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“Ryan!”

Heedless of his own injuries, J.B. bolted to his side, firing his Uzi through the veil of smoke. Grabbing Ryan by the legs, he dragged him back to the wall. “How bad is it?”

“Not…good. I know that much,” Ryan gritted. He brought his trembling neck muscles under control to look down at his shoulders, seeing a lot of blood and the jagged end of a bone poking up through the skin.

J.B. gingerly explored the wound. “This is going to hurt a lot.” The Armorer eased himself under his old friend’s right arm, eliciting a groan of pain from him as he gripped his hand tight to keep him in place.

When J.B. stood, Ryan nearly passed out from the agony shooting through his shoulders. The Armorer half dragged the one-eyed man forward, intent on getting clear of the underground pit and getting help for Ryan….

Perception Fault

Death Lands_®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the “dragon,” in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.

—D. H. Lawrence

1885–1930

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Chapter One

Crouched behind a half-ruined wall, Ryan Cawdor wiped gritty concrete dust from his tanned face, black eye patch and curly black hair. He peeked around the left side of the barrier, searching for the person with the longblaster who’d come within a couple inches of sending him on the last train west.

The day had started well enough. He and his companions had come out of a mat-trans near what they thought were the ruins of what used to be Denver, Colorado. It was an area they were fairly familiar with, since two of their group had grown up around these parts. Traveling north to check out the ville, they had reached the outskirts without incident. The quiet should have been a warning. They had just set up a campsite with an outdoor fire they’d thought was sheltered from passing eyes, and were roasting their freshly killed dinner. But as Krysty Wroth was turning the giant, heronlike bird on their makeshift spit, she had looked up with that shocked expression everyone knew all too well, sending each of the other five diving for weapons, cover or both. The first shot had cracked out a second later, and now the group was pinned down and facing an unknown force.

The ambush had been well planned and executed. But the targets the raiders had chosen weren’t farmers or traders traveling the Deathlands hawking their wares. They weren’t even a ragtag band of mercies looking for work, their blasters available for hire to anyone who had the jack.

Ryan and his five companions had spent years roaming the length and breadth of the radiation and chem-ravaged land that had been called America long ago. They had encountered much during their journeys, from mutant animals and humanoids of every shape and size to power-hungry barons carving out their empires from the postholocaust savagery, offering refuge—of a sort—to anyone who could pay or barter for the price of admission.

The companions had met just about every variety of man, mutant or monster inhabiting this world—and had left many of them on their back, staring sightlessly at the sky while their lifeblood leaked into the dirt. Each member of the group was a master of chilling in just about every way, shape and form possible, with Ryan perhaps the best of them all—a fact these coldhearts were about to find out the hard way.

He glanced over at his old friend, J. B. Dix, who held his mini-Uzi tucked into his shoulder. The sallow-faced man was hunched down behind the same wall as Ryan, but his expression was as calm as if he were strolling through a mountain meadow in spring.

Ryan risked another peek out only to draw another bullet for his trouble, the lead slug ricocheting off the side of the wall. “See anything?”

“Not yet. They picked a good time to spring this surprise. Dusk means better cover, and they used the fire as their targeting point, neatly pinning us near it.”

“What I really want to know is how we’re going to get the drop on them.”

The short, bespectacled man adjusted the battered fedora on his head and half turned to Ryan. “Working on it. You got a line on anyone else?”

“Krysty and Jak took cover to my right, about ten yards out. Don’t know where Mildred and Doc.”

“Mildred ended up on the other side of the street, in that falling-down house with half a second floor. That could be useful. Probably better that Doc’s taken cover. He can man the fort with me.”

Ryan wrinkled his nose as he smelled burning meat. Their untended dinner was going up in flames. “Fireblast and fuck! There goes the turkey.” Adding insult to injury, another large-caliber round cracked out, and the carcass burst apart in an explosion of half-raw meat, bone fragments and watery liquid. Ryan snarled, his growling stomach adding its own comment on the travesty that had just happened in front of him. “Now they’ve really pissed me off.”

“Sure would help if you could get a bead on where that longblaster is.”

“Dammit, I—” Ryan paused, replaying the exploding meal in his mind’s eye, particularly where the bullet had come from. The coldheart had gotten cocky—he’d started playing with them and given Ryan valuable information about his position with that last shot. “About twenty-five feet off the ground, probably third-story window or roof, mebbe one hundred yards straight ahead on the other side of this wall.”

“All right, then. They’ll be running at least two teams of two, mebbe three out to flank us while that longblaster keeps our heads down. Means some of us go hunting.”

