Jak Lauren wandered through a green-leafed forest. Shafts of summer sunlight darted between the gently swaying branches, dappling the winding path ahead of him.
Every now and again the rich balsam scent of the overhanging pines filled his nostrils. Around him stretched the high, clean meadows, speckled with Indian paintbrush, like speckles of spilled blood. Delicate bear grass, tipped with abundant white lace, nodded along the edges of the trail. Purple asters, harebells and the tiny false Solomon's seal filled his vision.
Somewhere down to his right he caught glimpses of a large lake, crystal clear, with the faint tint of turquoise that whispered melt water. And up the slope to the boy's left was the distant thunder of a high falls, tumbling over starry quartz into a spray-fringed pool.
The animal appeared from nowhere.
A massive silver-tip grizzly sow, with the characteristic hump of muscle across its shoulders, was weaving its head to and fro, and bloody spittle frothed from its muzzle.
An arrow thunked into the bole of a lodgepole pine at Jak's side, a small strip of white parchment tied around it with purple ribbon. Keeping a cautious eye on the bear, the boy unpeeled the paper and read the message.
Yellow cottage, quarter mile behind you. Turn left at lightning-hit live oak.
There was a distant crackle of thunder somewhere over the lake, and the wind was beginning to rise.
Constantly looking over his shoulder, Jak paced out a quarter mile. He gripped the bow in his right hand, an arrow notched and ready to loose. But the silver-tip had vanished.
For a moment he thought he glimpsed a couple of people, on a parallel path — a tall woman with startlingly red hair, and a man who wore a white bandage over his eyes.
There was the tree, its top splintered and torn by a lightning bolt. "Turn left," he muttered to himself.
The path grew wider, winding uphill, twisting and turning, with a cairn of white stones to mark each bend. Jak saw a fluttering scrap of yellowed paper held against one of the piles of rock by a piece of rusting iron.
Nearly home, Jak. Your mother and me are looking forward to welcoming you safe back. Not far to go, lad.
The bow was becoming cold and wet. He looked down at it and found the stout yew had turned into polished ice. The arrow was straw with a tip of smoldering red ash.
Ahead of him, something gray and scaled waddled across the path. It looked like a mutie alligator. The sun was gone, and dark clouds swooped over the stark mountaintops all around him. But he could see the cottage. The walls were painted golden yellow, and a lamp hung in the front window to guide the weary traveler home.
"Home," Jak said, and found that the word wouldn't fit properly inside his chilled lips.
He was less than one hundred paces from the trim little house. Behind him he could dimly hear the howling of a hunting pack of wolves. The bow was melting fast, running through his fingers and blazing like molten silver.
The cottage door opened and he could see a tall man, dressed in a green jerkin. "Come in, son. You're safe now, with us."
The door closed, and Jak found himself in a cheery room with a log fire crackling in the hearth. Copper pans winked from the shelves and a spread of food was laid out on a dazzling damask cloth — fresh-baked bread and crisp salad, with slices of smoked ham as thick as a man's finger.
Jak picked up one of the china bowls and saw that it held a mass of pulsating white maggots.
"Your mother's favorite, Jak. Made them special, she did. She'd be here herself, but she's dead and gone these fifteen years."
There was another burst of thunder that seemed to shake the whole building. The lights dimmed, and the fire died away. Jak suddenly began to feel very sick.
"You don't look too good, son. Mother's kept your room nice, waiting for you to come on back. Safe and secure, Jakky. Go and have a rest. Your own little bed in your own little room."
The nausea was growing like a bubble of rotten air, filling his stomach, rising through his chest and squeezing his lungs. It surrounded his heart and made it pound faster. The idea of lying down and sleeping seemed attractive.
"In there, son." His father pointed to a low door in the corner of the room. Jak noticed that the man's fingers were crooked, ending in thick, jagged nails that curved back on themselves.
The room was growing darker, and the sickness was surging into his throat. "Lie down," he whispered.
"Safe and secure, Jak. Insecure and unsafe, Jak. Which?"
The door opened without his touching it, and he stepped through.
"No," Jak whispered.
