Black Harvest
“Plenty of outlanders have scars like that.”
“Yeah, but this one is unique. Sec chief Robards thinks this Ryan may be the same outlander who chilled Baron DeMann’s brother a few years ago in a gaudy house in Spearpoint.”
Baron Schini suddenly appeared more interested in DeMann’s outlanders. If their leader was the one who chilled the baron’s brother, then he was also the one who chilled her son in the very same gaudy house firefight.
“And if this is the outlander who killed the baron’s brother, what does that candy-ass Robards plan to do about it?”
“Why, chill the scum and his friends on behalf of Baron DeMann, of course.”
The woman shook her head.
“You disapprove?”
“Not at all,” the baron said. “It’s just that if this one-eyed outlander is the same one who killed the baron’s brother, then he’s also the one who chilled my son, Luca. And if that’s the case, I damn well intend to be there to watch the bastard die.”
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Neutron Solstice
Crater Lake
Homeward Bound
Pony Soldiers
Dectra Chain
Ice and Fire
Red Equinox
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter:
Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
DEATH LANDS®
James Axler
For Evan Hollander, fellow warrior
Is it sin
To rush into the secret house of death,
Ere death dare come to us?
—William Shakespeare,
Antony and Cleopatra
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
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Epilogue
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor let out a gasp and cracked open his eye.
“Everything all right, lover?” Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s titian-haired lover looked concerned.
Memories of a jump nightmare swirled around his head.
Even though the jump had been tough on him, Ryan was in top physical condition, and his ability to recover from the mat-trans jumps was better than most in his small band of travelers. He’d experienced a bad jump dream, nothing more than that.
“Been better, but I’m okay,” he said. “You?”
“I’ve been worse,” Krysty answered.
Ryan believed that to be true. Her gorgeous mane of bright red hair, which usually lay flat against her head and shoulders after a jump, was full and thick, and cascaded over her shoulders like a waterfall.
She gestured to her right with a nod. “Doc didn’t do so well, though.”
Ryan looked at Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, a tall and skinny man dressed in an old and worn frock coat. To the casual observer, he appeared to be in his sixties, but it could be argued that the man was actually hundreds of years old. Ryan knelt next to Doc and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You with us, Doc?”
“‘Is this a dagger I see before me—’” Doc muttered.
“Can you hear me, Doc?”
“‘—the handle toward my hand?’”
J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer and weapons expert, removed his spectacles and rubbed his head. “What’s Doc talking about now?”
“It’s Shakespeare,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth replied. “Macbeth.”
“Sounds…interesting,” Krysty commented.
“Sounds crazy,” Jak Lauren said.
The teenaged albino usually fared the worst of all the members in the group after a jump, but this time he looked as if he came through unscathed.
It was Doc who’d had the hardest ride.
He’d be out of it for a while, his thoughts rambling and erratic, but he’d be all right in time.
Ryan shook one of the old man’s shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“What?” Doc said, shaking his head as if the brain inside were shrouded in cobwebs.
When he saw the one-eyed man standing over him, Doc gave Ryan an angry scowl. “I say, my dear Ryan, if you’d like my attention I suggest you use the nomenclature provided for me upon my birth, meaning you can call me Theophilus, or Theo, if you like, or you can simply use the more vernacular terms Doc or Doc Tanner. There is no need to wrench my shoulder from my body!”
Ryan grinned. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Doc massaged his aching shoulder.
“Where this place?” Jak asked, turning slowly to study the walls.
Ryan looked around the chamber as well, but didn’t recognize the purple-blue tint of the armaglass walls. The colors were similar to several chambers they’d been in before, but none had had this exact pattern or shading.
“Only one way to find out for sure,” Ryan said. “Triple red.”
He put his left hand on the handle that would open the door to the chamber.
For a moment the inside of the chamber was filled with the sound of the friends’ blasters being unholstered and cocked.
Then, silence.
Ryan turned the handle and pushed against the door. Slowly, the door swung open.
And then it stopped with a loud creak.
At the same time, the stench of death wafted into the chamber, causing several of the friends to cough.
“Is it blocked?” J.B. asked.
“Can’t tell,” Ryan answered.