Ryan’s lips peeled back in a wolfish grin. “I’m game. Care to fill me in on your plan?”

J.B. grinned. “We’ll outflank the flankers, you go up the middle and take out the longblaster. Isn’t that what we’ve been discussing?”

Ryan slapped his oldest friend on the shoulder. “Trader always said never to split up your group. Half your force is—”

“Half your firepower, I know, I know. He also said, ‘Find yourself ambushed and your best chance of not buying the farm is to go forward like goose shit off a shovel. They won’t be expecting that.’”

Ryan nodded. “Just wanna make sure we don’t make the wrong choice, that’s all.”

“Since when have you ever been worried about that? Just make sure you don’t get your ticket punched today.” J.B. whistled, low yet loud. The couple on Ryan’s right, the beautiful, flame-haired Krysty and a skinny, albino teenager, Jak Lauren, glanced over. With a series of hand signals, he instructed them what to do. A pair of nods, and they disappeared around the far corner of the crumbling shop, the glass in its large windows long gone.

J.B. turned to the black woman peeking out from a gaping doorway in a building that still had its walls. He pointed up, held up two fingers, then pantomimed shooting a pistol. With a curt nod, she disappeared into the darkness.

J.B. raised his subgun so the barrel just poked over the top of the wall. “I’ll find Doc later. Get ready to move.”

Ryan had already done so, securing his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster across his back and checking the broad-bladed eighteen-inch panga sheathed on his left hip and the narrow-bladed flensing knife at his belt before crouch-walking to the far end of the wall, poised for flight. His right hand was filled with his Sig Sauer P-226 pistol with its integral silencer, the perfect weapon for close-quarter urban hunting—if the sound suppressor worked—which it often didn’t. “Ready when you are.”

J.B. squeezed his mini-Uzi’s trigger three times, sending short bursts in the direction of the sniper. Ryan would have bet that the man known as the Armorer had come close to hitting the building the sniper was holed up in, just by using the brief description of where the last shot had come from.

However, that was of little consequence, since the moment J.B. fired, Ryan had burst from cover to reach the nearest building. Even as he ran, he heard the louder boom of the longblaster in the distance and felt something pluck at his sleeve as he ran to a large pile of debris topped with a still-intact roof.

Taking a moment to get his breath and bearings, the one-eyed man peeked underneath the roof to find a narrow passageway running down its entire length—the perfect hidey-hole for what he needed to do. Dropping to his knees, he peered inside. The tunnel appeared empty in the dim light. Nevertheless, he drew his thin-bladed flensing knife and placed it between his teeth before crawling into the hole, not wanting to be surprised by any occupants that might be resting inside.

AS A CHILD, J.B. HAD ONCE SEEN a working targeting comp that an outlander tinker had managed to get working. Attached to a car battery, it had been able to calculate the trajectory, azimuth and range of something called an M110 self-propelled howitzer to hit targets up to four miles away.

J.B. had been fascinated by the blinking display, ignoring the adults’ pointed questions about where the man had gotten the device and how he’d managed to figure out how it worked. He was simply captivated by the complete and utter accuracy of the machine, no emotion, just simple math and logic used in its calculations to place the bomb where it was supposed to go.

Now, some thirty-odd years later, if anyone had said his own mind worked much like that targeting comp, he would have regarded them with a long, flat stare.

The Armorer had already narrowed down what kind of longblaster they were facing—hunting gun, perhaps Remington bolt-action, .308 caliber—and taken his measure of the person behind the sights. The coldheart was calm, picked his shots well. From Ryan’s estimates, he’d triangulated where the coldheart was, and had aimed high to allow the bursts from his mini-Uzi a chance to arc into the building. A long shot, to be sure, but he had faced death so many times he’d lost count of how often he thought he might have glimpsed the shadow of the conductor waiting to take him aboard the last train to the coast. He fully expected this to be one of those times, as well.

A muffled knock on the wall let him know Mildred was in position. Thinking about the stocky, opinionated predark black woman and the relationship they shared caused the corners of his mouth to twitch up in what might have been a smile, flicking across his face before it vanished again as he turned to the task at hand—providing a very noticeable target without actually getting himself shot.

Readying the mini-Uzi again, he fired two single shots, hoping to make the approaching coldhearts think he was running low on ammo. That was only one of the surprises he had in store for any attackers who had the misfortune to stumble across him in the gathering darkness.

