James Axler - Deathlands 23 Road Wars

/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 23 - Road Wars (v1.0) (htnl) ISBN: 0373625235

A figure ghosted out of the darkness, directly in front of Doc's crouching figureThe movement was so sudden and so silent that it startled Doc. He nearly squeezed the Le Mat's trigger, but his better judgment asserted itself in the nick of time. Instead he stood and thrust with the rapier, aiming slightly upward, feeling the needle tip slide between the protecting ribs on the left side of the intruder's body.It was a perfect, clean kill. The flagellant dropped to the floor, shrouded in rags.Doc withdrew the blade, stepping confidently out into the open space between the stalls, aware only of the sudden restlessness of the animals, disturbed by the hot reek of freshly spilled bloodto find himself confronting a second assailant who stood ten feet in front of him, holding a long-hafted hatchet.At that frozen moment, Doc remembered one of the Trader's sayings that Ryan had often quoted. Pull the trigger too soon and you 'll probably be fine. Pull it too late and you 'll probably be dead.But the three and a half pounds of steel, lead and gold remained unfired. "Move and I'll fill you full of holes," Doc warned shakily."No, unbeliever," said a cold voice behind him. "You move and I'll fill you full of holes." 23 in the Deathlands series The piece of paper was crumpled and stained, but it was still perfectly legible.Ryan laid it out on the kitchen table and read it through, for the twentieth time. It was now two days since the seedy packman, passing through the small ville of Patriarch, had handed it to Ryan Cawdor.Success. Will stay around Seattle for three months. Come quick.Abe.The note had been on the road for just over six weeks before it eventually found Ryan, which gave him about a month and a half to make the long and dangerous overland trek to the far northwest of Deathlands to try to meet up again with his old friend Abe and his old leader, the Trader.THE FIRST FRAIL LIGHT of dawn had been edging over the jagged crests of the mountains to the east of Jak Lauren's homestead when Ryan slipped from his bed. Krysty Wroth had still been sleeping, her flaming red hair fanned out across the floral pillow, seeming to glow with a vivid fire of its own. Her bright green eyes were closed and one hand lay, fist clenched, across the top of the covers.They had made love three times during their last night togethertheir last night together for a limitless time. Ryan's hope was that he and the Armorer, J. B. Dix, would be able to make the fifteen hundred miles to the northern Cific coast in a week or so, trouble permitting, take a few days to contact Trader and Abe, and then all return securely to old New Mexico. Call it three weeks, at the outside. That was the theory.As soon as he'd set his eye on the note, Ryan had known that he would have to go. Since he couldn't use the gateway to make a jump to Seattle, it was going to mean some hard traveling, cross-country. It wasn't the kind of journey where he'd want to take Doc Tanner, Mildred Wyeth or his son, Dean, with him. Jak needed some time to get his head together again after the brutal slaying of his wife and baby.That meant someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on things. Krysty was unarguably the best for that. And he needed someone to go with him on the road.Trader used to say that a man traveling alone traveled fastest, but that two good men traveling together would travel safest.John Barrymore Dix and Ryan Cawdor had ridden and fought together for more yearsmostly with the Traderthan either cared to remember. Five feet eight inches tall and one hundred and thirty-seven pounds soaking wet, J.B. had forgotten more about weapons than most people in Deathlands would ever know. Sallow, bespectacled and terse, he seldom used one word where none would suffice.In bed, the previous night, with the noises of the house quietening for the dark hours, Ryan had begun to try to explain the plan to Krysty Wroth.THEY WERE NAKED, close together, yet back to back, a thousand miles apart. There was the faint golden glow of an oil lamp flickering under the bedroom door, and outside the window they could see the sickle moon, floating behind ragged clouds, low in the black velvet sky."Want to sleep, lover?" he whispered.Krysty didn't answer him at first, but he could tell from the fast, shallow sound of her breathing that she was still very much awake."Want to talk about it?""No.""Sure?"She turned to face him, her breath warm on his skin. "We've talked it through, Ryan, talked this kind of thing through a hundred times since we met.""I have to go.""You stupe bastard. Think I don't know that?""Then"Krysty stretched an arm across his chest, then nuzzled her face into the hollow of his neck. Her right hand touched him, feather-light, on the lips, then traced a firm line down his throat, brushing past the legion of seamed scars and weals, over the flat muscular wall of his stomach.Lower."Sure you want to?"Krysty stopped him with her mouth, the tip of her tongue darting between his parted lips. Her hand grasped him firmly, bringing him to an instant diamond-hard