He pushed against the door and felt resistance. He stopped a moment, reset his feet and tried it again. This time, with the help of J.B. and Jak, he was able to force open the door.
Mildred, Krysty and Doc’s blasters swept across the open doorway, but found no one outside the chamber waiting for them.
Ryan and the others pushed the door all the way open. It came to an abrupt stop with a grinding halt, metal against metal, and it was obvious to them why the door had been so hard to open. The steel had been bashed and scarred on the outside and several of the hinges were gone, either torn away from the door or just smashed beyond recognition.
“Blasterfire?” Jak asked, putting the tip of his index finger into a large pit in the outside of the door.
“Yeah, and mebbe some grens,” J.B. added. “Recent, too.”
“And all other manner of weaponry as well,” Doc offered.
There’d been a firefight in the redoubt, that much was obvious. There were blaster marks on the walls, and entire sections of floor and walls that had been scarred by blasters and who knew what else.
“Thought redoubts nukeproof,” Jak stated.
J.B. turned toward the albino teenager. “They are, but that’s when the nukes go off on the outside. From the looks of this damage, there were bombs or grens going off in here.”
“Then how come the chamber wasn’t damaged?” Mildred asked.
Ryan tried to close the door to the chamber, but it wouldn’t swing back. He left the door where it was, hanging open at a strange angle. “Inside wasn’t damaged. Outside was blasted to hell.”
“So it held together just long enough,” Mildred continued, “to receive one last band of jumpers.”
J.B. nodded again. “Looks like it.”
They inspected the outside of the chamber more closely for several moments.
“Ryan, over here,” Krysty called from a corner of the control room.
As Ryan made his way over to her, he became aware of the stench of rotting flesh.
“Bodies,” Krysty said. “Lots of them.”
There were at least a dozen bodies strewed across the floor near the wall. They’d been cut down by blasterfire and had died where they’d fallen. There were skeletons at the bottom of the mess, but some of the corpses on top didn’t look that far gone.
Krysty suddenly raised her hand.
The rest of the friends went silent.
“Someone’s coming,” Krysty announced, her hair tightly wound around her head and neck as an added indication of the danger.
Ryan signaled the rest of them to scatter and find cover, and then he waited in silence for the sound of footsteps. At last he could hear them, softly padding feet approaching their position at a modest rate, seemingly walking without purpose.
And then he saw her as she rounded the corner to the room surrounding the chamber. Or perhaps more correctly, saw it.
It was a young, pale-skinned girl. Her hair was a dusty black and her body was covered in fresh red scars and bleeding sores. She wore only a pair of shorts, and the tiny buds of her breasts told Ryan she was younger than twelve.
Ryan stepped forward, and the rest of the friends followed, stepping out of the shadows. “Hello,” he said.
She didn’t answer. Instead she just looked at him and smiled. “You got bang?” she said.
Ryan wasn’t sure what the right answer was, so he said nothing.
“Want bang.”
Ryan shook his head, then looked to the rest of the friends for an answer.
Mildred stepped forward. “Are you all right, girl? Is someone you know hurt?” Mildred looked confused. “What’s bang?”
“Gimme bang,” she said, turning to Mildred.
“I’m sorry, child, but I haven’t got any… And from the sounds of it, I don’t think I want any, either.”
“Gimme bang!” she demanded, louder this time.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The girl didn’t answer. Instead she ran toward Mildred and leaped into the air, a knife glinting in her hand.
But as the girl soared through the air, there was a sharp crack of a blaster and half of her head vanished in a spray of blood-red mist.
Mildred wiped a bit of the child’s blood and brain matter from her face. “Damn! Thanks, Jak.”
“Yes, well done, Master Lauren. Quick, decisive and an expert shot,” Doc said. “As always.”
“What did she want?” Krysty asked.
“Bang, whatever that is,” Mildred answered. “I don’t think she was hurting.” She knelt over the body and examined it. “Most of these scars have been healed over for weeks. The fresh ones look like she’d been picking at them.”
“Mebbe was crazy,” Jak said.
Mildred ignored the comment. “Well, whatever bang is, she wanted it pretty bad.”