His feet slipped away, and he began to fall down a long, polished tunnel.
"No!"
Faster and faster he fell, and he tried to grab at the sides of the tunnel, his fingers blistering from the speed and heat of his fall.
"No!" Jak screamed.
Infinities below him he could make out a speck of silver-white light, rushing toward him at a dizzying speed. "No!"
The desert sands were red with blood.
John Barrymore Dix lay flat behind a low bullet pocked wall, pressed to the warm earth, waiting for the stickies to come at him again.
The sky was pale orange, scarred with the drifting remnants of a fearsome chem storm of scarlet and jagged silver. The air still tasted of ozone from the force and power of the tempest.
The rest of the war wag's crew were dead, butchered by the ceaseless attacks of the gibbering muties. They'd come in waves from the sun-baked arroyos, their suckered hands tearing and ripping at the bodies of the defenders. Bullets scarcely checked the stickies with their rubbery flesh. Lead went in and out, and left only a small hole and a trickle of what passed for blood. You had to shoot a stickie in the head and pulp its ferocious residual brain. J.B. knew he'd sent a dozen or more out on the last train to the coast, but there were hundreds more, waiting out there. His friends lay around him.
The white-haired boy had most of his face missing, exposing the glistening pallor of bone. His satin-finish Magnum was by his side, its barrel clogged with blood and mud.
The woman had taken her own life, kissing the muzzle of the 9 mm Heckler & Koch pistol. Her bright blood was invisible against her matted crimson hair.
Maybe that was the best, cleanest way to buy the farm.
All J.B. could see of the old man was the cracked knee boots protruding from under a pile of mutie corpses. The silver swordstick, blade snapped jaggedly in two, lay nearby, the blade reflecting the fire of the nuke-ravaged sky.
A dead puppy, head missing, was flung against the bottom of the wall.
"Ryan?" J.B. called, knowing that there wouldn't be an answer. Not this time. Not anymore.
He could feel bile, hot and sour, churning in his guts. The sun beat down on his head, despite the protection of his dented fedora. His eyes blurred, and he blinked to try to clear them.
"Come on, you bastards," he muttered, risking a look over the wall. Nothing. Just the purple sand dunes that stretched out toward the shimmering horizon.
J.B. knelt and reviewed his arsenal of weapons, laid neatly in front of him. He'd field stripped, oiled, polished, greased and loaded dozens of them. Each had a round snug under the cocked hammer. All he had to do was heft them and squeeze the cool, curved triggers.
He squinted, then rubbed at his eyes. There seemed to be some movement to his left, near a half-burned Joshua tree.
J.B. laid down his Colt Navy pistol and pressed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. His glasses were smeared and dusty, and he wondered whether he should try to clean them before the attack came. His headache was getting worse, and he realized that he was feeling sick, as if someone had kicked him hard in the balls.
He wondered which gun to use first. He looked in front of himself again and saw that there were literally hundreds of different blasters. Right by his boots was a stocky silenced Sterling Parabellum submachine gun. J.B. didn't recall having noticed that one before.
A pair of elegant rifles were propped against each other — a Ruger M-77 and a Steyr-Mannlicher, each with a polished walnut stock and a scope sight. Hunting guns.
J.B. couldn't remember where they'd come from. From some of the other dead, he supposed. But as he looked around, the Armorer realized that all the bodies had disappeared, both norms and muties. The land around him was full of blasters and empty of anything else.
The army of stickies was advancing slowly toward him, their bare feet shushing through the hot sand.
He couldn't make up his mind as to which blaster to use to defend himself. Something old, like the jumble of wheel lock and flintlock pistols? Or the long .50-caliber Sharps? Maybe its classic rainbow trajectory was what he needed to begin picking off the muties at long range.
If only his head didn't hurt so much! It was making it difficult for him to think straight.
J.B. closed his eyes and let his head sink forward onto his chest. He tried to steady his breathing, fearing he was going to start throwing up.
When he opened his eyes again the stickies were across the river, pouring up the steep valley toward the ruined church where he was hiding. The sky was darkening fast, and he wondered whether night would fall quickly enough to help him.