He gripped the mini-Uzi tightly and squeezed off two more shots. Knowing exactly how many shots were left in the magazine, J.B. pressed the trigger once, then again, hearing the loud click as the firing pin fell on an empty chamber, and pulled the trigger twice more, wincing at the potential damage the pin might be suffering as he did so. He heard the crackle of the fire and the oily hiss of the shattered bird carcass as it crisped in the flames, but J.B.’s ears were focused on the sounds coming from outside the firelight—the scrape of a boot on concrete, the clink of metal on metal as the leftmost team snuck closer to try to get the drop on their targets. With him on one side and Mildred on the other, it was a perfect situation to take them out in a lethal cross fire.

The soft snick of a full magazine slotting into the mini-Uzi’s handle made J.B. look down. Almost of their own accord, his hands had removed the subgun’s empty stick mag and replaced it with a full one from the pocket of his jacket while he’d been listening to their enemies approach. Slowly drawing the cocking handle back, he set the weapon beside him and picked up the second surprise he was going to spring on the raiders. They just had to come a few steps closer….

He was just about to roll out and spray lethal lead when a loud stage whisper carried across the campsite to his ears. “John Barrymore, is that you?”

Dark night! he thought as the movement on the other side of the wall stopped. Doc, you triple-stupe, sometimes you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

Before he could alter his plan, J.B. heard running footsteps from behind him, and then a gruff voice calling out, “Move an’ yer dead, old man!”

HAIR TIGHTLY COILED AT HER nape, Krysty Wroth moved through the twilight like a panther tracking its prey—swift, intelligent, remorseless. They were out here somewhere, and she was going to find them and put them on the ground before they did the same to her and her friends. The titian-haired beauty’s S&W blaster was at her side, held low but ready to fire at a moment’s notice. Her hand-tooled blue cowboy boots clicked on debris as she picked her way through what had been an abandoned store, the once spotless and level tile floor now buckled and slanting, covered with dust, dirt and fragments of glass from its shattered windows.

She knew Jak was advancing parallel with her a few paces to her right, his snow-white hair only somewhat muted in the night. She’d suggested that he cover it more than once, but the albino teen had refused, saying he didn’t like wearing anything on his head, even though she had seen him wear an old army cap on at least one occasion. She didn’t argue, however—if it made him a more likely target to their enemies, so be it. Besides, she knew he could take care of himself, with or without a blaster.

J.B.’s instructions had been clear—advance under cover and find a place to ambush attackers—and she intended to follow them to the letter. She knew it was risky, but she trusted the small man almost as much as she trusted Ryan, and knew he wouldn’t have placed them here if there was no chance of getting the job done.

A long counter that ran across the room was also warped and collapsing. Behind it was a space where someone had waited on customers long ago, selling whatever goods they had, and another set of counters that lined the back wall. They looked sturdy enough, however, and Krysty would be able to crouch under the window set several feet up on the wall, even using it as a blaster port if necessary.

She hissed at Jak, who had prowled to the gaping back door, making not a whisper of noise as he’d crept through the room. At her signal, he squatted in the shadow next to the opening, his big .357 Magnum Colt Python almost dwarfing his hands. Krysty held up her closed fist, the signal to stay where he was, then pointed to the window. Jak shrugged, watching her lithe form as she climbed up on the shelf, which creaked a bit under her weight, but held. Standing next to the opening, she cautiously leaned out far enough to get a view of the shattered street outside. Nothing seemed to be moving. Where the hell are they? she wondered.

“Bored. Let’s go.” Jak’s whisper made her start, since it came from only a few feet away. She turned just far enough to see his pale face gleam in the rising moon. He was trying very hard not to stare at her ass, currently uncovered by her shaggy bearskin coat, which she had left near the fire.

She shook her head. “We let them come to us, remember?”

The albino teen shook his head. “Too long. Die waitin’ fuckers to come.”

Krysty took one last look outside—still no one there. She knew they couldn’t have passed the pair—there was no way they wouldn’t have seen the coldhearts. “All right. Get back to the door, and we’ll go to the next building. Wait for me there.”

“Sure, sure.” He was already at the doorway by the time she got to the floor, and before she could join him, he had peeked out. “Hey, see one!” Without waiting for an answer, he darted outside.

“Jak, get back here!” Krysty stepped forward just as she felt the unmistakable pressure of a blaster barrel pressed to the back of her head.

“Don’t move, girlie, or you won’t have that pretty head no more.”