“Think it’s a drug?” Ryan suggested.
“That would be a good guess.” Mildred got up from beside the body. “Can’t be sure, though.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s a good bet that there are other people in the redoubt,” J.B. stated.
Ryan nodded. “Triple red, people.”
The chatter going on behind Ryan died down, and his companions followed him through the redoubt in silence.
As they moved up and down stairs, along corridors and through holes blasted in the walls, they could find nothing of value left inside the redoubt and no evidence of anyone else living inside it. Most items left behind had been destroyed, or had otherwise been rendered useless. Two sections of the redoubt that had been cleaned out were the medical lab and the kitchen. Everything inside those rooms had been carted away, with pipes and wires neatly cut from the walls rather than torn out in a hurry. Somebody was making use of the equipment, and likely using it for more than making meals and treating the sick.
They continued searching the redoubt for anything of value, and as they turned the corner at the end of a long corridor, Ryan saw a light in the distance.
It was a dimly reflected light, and had to be checked out.
“Jak,” Ryan said.
The albino teen moved to the front of the line and came up by Ryan’s side.
“See where that leads,” Ryan commanded.
Without a word, Jak headed down the corridor toward the light. The others had their blasters trained on the end of the hallway, covering him just in case.
They watched the teen’s body get smaller and smaller until all that could be seen was his stark white hair growing brighter the closer he got to the light source. And then, all of a sudden it was gone as he turned the corner into the light. Minutes later he reemerged, and when he neared, it was obvious that he had some good news.
“Outside,” he said, gesturing down the hall.
“People?” Ryan asked.
Jak shook his head. “No.”
“What’s out there, then?”
“Sky. Rolling fields. River.”
“Anything else?”
“What more want?”
Ryan and the others walked toward the light and exited the redoubt to a hot, sunny day, the sky tinged by a slight purple hue with streaks of green and orange throughout. The surrounding fields were barren, or else overgrown by weeds, but they seemed to roll with the irregular undulation of foothills, suggesting they might be somewhere in the Midwest.
Jak tapped Ryan on the shoulder and pointed to the south. “River, near trees.”
Ryan took out his marine telescope from a pocket in his coat, extended it to its full length and brought the lens up to his eye.
After making several adjustments to focus, he said, “About an hour away on foot. We can make camp there, mebbe catch something to eat in the river.”
“Sounds like a plan,” J.B. said.
And then, without another word, the friends were off, heading south in single file to cover their tracks in the earth, Ryan leading the way, J.B. bringing up the rear.
They didn’t know what to expect.
But together, they were ready for anything.
Chapter Two
When they got to the river’s edge, Mildred did a quick rudimentary test of the water to see if it might make them sick. “It’s pretty clean,” she said, holding up a test tube of the clear liquid.
Ryan nodded. “Let’s make camp, then. Krysty, Doc and Mildred set up a perimeter. Jak, you and J.B. see if you can catch us something to eat.”
In silence, the friends split up and took their positions.
Meanwhile, Ryan gathered a few dried branches and set them in a pile for a fire. He’d light it later, depending on how lucky J.B. and Jak were in the river. If not, they’d have to eat the last of their rations and hope to find something else to eat in the morning.
His stomach growled and churned at the thought of it.
“Help!”
It was a woman’s voice coming from somewhere downriver.
“J.B.?” Ryan called.
“Heard it. ’Bout a hundred yards south.”
“Let’s move.”
Almost as one, the friends picked up and headed south through the trees, always sticking close to the river’s edge. Ryan could barely see the others through the brush, but he instinctively knew that Jak and J.B. were to his right, spaced about ten yards apart, while his left was flanked by Doc, Mildred and Krysty, with one of them, maybe two, hanging back slightly to cover their rear.
Another scream came from up ahead.
It was a woman’s voice, but a different woman than before.
Jak, the best tracker in the group, stopped and signaled to J.B. and Ryan to do the same. Ryan sent the message along to the others and together the friends slowly closed in around a large clearing by the river.
Two women, naked. They were either swimming or just spending some time alone together by the water. One was young, tall and blond, her body lean, taut and muscular. The other was older and a bit shorter, with long dark hair that was streaked with gray. Her flesh sagged a bit, her belly distended slightly, but she was more mature and full figured than old and fat.