"Time to start throwing some lead," he said to himself.
He picked up the nearest blaster from the polished steel racks in front of him. It was a Parker-Hale M-94, equipped with a folding bipod and a Smith & Wesson Startron 800 passive vision night sight. The Armorer worked the bolt and steadied the rifle on the sill of a broken stained-glass window. The sight brought the nearest stickie almost within touching distance. J.B. gently squeezed the trigger.
And heard the dry click of a misfire.
He dropped the blaster and snatched up the Nambu, hearing the same hollow, empty sound.
The French rifle, the same result.
A Walther PPK, plated with a thin layer of pure gold. Misfire.
J.B. dropped the last of the useless, malfunctioning weapons and turned to face the doorway of the church. The headless remains of a crucified man hung above the lintel, one leg missing. The stickies came silently walking through the dark entrance. Creepily they weren't hurrying, and some of them seemed to be smiling.
They reached out toward the helpless man with their spread, suckered hands, ready to draw the skin from the flesh, the eyes from the sockets, the flesh from the bones.
The life from the body.
The churning pain in J.B.'s head was close to unbearable. It was like having the needle tip of a scalpel drawn slowly around the inside of the skull, slicing tiny wafers of tissue from the brain.
The Trader stood near the shattered remnants of the altar, watching as the muties surrounded J.B. for their butchering.
"Help me," J.B. croaked, licking his dry lips.
The suckered hands were everywhere, bringing a sucking blackness.
"Help me?" J. B. Dix looked toward the gaunt, remote figure of the Trader.
"No."
Dr. Theophilus Tanner beamed as the puppy came bounding up the dusty street toward him, its tail wagging furiously. A speeding brougham bowled by, driven by a liveried negro, narrowly missing the eager animal. Doc glimpsed a beautiful, cold-faced woman, sitting back on the maroon velvet cushions, ignoring the common people.
The dog went to him, and he stooped to pat it. "Friendly little chap, isn't he, Emily?"
"He is, my dearest," Doc's pretty young wife replied.
The dog began to tremble. Emily Tanner backed away from it, lifting the hem of her skirt. She turned a worried face to her handsome young husband. "What's wrong, dear?"
The dog rolled on its side, legs jerking as if it were trying to run on the air. Its eyes were open wide, and it made an alarmed, whining noise.
"I guess it's hungry," Doc replied. "Best leave the animal, or someone could come along and set it ablaze. Happens all the time." There was a moment of sickening blackness. When it cleared away, Doc was strolling down Fifth Avenue with Emily on his arm. She was pushing a wicker perambulator that held baby Rachel. Emily was heavily pregnant. It was a beautiful summer morning, and the street bustled with horse-drawn carriages and cabs. A hansom had lost a wheel on the corner of Thirty-Second, and a sweating, swearing Irish policeman was struggling to clear the jammed traffic.
Doc took out a kerchief with a swallow's-eye design and dabbed at his brow. "By the three... something. Hot."
"When do we leave for Omaha, my prince among men?" Emily asked.
"Dog has too many heads, my dear. Cerberus by name and Totality by nature."
She smiled up at him, infinitely gentle. "Don't leave me, Theo."
"Of course not. Never and a day. Safe here, aren't we, Ryan?"
The one-eyed man was walking on the far side of the pram. He wore a patch over his left eye, but the other socket welled with black blood.
"Today's not safe, Doc," he replied. "Tomorrow's worse. Only safe place is yesterday."
The picture of nineteenth-century New York trembled and Doc fell to his knees, holding his head and rocking back and forth. The pain was appalling, swirling around inside his mind. Dark shadows sucked at all of his memories.
"Yesterday's safe," he muttered.
Emily, the baby, the pram... they'd all vanished. There was a gleaming horse tram, with walls of turquoise arma-glass. People were inside it, sitting upright and facing the front: a woman holding a little baby near the rear; a man in a hat and a young boy with stark white hair, carrying a puppy in his arms; a tall woman whose hair blazed like a New Mexico sunset. All were moving away from him.
"Come back to yesterday," Doc shouted, starting to run toward them.