readiness."Cut out the talking and get on with the doing, lover."Their first time that night was over quickly, each taking what was urgently needed from the other.The second time was slower, both concentrating more on giving than taking. Krysty slipped lower down the bed, but Ryan also wriggled around, leaving them head to toe. He used his fingers, sighing with his own excitement as she took him in her mouth. Then he repaid the compliment, licking and kissing her delicate moistness as she rolled on top, thighs parted to receive him.After the loving they had fallen asleep, wrapped in each other's arms. Ryan awakened first, feeling the pressure on his bladder from the beer they'd all drunk. He returned from the outhouse, seeing moonlight glinting on Krysty's emerald eyes. He knew that she was awake."I thought you were triple pissed at me," he said quietly, aware of eleven-year-old Dean sleeping in the next room."No. Not angry. Sad, hurt, lonely and worried. Those are the sort of words, lover. I won't sleep a quiet hour until you get home safely.""I know that.""But it's not going to stop me from sending you on your way with the memory of your body fresh in my mind. Let's go for the third strike, Ryan."THE ROOM WHERE HE SAT carried the faint scent of the predark brass oil lamp that he'd lighted as soon as he closed the oak bedroom door behind him. But it was overlaid now with the wholesome smell of fried food.The plate in front of Ryan held three eggs, over easy, with some strips of Jak's home-cured bacon, mushrooms and hash browns with fresh-baked bread and salted butter. Nobody else seemed to be stirring, though he was sure he'd heard the sound of subdued conversation coming from the room shared by J.B. and Mildred.His guess was that they were having a conversation something similar to the one he had with Krysty.If they were to make an early start, Ryan knew that he'd soon have to rouse his old friend. But that meant waking the rest of the household.For a few moments, sipping at a scalding mug of black coffee sub, he enjoyed the solitude, a time out of the perpetual war of surviving in Deathlands to sit and think and gather his private thoughts.Fifteen hundred miles. They had the LAV-25 locked away in the large barn, and there was enough gas to take them a good part of their journey in the eight-wheeled light-armored vehicle. He and J.B. had checked out the few tattered maps available, trying to pick a good route that would keep them clear of any of the pesthole frontier villes that they knew from previous experience to be potentially hostile.The reputation of having been one of the Trader's lieutenants didn't always mean a smiling reception. And when you looked like Ryan Cawdortwo hundred pounds of honed muscle and over six feet of one-eyed meanthen folks tended to remember you.Ryan heard a floorboard creaking in the hall behind him, and his right hand dropped automatically to the butt of the big SIG-Sauer P-226."Only me, my dear chum," Doc said."Join me in a cup of coffee?""I don't believe there'll be room in it for both of us." He started to cackle, remembered the earliness of the hour and clapped a gnarled hand over his mouth. "Nothing like the old jokes, Master Cawdor. And that was nothing like one of the old jokes."Ryan smiled, feeling a sudden rush of genuine affection for the old man.Old man?It was a recurring puzzle, trying to work out how old Doc really was. With his mane of white hair and lined face, wearing an ancient frock coat with a strange green sheen across the shoulders, and cracked knee boots, he looked to be closing in on seventy. And the ebony sword stick with the Toledo-steel rapier blade, the hilt a carved silver lion's head, gave him a nineteenth-century dandyish swagger.Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. So that would make him well over two hundred years old.He had married Emily Chandler in June of 1891, and they had two childrenRachel in 1893 and little Jolyon two years later. With his doctorate of science from Harvard, and doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University, England, Doc's academic career was already flourishing.Until a bitter, leaden day in November of 1896.In another time, the scientists of the United States government were laboring with a highly secret series of experiments. Code-named Operation Chronos, part of the Overproject Whisper, itself a small cog in the mighty machine of Totality Concept, they were trying to travel men and women from past to future.And Doc was their star subject.Some of their failures were horrific enough to make a man vomit blood, so ghastly and inhuman were what came through the temporal gateways.You could count their successes on the fingers of both hands, and even some of them were of dubious merit.Doc had been in Omaha, Nebraska, when his mind blurred and he collapsed, to awaken in a sterile laboratory in the year 1998, surrounded by a convocation of faceless scientists in masks and gowns.At that moment you could have reasonably suggested that he was twenty-eight years old.Nobody who'd ever encountered Doc Tanner would have said that he suffered fools gladly. Or, indeed, that he ever suffered them at all.As soon as he found out what had happened