Chapter Two

“Come on, J.B., what’s taking so long down there?” Mildred Wyeth muttered under her breath as she waited in the second story darkness, her ZKR 551 target pistol poised to aim and fire as soon as the Armorer sprung his trap. Except something was delaying the whole plan.

Having been placed into cryogenic suspension after an adverse reaction to anesthetic during what was supposed to have been a routine operation in the year 2000, the last thing Mildred expected to wake to was the devastated remains of America in a blighted world. But when she had opened her eyes in the cryo chamber, the appearance of the motley assortment of men and the woman who surrounded her had immediately let her know that wherever she was, it definitely wasn’t Kansas anymore.

Since then, she had undergone a crash course on life in the Deathlands, adapting to survive in this untamed world, with the pockets of civilization they encountered raw and rough around the edges. She had seen and done things that would have made the old Mildred curse or sob or scream, but now they were taken as a matter of survival, if not of everyday life. In addition, she had been a doctor in her old life, working on the very cryogenic machinery that had saved her life, only to deposit her a century in the future into a hellish land. The irony was all too easy to grasp.

In the beginning, there had been times when she had wondered if this was all a long nightmare or some cruel joke that someone was playing on her. She’d never mentioned it to anyone in the rest of the group, not even J.B., but simply soldiered on, hoping the next place they might find would be some kind of refuge against the insanity that had claimed the world she’d known long ago. But as she had become more acclimatized to her surroundings, she’d been able to hone the necessary survival skills. Sometimes, that thought made her proud of how she had adapted.

Sometimes, it scared the hell out of her.

Now, however, wasn’t one of those times. From the moment the first bullet had hit the dirt, there was no time for introspection, only the instinct to stay alive. To kill before being killed.

In that, Mildred had been both lucky and unlucky. She’d been foraging for firewood several yards away from the campfire when the shooting had started. The nearest cover had been the half-collapsed building a few steps away—in the opposite direction from the group. J.B., however, had turned that liability into an opportunity, as she was now hidden in an elevated position, ready to drop any enemy who came into her sights.

Normally the target pistol she carried would also have been a detriment in her situation, but Mildred knew it like she knew herself, and what she could do with it. It also helped that she had been an Olympic-medalist target shooter back in the twentieth century. That was how she had gotten through the killing in the early days. She pretended their savage, slavering enemies had big, black targets on them—aim, shoot and knock ’em down.

She hadn’t needed to pretend in a long time.

“Come on, come on, J.B.” Two shots from his Uzi rang out, then the clack of the pin falling on an empty chamber. Risking exposing her position, Mildred peeked out over the edge in hopes of spotting one of the lurking bastards creeping in. Instead, what she saw made her heart lurch into her throat.

Below her, three men in identical faded olive-drab fatigue shirts with a patch on the right shoulder trained weapons on a scarecrow-limbed figure in an old, stained frock coat, black pants and battered knee boots. The white-haired old man was currently staring at the armed trio with his arms thrust above his head.

Even as she aimed at the nearest man over the sights of her pistol, the words rose unbidden in her throat.

“Goddammit, Doc!”

ALTHOUGH HE KNEW THE REST of the group sometimes differed in their opinion as to whether Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a help or a hindrance to them, often depending on the day, the old man with the oddly perfect white teeth, known as Doc to his companions, had a surprisingly accurate gauge of his strengths and weaknesses.

When he was lucid, which was more often than not, he was a definite strength, able to recall esoteric bits of arcane lore that could mean the difference between life and death for Ryan and the rest of the group—much like when he had first met them, as the performing prisoner of Baron Jordan Teague in the ville of Mocsin, long, long ago. When they had all ended up trapped in the mountains while searching for the legendary Project Cerberus, surrounded by a tribe of hostile Indians, who had saved all of them?

Why, Doc Tanner, that’s who.

He’d stepped up to that seamless wall of solid steel and punched in the numbers that had allowed access to that very first redoubt. Saved them all, he had. Not that he expected anyone to remember in the incredible onslaught of adventures they had lived through since. But ever since that day, he’d held tight to that memory.

For that had been the day Ryan Cawdor had given him back his life, such as it was.

By far, Doc would have preferred to have his old, original life back. Like Mildred, he was a man from another time. But where she had Rip Van Winkled her way into the future, he had, in the paraphrased words of the great bard himself, from his own existence been untimely ripped.

He’d had a wonderful life as a doctor of science in Vermont, back before skydark, way back in the late nineteenth century. He’d been married, with two beautiful children. The bright smiles of his wife, Emily, and his children, Rachel and Jolyon, still haunted him in his dreams—close enough to touch, to hold, to kiss—then disappearing when he opened his eyes, never to be seen in this world or any other again.