But a swordstick of demonic agony tore into his head and he fell down, blood coursing from his nose. The blood ran over the sidewalk, which was built from patterned tiles that made up a star-spangled banner.
A mop-headed youth holding a battered guitar patted him on the shoulder. "Something's happening and you don't know about it. I'll let you be in my past if you'll let me be in yours."
It seemed like a good offer to Doc, but by the time he'd struggled to his knees the boy had vanished.
"Someone dug the dog a tomb," Doc said, nearly weeping from the sickness and his own weakness.
Emily kissed him on the cheek. "Stay here with me forever, my love."
"Yes," he whispered as the blackness enveloped him.
Krysty Wroth could usually control what happened to her mind when she was sleeping, or when she was making a mat-trans jump. The training that she'd been given by her mother, Sonja, back in her home ville of Harmony, meant that she possessed a variety of arcane skills. But even her mind was torn into the ether by the third, faulty jump.
She knew that the lover in her dream was Cort Strasser, knew him for one of the most evil beings to blight the Deathlands. Jordan Teague had been Baron of Mocsin, a notorious frontier pesthole, with festering alleys, gaudies and bars. To control somewhere like Mocsin meant "no more Mr. Nice Guy." But Teague couldn't have done it alone. He needed a sec boss who would be ten times more vicious and cruel.
Cort Strasser.
Krysty lay back in the soft, warm bed and moaned as he touched her. His long, strong fingers sought out the hidden places of her body, making her writhe with an overwhelming sensual delight.
She clasped the tall, gaunt figure to her, reveling in the lean tension beneath the corded muscles. He rolled above her, spreading her thighs with a brutal jab of his knee. One hand gripped her wrists and held them effortlessly still above her head. Sweat beaded the near-bald head. Thin eyes stared deep into her face, thin lips peeled off broken teeth.
"Ryan did that," she whispered. "Threw a blaster into your mouth."
For a moment Strasser hesitated, poised above her. His thick, powerful erection shrank between his thighs, and he lifted a clubbed fist threateningly.
"Keep your mouth shut, redhead slut," he hissed. "I'll tell you when to open it, and I'll tell you what to do with it. Understand?"
Krysty nodded. "And you'll give me a son?"
"If you're good to me, bitch. If you're not, it'll be one of my toys to remind you of how to obey your master."
A log fire was dying in the open hearth. A small brindled puppy was sleeping in front of it, head on its paws. And on the table by the fire was a selection of Cort Strasser's toys. A whip with a short, stubby handle was studded with nails. The thongs were plaited wire, and the tips were splinters of jagged glass. Next to it was a longer whip, with a single, cutting lash. There were knives on the table, as well as a number of sexual aids — phalluses of differing sizes and shapes, but all with some unexpected and cruel refinement.
"You ready, whore?"
Strasser's narrow mustache was glistening with perspiration, and he licked his lips. By lifting her head a little Krysty could see that he was once again fully erect.
"This isn't right."
He laughed, his breath foul in her face. "Not right? You triple-stupe slag! Don't tell me what's right."
"Gaia, help me!"
Krysty's head was hurting, and the weight of the sec boss on her stomach was making her feel sick. But she felt powerless against the man's strength.
"Gaia don't do shit, lady," he cackled, bracing himself between her thighs.
"Let her go, Strasser."
Ryan stood in the doorway, a silvery automatic pistol in his right hand. Doc and J.B. were with him, and in the corridor behind, Krysty glimpsed the sparkle of snowy hair.
"Go fuck yourself, Cawdor," the sec boss snarled, unmoving.
"Sure thing," Ryan replied, turning on his heel.
"Ryan!" Krysty called.
"What?"
"Wait!"
"Going, lover. Got to keep moving. Mebbe stop one day."
"Let the back-shooting bastard go," Strasser urged, pressing the tip of his engorged maleness against her body.
"Ryan, I want you."
"Cort there'll give you what you want, lover," Ryan said wearily. "Child, family, place to settle and live."
The headache was electrifyingly painful, throbbing to the beat of an unseen drum. Krysty struggled against Cort Strasser, but her normal power had gone.
