James Axler - Deathlands 26 Shadowfall

/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 26 - Shadowfall Ryan was shocked at the wide-eyed look of horror on Krysty's face

"What?" he whispered."Oh, Earth Mother! Back. Must turn back now. Feel desperate danger behind us. Turn back." She pushed past Ryan, running clumsily past the others, nearly knocking over Abe.Krysty grabbed at Trader's sleeve. "Stop!" she hissed. "We have to go back, Trader. I can feel it. Very, very strong. Behind us.""Feel what?"The woman stared behind her, into the dark bank of fog that was all around them like an encircling wall. "Somethings gone triple-wrong, Trader. Mebbe they know we're coming. I can't tell what it is."Ryan started to go back toward where they'd left the ten sec men, but Trader called to him."Goin' somewhere, Ryan?""You heard her. Krysty gets a feeling as strong as this one, then you take note of it.""She doesn't know what it is, but she feels something might've gone wrong." Trader laughed and shook his head. "We keep goin'."For a moment nobody moved.Then the sound came from behind them, to the east, a terrible piercing scream of soul-tearing pain and despair. 26 in the Deathlands series A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDETORONTO NEW YORK LONDON AMSTERDAM PARIS SYDNEY HAMBURG STOCKHOLM ATHENS TOKYO MILAN MADRID WARSAW BUDAPEST AUCKLANDIf you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."***This book is dedicated to the memory of the enormously talented filmmaker, gardener and humanist, Derek Jarman (1942-1994), who carried the definition of courage as being grace under pressure to quite extraordinary frontiers. His name will not be forgotten.***First edition May 1995ISBNO-373-62526-XCopyright 1995 by Worldwide Library.All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.Printed In U.S.A.***Fare thee well, no more, let us clasp our handsAnd swear no tears shall mar our manly cheeks.Now we must part, to go to distant lands,Each of us alone, through valleys, o'er peaks. Yet in the dark, when mylast breath shall end, My final thought will be of you, my friend. From "A Wessex Boy," LJ Priv Prntd, 1742 Ryan Cawdor closed his eye and entered the darkness.He had lost count of the number of times in the past couple of years that he'd gone through this experienceentering the gateway chamber of one of the long-buried military complexes, known as redoubts, to make a mat-trans jump. The process utilized the lost technology from the predark days, before the ultimate nuclear holocaust that had effectively destroyed civilization around the globe.The present jump was beginning in the heart of what had once been Acadia National Park, in the area of the old United States that had been called Maine. None of the group of nine companions had the least idea where the jump would take them. Knowledge of how to control the gateways had been lost in the nuke-tainted years of the long winters. All they knew was that they would arrive in a similar gateway, elsewhere.The one control element that they'd stumbled upon was that gateways had an automatic thirty-minute reset, enabling you to jump back to where you'd just been. As well, there was a setting, generally the coded buttons L and D , that would also take you to the last destination.Ryan's final sight, before the swirling mists closed his good right eye and his mind down, had been his eight friends.Next to him, holding his hand in hers, was Krysty Wroth, the great love of his life. In her mid-twenties she was about ten years younger than Ryan, and three inches shorter than his six feet two. The green-eyed, red-haired Krysty had the "mutie" power of being able to "feel" when danger threatened. She was also able, in the direst of straits, to call on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, taught her by her own mother back in the ville of Harmony, where she'd spent her childhood. This power brought Krysty way beyond the edge of total exhaustion but gave her, briefly, an almost supernatural strength.On Ryan's other side was his eleven-year-old son, Dean. Ryan had been totally unaware of the boy's existencethe result of a fleeting relationshipuntil a year or so earlier. Now he would have given his own life for the lad. Dean was meeting the jump sitting with his back against the dark gray walls, clutching his turquoise-hilted knife in his lap.Next around the circle was Mildred Wyeth. The stocky black woman had been a doctor, specializing in cryonics, or the medical effects of freezing. Born in 1965, Mildred had gone into a hospital in late December of the year 2000 for minor exploratory abdominal surgery, but she had never gotten that far. A freak reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her comatose body being frozen. The world blew apart less than a month later, and she rested on in dark silence, forgotten, her life-support system powered by an undamaged nuke plant. She had finally been awakened from her long sleep by Ryan.Other than her medical talents, Mildred also had an even more useful skill for survival in the wasteland that had once been the United States of America.In the last-ever Olympic Games, held in Miami in 1996, Mildred had represented her country in the free pistol shooting, winning the silver medal. Now, with her ZKR 551 6-shot Czech revolver, chambered to take the Smith amp; Wesson .38 round, she was probably the finest shot in Deathlands.In the past few months Mildred had begun a relationship with the person next around the circle.John Barrymore Dix, known as J.B. or as the Armorer, was about the same age as Ryan and had been his closest friend for the past dozen years or so. J.B. was the greatest