Doc had been trawled—brought forward in time—to around 1998, one of the only successful test subjects of Operation Chronos, a division of the Totality Concept, which had explored every strange way of bending the known laws of science to man’s will. The whitecoats had studied him eight ways from Sunday, performed every test known to man on him, trying to find out how he had survived the mind-warping, body-wrenching trip, where others hadn’t.

In the beginning, Doc had been patient and cooperative, sure that once they had finished their work, they would send him back. It was the first of several miscalculations on his part. When they kept him there longer than he desired, he tried to send himself back. That was his second mistake. The greedy, black-hearted barons of the Deathlands had much in common with the pitiless, cold-eyed scientists Doc had met in the late twentieth century—in particular, they both knew when a person had outlived his usefulness.

Nowadays, that person would usually meet either a quick or slow death, depending on the perversity of the baron. The scientists of the Totality Concept were infinitely more heartless. Figuring Doc had survived being plucked from his time, they had trawled the now difficult subject again—into the future, and the Deathlands. His mind scrambled from the jumps, Doc had wandered the hell-blasted lands until falling in with Strasser and his ilk, and had been tormented further—he still couldn’t hear a pig squeal without his bowels tightening—until being rescued by Ryan and his friends.

Since then he had accompanied his companions around the country and beyond, helping as they moved from place to place, never staying long, but doing what they could to make wherever they visited better however they could. That was one of the things Doc clung to in this sanity-threatening world—that there were still good people in it who could be counted on to do the right thing when it mattered. Ryan Cawdor and his companions were definitely those good people.

To that end, Doc would do whatever he could for them, including risking his life to serve as a distraction for the three ruffians who currently had him in their sights. At the moment, his mind was perfectly sane, and more than aware that he was a finger twitch away from being blasted into oblivion. And yet…they hadn’t shot him yet, not even the sniper, to whom he had to have presented a perfect target, outlined in the fire as he was. Why was that?

Doc had no time to ponder that particular mystery. If he didn’t keep up his pretense, he’d be lying on the cold ground in an instant, dead as a doornail. His rich baritone voice reverberating in his throat, Doc played the part of a senile old codger as only he could, doffing an imaginary hat and sweeping out his arm in a wide bow.

“I beg your pardon, good sirs, but I seem to have mislaid my companions somewhere around here. If you would kindly assist me in ascertaining their whereabouts, I would be most grateful.” His gaze flicked to J.B., who was still lying prone on the ground behind the wall, mostly obscured from the three coldhearts’ sight, the long barrel of the autoshotgun he carried clenched in both hands. Any time now, John Barrymore, Doc thought.

The three men looked to be just a few more of the ever-present two-legged predators that scourged the Deathlands, looking for anything they could get their hands on—food, weapons, women, wags. Each was unshaved and rank, dressed in a variety of tattered clothes—except for the similar green shirts worn by each one—the man on the far left without boots on his feet, just blackened, tattered rags wrapped halfway up his legs. Their weapons, however, two remade AK-47s and a battered ArmaLite AR-18, appeared to be in fine working order.

“Nuking hell! Gotta be more than just you making all the racket, white-hair,” the furthest one drawled. “Know we saw least three figures here.”

Doc spread his arms wide. “As I mentioned, they seem to have up and left me. I would call them back, but the sight of your armament would no doubt cause a veritable state of panic, for they are indeed peace-loving folks.” As he spoke, Doc stared daggers at J.B., who had remained motionless during his entire speech. Then, the old man realized exactly why that was.

In his eagerness to serve as the decoy, he had inadvertently advanced too far ahead, and now stood between the weapons master and his targets. Doc was pretty sure that Mildred was in the mostly ruined building on the other side of the ruffians, which meant that he was in her line of sight, as well. To shoot one of them meant risking the bullet passing through her target and perforating him—a fate he wished to avoid at all costs, especially having seen how accurate she was with her target pistol.

No, if anyone was going to get him out of this predicament, it would have to be Doc himself. Ah, well, it wasn’t the first time.

The pair serving as the vanguard of the squad cast uneasy looks into the darkness around them, expecting—as was wise—that a bullet might scream out of the night at them at any moment. One of them glanced back at their apparent leader. “What do ya wanna do?”

“Take ’em for interrogation. The boss’ll wanna have a chat.”

The third man motioned Doc forward with the barrel of his longblaster. “Come on, old man, and keep those arms up.”