"Only with you, lover," she yelled.
But she and Strasser were alone on a hillside, above a shallow valley. Beneath them she could see the polluted waters of a vast rancid lake. The sec boss still held her beneath him, about to complete the rape.
"Gaia, help me."
"I'll help you with this." He laughed, making Krysty sure she would vomit at any second.
A little dog, barking its brave defiance, hurled itself at Strasser, distracting him for another, blessed moment.
The dog received abrupt punishment from the murderous man. He reached out with his free hand and caught the pup around the throat, squeezed once and dropped the twitching little body to the warm earth.
"Killer!" she spit.
"Yeah, you believe it."
"You'll die."
He stroked Krysty's long red hair with his free hand and smiled with a shocking gentleness. "Yeah. We all will."
"I can't stand it."
Cort Strasser's face shimmered like a reflection in a wind-tainted pool. The grip on her arms weakened, and Krysty tried again to pull away from him. Her eyes felt as if someone were trying to push them from their sockets with white-heated pistons.
"Gonna give you what you want, slut. Give you what all women want."
He thrust then, and she screamed at the terrible ripping, rending pain in her loins that tore through her body and made her black out.
"Noooo!"
Keeping a hold on his sanity was one of Ryan Cawdor's toughest struggles.
Three jumps, back to back to back, the last from a defective gateway, were enough to scramble anyone's brain. He fought as hard as he knew how to hold the sweeping tide of blackness at bay. But it rose and rose about him, until even his mental and physical powers were drained.
He was in an abandoned ocher quarry, endless ravines and canyons of multicolored clays that ranged from the palest gray-white to the deepest, richest vermilion. Ragged trees lined the tops of the sheer cliffs, and the remnants of rotting wooden ladders were pinned to the walls.
The air was heavy and sulfurous, weighing down on Ryan's head and shoulders. His steel-toed combat boots slithered in the orange clay, making it hard to progress in any direction. And all directions looked the same. His coat was sodden with his sweat, and he wasn't carrying any kind of weapon.
Ryan felt there were other people somewhere in this Technicolor wilderness, but he couldn't quite see or hear them. He saw the marks of feet, sometimes fresh with moisture still seeping into them, and twice he thought he heard a voice behind the next twisting turn. But when he rounded the blind corner nobody was there.
As he eased the patch from over his left eye, he was assaulted by a sudden memory of his murderous brother, Harvey. The livid scar etched across his right cheek flared at the thought.
There was a doorway in the bright wall of stone ahead of him and a barred gate with a huge, brooding figure standing in front of it — an armored man, holding a strange weapon of polished brass with a gaping muzzle. It was like no blaster that Ryan Cawdor had ever seen, and he knew instinctively that it possessed a dreadful megacull capability. Nothing he could do would enable him to beat this sinister sec guard.
Yet the gateway presented him with his only chance of escaping from the ocher maze.
"What's your sec clearance, outlander?" the sentry asked in a booming voice.
"B 100."
"Name?"
"Cawdor. Ryan Cawdor."
The giant consulted a piece of white parchment in his mailed fist. "Cawdor. Cawdor. Cawdor. Did you say Cawdor?"
"Yeah."
"Did you say Richard Cawdor?"
"No, Ryan."
"You said Richard!"
"No."
The weird weapon lifted toward the one-eyed man, its barrel reflecting the pink of the sky. "Ryan Cawdor, are you saying?"
"Yeah, and you'd better not point that blaster at me, unless you aim to use it."
The guard roared a rippling belly laugh. "Well, now. I call that mighty big talk for a one-eyed thin man like you, Ryan Cawdor."
Ryan winced at the noise, finding it made his splitting headache even worse.
"You going to let me through, or do I chill you where you stand?"
"No need, outlander. My list has your name on it. This door is only for you. And now I'm going to open it."
The corridor had walls of pale gray, a floor of black tiles and a ceiling of peeling yellow paint. It stretched away ahead of Ryan, as far as he could see.
Above him he could hear the noise of countless feet, marching in a stumbling dissonant rhythm, the sound muffled by the ceiling. On either side of the passage were rows of identical doors, each with a tiny peephole.