living authority on firearms and weaponry in general. Despite his appearancefive feet eight inches and one-forty pounds soaking wet, with glasseshis combat experience was almost unrivaled.He sat next to Mildred, his sallow complexion even more pale than usual, his 9 mm Uzi and Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun lying at his side. In his lap he held his beloved fedora hat.Squatting next to J.B., and holding a battered Armalite, was a lean, grizzled man in his fifties. Known throughout much of Deathlands simply as the Trader, he was the person who'd originally brought Ryan and J.B. together, enlisting them as young bloods and training them until they became his right- and left-hand men.Trader had found two massively powerful war wags up in the Appalachians and used them in his trading and traveling until he was one of the most feared men in Deathlands. Even the barons of some of the largest villes were wary of upsetting the uncertain temper of Trader.The diminutive figure next to Trader, with a drooping mustache, was Abe, once the gunner on War Wag One. When Trader had vanished, many many long months ago, it was widely accepted that he'd gone off alone into the woods to chill himself, as he was known to be suffering from a painful and probably terminal rad cancer.Then the whispering started. Trader had been seen down in Yuma; had chilled a whole ville in Peoria; was running a frontier gaudy with twenty beautiful girls, somewhere east of Taos.It got so that Abe couldn't stand the rumors and had set off to try to track down his old leader.Eventually he had succeeded in his quest, locating the grizzled veteran close to the ruins of old Seattle, Washington.Ryan had mentally ticked them all off, as the disks in floor and ceiling began to glow and the white fog wraiths appeared in the gateway chamber Krysty, Dean, Mildred, J.B., Trader, Abe.And Jak and Doc.Jak Lauren looked as comfortable as if he were relaxing on a goose-feather mattress. Sixteen years old, he was the finest acrobat that Ryan had ever known, as well as being murderously accurate with any of the half dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives that he kept concealed about his skinny person.He came originally from West Lowellton, near Lafayette, in the swamps. Ryan and the others had met him when they became involved with Jak's battles against the evil Baron Tourment. The albino teenager, with a mane of stark white hair and ruby eyes, had traveled with them for some months, until he'd met and married Christina Ballinger. They had lived happily on a spread in New Mexico, with baby Jenny coming along to cement their love for each other.Then tragedy had struck, and the woman and child had been butchered. Jak had come to the very brink of suicidal madness, but Ryan and Krysty and the others had helped him through the darkness and out once more into the light.Last, and certainly not least, of their party was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner.None of the nine could have been called "normal" by any acceptable standards, but Doc Tanner was less normal than any of them.The date of his birth was February 14, 1868, in a white frame house in the pretty hamlet of South Strafford, Vermont.On June 17, 1891, he had married Miss Emily Chandler. A daughter, Rachel, had blessed their union two years later, followed by their ever-smiling little baby boy, Jolyon, in 1895.Doc, whose degree was in science from Harvard, backed with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, England, had the whole world in his hands.But the American military scientists in the unknowable future had other ideas.First, there was the Totality Concept, which spawned Overproject Whisper, of which Project Cerberus dealing with gatewayswas an integral part. Another subdivision of the Totality Concept was Operation Chronos.The slang name for their experiments was "Trawling." It meant seeking out individuals from the past and using a complex and unreliable variant on the mat-trans system to pluck them from their own time, to the cold research laboratories of the late 1990s. There were many failures. The results of some of the failures were hideous beyond human imagining. There was really only one clear-cut success in all of Operation Chronos. Dr. Theo Tanner.One moment he was in mid-Victorian times with his wife and children and then, a heartbeat later, he was dragged more than a hundred years into the future.But the whitecoat experimenters came to regret their single success.Having Doc Tanner loose in their organization was like having a panther running loose in a tornado.He made himself so difficult and obstructive that they eventually resorted to trawling him forward, dumping him nearly a hundred years into the Deathlands future and leaving him there to fend for himself.Had that not happened, he would have died a scant month later when the skies darkened and the missiles ravaged the world and a civilization passed away.Now he was one of the exclusive members of the group who traveled with Ryan Cawdor.Doc had survived experiences that would have turned most men stark mad, but he had paid a high price. Though he was reasonably well balanced most of the time, there were occasions when the pressure of what had happened to him tipped a part of his acute mind sideways.Now he lay sprawled flat on his back, his mouth sagging open, showing his peculiarly perfect teeth, snoring gently. The huge gold-embossed commemoration Le Mat blaster protruded from its holster on his belt.Ryan slipped away into the brain-churning blackness of the jump, surrounded by his son and his friends, ready to waken elsewhere.He closed his eye. Next page