The two women were surrounded by four muties similar to the ones the friends had seen in the redoubt. They were dirty and scraggly, their bodies covered by the same sores the girl in the redoubt had.
“Bang,” one of the men said.
Another one lunged forward at the women, then stepped back in fear. “Gimme bang.”
“More crazies?” Krysty said under her breath.
“There are stranger things in the Deathlands,” Ryan answered evenly.
“Want jack.”
“Need smash.”
“What are they saying?” Krysty asked.
Ryan shook his head. “I’m not sure, but it sounded like jack…”
“And smash.”
“What happened to bang?” J.B. asked.
“We don’t have any to give you,” said the taller of the two women. “Check our clothes, and you’ll see it’s the truth.”
Two of the muties riffled through a small pile of clothes on the riverbank, then threw them to the ground in disgust when it was obvious that it was just the women’s clothes and no more. “Nothing.”
“There has to be something there, check the pockets again.”
“There’s nothing, I tell you!”
“What about blasters!” the leader demanded.
The two men began to search the ground around the clothes, then check under a pile of neatly stacked rocks. In no time, each was lifting what looked like decent-quality remade blasters. “Whoo-eee! Look what I found!”
All four of the muties were laughing now.
“These we can trade for bang!”
“You can have them,” the older woman said. “Just leave us alone.”
The leader stepped forward. “We’ll be taking them all right, but before we go, we’ll be wanting something else from the two of you…” He leered as he approached the smaller woman. One of the others put a remade in his free hand and he pointed it at the younger woman as the other mutie neared.
She trembled in fear and wanted to run away, but there was no place for her to go. They were surrounded.
“Should we do something?” Krysty asked.
“Not our fight,” Ryan answered.
“Yeah, but I don’t like the odds.”
After a moment’s silence, Ryan said, “Me neither.” He carefully leveled his SIG-Sauer at the leader, who was now gesturing to the others to help him.
“Hold her down so I can give her a—”
The man never finished his sentence. His last words died in his throat as a thundering round from Doc’s huge LeMat blaster took out the man’s neck and a large chunk of his shoulder.
The mutie holding one of the blasters turned and squeezed off a single round before he was cut down by blasterfire from Mildred Wyeth’s Czech-built ZKR 551. The onetime Olympic target shooter caught the vile man with a perfectly aimed round that hit him between the eyes and slightly above the eyebrows.
With two of their fellows down, the survivors looked scared and confused. They turned to run, but were torn apart by blasterfire from the rest of the friends. Jak’s powerful Colt Python struck one of them in the shoulder, sending him tumbling heels over head into the river. And the last mutie fell to a round from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer that caught him in the back of the neck. Although it was impossible to know if it was a round from Ryan’s blaster or Krysty’s Smith & Wesson .38 that actually took the sorry man’s life, one thing was for certain—he was chilled and on the last train west before he hit the ground.
In the moments after the volley of blasterfire, all that could be heard were the muted sobs of the two women, who had gone from nearly being raped and killed, to being rescued by a band of outlanders, all in a matter of seconds.
“Anybody hurt?” Ryan called out.
At first no one answered, and then, “Yes.”
Ryan looked at each of the friends, searching for the wounded one.
“It’s Jak,” Mildred said. “Caught him in the shoulder.”
Ryan ran to where Mildred was kneeling down beside the white-headed teenager. Even though Ryan could see Jak had suffered a wound in the shoulder that was leaking blood and causing him pain, he deferred to the doctor for a better assessment. “How bad?”
“Bad enough,” Jak answered.
Ryan waited to hear from Mildred.
“Bullet went through the shoulder and tore up the flesh pretty good. Can’t be sure if there’s any damage to the bones unless I get a proper look. I can close the wound easy enough, but there’s always a chance the flesh could turn.”
Ryan nodded.
“Be fine,” Jak said, grimacing in pain as Mildred began giving the wound a field dressing. “Not worry.”
Ryan turned toward the two women and saw Doc stepping into the clearing. “It is okay,” he said. “You two are going to be all right.”