Ryan paused and looked in the first one, then the second and the third, moving to the other side and finding that each peephole revealed exactly the same thing — a square concrete cell, with a bunk bed and an enamel chamber pot. The rooms were seven feet across and had a barred window of opaque arma-glass six inches wide.
And in each room stood a naked person — alternately male and female — with their backs toward the doors. Their hands were manacled behind them, and bags of rough hessian covered their heads, knotted at the sides with purple cord.
None moved or made any sound, nor was there a sign of anyone who might have been a guard.
Ryan turned away and walked farther along, finding another corridor that opened to his left. It was a blind alley with only five doors, and these doors, like the others, had peepholes.
In the first cell stood an old man, his head hidden under a sacking hood. On the bunk lay a folded kerchief, bearing a swallow's-eye design.
The next cell held a man close to middle-age, but lean and muscular. On the bunk was a pair of rimless spectacles.
A teenager stood motionless in the third, the hood revealing a trickle of snow-white hair beneath it. On his bunk was a dish that held a mess of pallid creatures that writhed and twisted about one another.
In the second last Ryan saw a tall athletic woman, whose fiery hair had escaped beneath the hessian mask. On her bunk was a riding crop with a handle of carved ivory.
There was nobody in the last cell, but on the narrow bed lay the corpse of a small puppy. From the angle of its head, Ryan could see that its neck had been broken.
The man who sat across the table from Ryan was aged beyond measuring: his scant hair was without color and clung to the shrunken skull like moss to a boulder; his eyes were veiled and blind, lost beneath layers of pale wrinkled skin; the mouth was toothless, lipless, and seemed possessed of a strange ticking life of its own.
Spittle dripped ceaselessly, running over the chin and down the scrawny neck, which was wattled like an ancient turkey. He was dressed in a collarless shirt that was tucked into baggy pants, and he smelled of urine and last week's stew, in roughly equal proportions.
"You passed the gate built only for you. You passed without the word. And now you will witness the last and greatest mystery of them all."
"No." Ryan swallowed hard to contain the vomit that he could taste rising from his churning stomach.
"Indeed, yes, Ryan Cawdor, late of the ville of Front Royal. I will reveal to you what all men desire and all men fear."
"What?"
"The manner of your passing."
Ryan tried to shake his head, but the pressure on his brain was too severe. "Don't fucking want it, old man."
The tabletop between them was made of cold dark glass. As Ryan leaned forward to rest his head on his hands, it seemed that he could see flickerings of light and fire within the somber shadows. Once he thought he glimpsed the face of Krysty Wroth, twisted like that of a tormented soul, with a grinning, thin-lipped skull at her shoulder.
"No man wishes it, but you are valued above all men, Ryan Cawdor. And this shall be your suitable reward."
"Why?"
For some reason the question amused the smirking dotard and he giggled, his voice high-pitched like a little girl's. "Because you are the meanest bastard that ever walked through the valley of Deathlands. That's why."
"I have never taken pleasure in killing." Even as he spoke, Ryan knew in his heart that it was a lie. He'd killed men who deserved to die, and women. And to leave the earth a little cleaner was always a good thing.
"That don't signify doodleysquat here, Ryan Cawdor. Now, look into the middle of this here table and you'll see how you get chilled, when you get chilled and where you get chilled."
Ryan looked away, trying to make out what kind of room they were in. All he could see were folds of heavy material, draped in the corners. It could have been a tent, but it felt colder and the echoes didn't sound right.
"Don't you want to know?"
"No. Who are you?"
"I'm now.I want to show you soon.Want to know if you marry? Have kids? I can show you all that. If it's there. But you have to see the end as well as the beginning. Might not be so bad."
"No."
"Could be you go in your sleep on your 120th birthday, your kin all around your bedside, weeping."
"Could be it's in the gutter of some pesthole, looking up at the sky while the rain bounces off my eyes."
The old man laughed again. "Look into the table, Ryan Cawdor, and find out."
Unable to resist, the pain blinding him, Ryan leaned forward over the darkness. And watched.