "You did protect me. It was your love for me and my love for you that broke his power, broke Nefron's power. It was your strength and courage that gave me the resolve to battle him. Every time he reached for me, touched me, spoke to me I was fighting back. We defeated him together."

 

Ryan closed his eye, releasing his breath slowly, letting her words wash over him. Comforting, soothing words. He pulled her to him, holding her tightly. He nuzzled her hair, pulling her scent back into his lungs and being.

 

"Living is struggling," Krysty whispered to him. "The unavoidable thing. But love makes it worthwhile."

 

"Yes," he replied very quietly. "You taught me that."

 

Ryan relaxed his arms around her and she stepped back to face him, her eyes shining with tears, like wet emeralds. Her mouth was smiling as she reached out and took his hand.

 

"What's the holdup?" J.B. said suddenly, his voice coming at them from around the bend in the passage. Apparently the Armorer and the others had continued ahead, but had grown tired of waiting for the pair.

 

"Just restating the obvious, J.B.," Ryan called out, squeezing Krysty's hand. "We're right behind you."