to him, Doc devoted all of his considerable intellect to trying to make the chron jump back to his own time. But his keepers were too alert for that to happen.But he consistently made himself a serious nuisance for the authorities.Eventually, only a matter of days before the nuke holocaust of January 2001, the adminstration committee of Operation Chronos ordered Doc drugged and pushed forward in time. As far as they were concerned, the thorn in their side was gone forever. If he eventually made a temporal landing safely, a hundred years or so ahead, then he wasn't likely to ever come back to haunt them.As it happened, they saved his life. Within twenty-three days, they were all dead.But it was that jump that changed Doc forever.Nobody had ever quite understood how the process of trawling worked. Now he looked a sparky sixty-odd years old, with a mind permanently tipped by the horrific experiences that he'd suffered, experiences that made him totally unique in the history of the human race."Penny for your thoughts, my dear fellow?"Ryan realized that he was holding an empty mug, and that he'd been miles away. "Just thinking about memories, Doc. Nothing important, though.""Things past, not worth forgetting, my friend. Things to come, not worth anticipating. You and John Barrymore Dix are ready for your journey?""Pretty well."Doc poured himself some of the bitter coffee sub, grimacing as he raised it to his lips. "I disbelieve that I shall ever find this turgid sludge acceptable to my palate. Oh, for a muse of fire to sing of finest Java and the Blue Mountain blend.""Wake others?"Jak had come into the room so silently that even Ryan's razored combat reflexes hadn't detected him. The albino teenager was barefooted and wore only cotton pants and a short-sleeved shirt, open all the way down. His stark white hair blazed like a mag flare in the dim light of the oil lamp, and his red eyes glowed in sockets of wind-washed bone like the embers of a dying fire.Ryan nodded. "Might as well.""Sure don't want me come with you?""No, Jak. Not your fight, this time.""Wasn't your fight, Christina and Jenny bein' chilled. Didn't stop you. Wouldn't stop me.""I know that. But there's work to do here on the spread, Jak." Ryan lifted a hand. "I know that you keep telling me you don't intend to stay here. Not now. When we move on, in a few weeks, after I find Trader, then you can decide. Stay or come. Whichever you want, Jak. But for now, there's things to do here.""Yeah. Guess so."He went out as quietly as he'd entered, and they heard him going to rouse the rest of the household. Doc blew his nose on his swallow's-eye kerchief."Grief burns to the very core of his soul, Ryan. By the Three Kennedys! I know the feeling well enough. To lose a wife and a child"He paused as Krysty strode along the hall and joined them. She was wearing a white silk blouse, hanging loose over dark blue riding breeches. The heels of her blue leather Western boots clicked on the wooden floor."Good morning, gentlemen," she said. "Don't suppose you fried up enough breakfast for anyone else, did you, lover? Of course you didn't."Doc rose and bowed. "I would deem it an honor to be allowed to go and cook some"Krysty laughed. "No, thanks, Doc. Best wait until everyone else is up and around. Then we can get organized."J.B. appeared, wiping his wire-rimmed spectacles on a length of clean linen cloth. "Weather tastes good," he said. "Fresh northerly. Go at first light.""That smells almost like coffee." Mildred stood behind J.B., one hand resting on his arm. She was stocky in build, with her hair knotted into tiny beaded plaits.Like Doc, Mildred came from another time.She'd been thirty-six years old, unmarried, one of the leading world authorities on cryogenics and cryo-surgery. Her other claim to fame was that she had won the silver medal in the free pistol-shooting in the last ever Olympics in Miami in 1996.Then, in December of the year 2000, the black woman had gone into the hospital for some minor abdominal surgery.Things had gone wrong.Badly wrong.With the monumental irony that the blind lords of chaos so love, Dr. Mildred Wyeth had been frozen in an attempt to preserve her life.Then the missiles had blackened the skies and civilization disappeared up its own nuclear-powered fundament.Along with a number of other patients, Mildred had been locked into the dreamless sleep for nearly a century, until awakened by Ryan and the others, and brought back to life in Deathlands.Now everyone was up and bustling about.Except for the youngest of the group, Dean Cawdor.It had only been in the past year or so that Ryan had known that he had a son. His brief sexual encounter with Dean's mother, Sharona, had occupied only a few minutes of Ryan's life. Then, like a bolt of lightning at a summer picnic, he found the boy, then ten years old."Anyone seen Dean?" he asked, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and getting up from the table."Heard movement when I came past," Mildred replied, looking around. "Here he is. Morning, young man.""Hi." Dean's black, curly hair was glistening, flat against his head where he'd stuck his head under the pump.Ryan looked at his friends. They were all together. Next page