Skydark Spawn

“Survival of the fittest,” Mildred stated

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“There’s something called the principle of natural selection that says the strongest survive, and that a species continues to evolve through natural and sexual selection. The baron’s contest will ensure that the strongest male survives to breed with the strongest female.”

Ryan nodded, then got up from the table to sign up for the contest. Brody stood, as well.

“Where are you going?” the one-eyed man asked.

Brody put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “There’ll be at least a dozen men in that ring, all wanting to chill you. If you’re going to make a break out of here, you’re going to have to be alive to do it. You’ll need someone to watch your back, and that’s going to be me.”

“Thanks, Brody. You’re a good man.”

“You’re a good man, too, Ryan. Let’s just hope for the sake of your woman that you’re also the best.”

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Pilgrimage to Hell

Red Holocaust

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

It seems most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end

Will come when it will come.

—William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

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

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Epilogue

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye, then closed it quickly as a blinding jolt of pain lanced through his skull. He half rose to his feet, then sank back to the floor, dizzy. Bastard jumps always took a toll.

The mat-trans jump was over, and, as usual, he and his companions lay on the floor of the chamber, trying to gather their wits and keep the remnants of their last meal in their stomachs.

After a few minutes, Ryan tried opening his eye again. The pain was still there, but had now settled into a dull throb that he could handle.

“My word,” Doc Tanner said, removing his swallow’s-eye kerchief from a pocket of his frock coat and wiping away a trickle of blood that had seeped from his nose, “it never ceases to amaze me how utterly incapacitating these jaunts of ours can be.”

“Still able talk,” Jak Lauren commented, lifting his right hand and moving his fingers in a motion meant to simulate Doc’s flapping gums. Jak hadn’t fared as well. The front of the young albino’s tan T-shirt was stained with vomit that had leaked out the corners of his mouth. He tried to clean himself up with a few wipes of his sleeve, but all that did was spread the mess around.

Ryan’s son, Dean, had fared better than the others. He looked a bit dizzy, but was already able to stand. J. B. Dix sat with his back against one of the chamber’s walls. He’d lifted his head and had his eyes tightly closed as if he were in pain. He was struggling to catch his breath.

“You all right, J.B.?” asked Ryan.

The Armorer shook his head as he removed his wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. “Had a nightmare. I was alone in a forest somewhere. As I walked along a path, I was confronted by a huge mutie.”

“Chill it?” Jak asked.

“No, that’s the thing. It approached me and I leveled my blaster and squeezed the trigger…but the scattergun didn’t fire. I tried it again and again, but nothing. The creature kept coming, but the blaster wouldn’t fire. Dark night! Didn’t know what was wrong with it because I’d just finished stripping and cleaning it in my dream. So there I was, pointing a dead blaster at a mutie just itching to chill me.”

“And did it?” Mildred Wyeth asked.

“Tore me to pieces with a set of talons as long and sharp as my Tekna. And I couldn’t even wake up. Hurt like hell.”

Ryan looked at Mildred, wondering if the dream meant anything.

“Performance anxiety,” Mildred stated.

“What? I don’t have any problems with that.”

“No, I don’t mean sexual performance, John,” Mildred chided. “Our lives often depend on your knowledge. My guess is that lurking somewhere in your subconscious you have a fear that at some point, when it matters most, you’ll let one of us down.”

“But I was the one who was chilled.”

“Yeah, and that’s probably the way you’d want it to happen if it ever did.”

“Not worry,” Jak said, putting a hand on J.B.’s shoulder. “Not let us down.”

“Thanks.”

The few moments Mildred had spent analyzing J.B.’s dream had done wonders to revitalize the group. Krysty Wroth was showing signs of coming around, and the rest of the companions were on their feet but still pretty groggy.

“I suspect,” Doc said, tapping the silver lion’s-head handle of his swordstick against the walls of the chamber, “that this mat-trans is not constructed of armaglass as is customary.”

Ryan raised his arm and pounded the butt of his SIG-Sauer against one of the dark charcoal-gray walls. Instead of the familiar tink of reinforced glass, his ears were met with the sound of a dull, hard thud. “Concrete,” he stated.

“Not only that, but look at the LD button,” J.B. suggested.

Ryan scanned the walls, realizing that this chamber wasn’t equipped with a Last Destination button. “There is no button,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Mildred asked.

“Not sure,” Ryan replied.

“Maybe it’s a one-way chamber,” J.B. opined.

“What would you need one of those for?” Mildred asked.

“Who knows?” J.B. answered. “It’s just a thought.”

“The motivations of your predark government have baffled me at the best of times,” Doc stated. “Add another puzzle to the file for future reference.”

Ryan agreed with Doc. Whatever the reason behind this installation’s construction, it would be made clear to them soon enough.

“At least we’re alive,” Krysty stated.

Ryan turned and saw that Krysty was stirring. Her sentient hair had unfurled and was now stretching to its full length, falling over her shoulders like red waves. “How are you, lover?”

“I’ve had worse jumps,” she answered. “Any idea where we might have ended up?”

Ryan shook his head. It was possible to get an idea of the chamber’s location by the color of its armaglass walls, but they’d never been in this gateway before.

“I’ll take a reading with my sextant when we get outside,” J.B. said. “Hopefully the skies will be clear.”

Ryan sat down with his back up against one of the room’s six walls. Now that he knew his companions were all right, he decided to give himself some time to recover from the jump. This one had been easier than most, but he still had a fireblasted headache.

FIFTEEN MINUTES PASSED before the group had recovered and Ryan could risk opening the chamber door. As they’d learned over time, the friends needed to be on triple alert when entering a redoubt, never knowing who or what lay beyond the door. Anyone or anything could have discovered a break in the solid concrete walls and found a way inside.

“Triple red, people,” Ryan said, putting his hand on the door. He looked around the group, making sure that each of his friends was prepared for whatever might be out there. Krysty had her Smith & Wesson .38 at the ready, while Doc clutched his LeMat blaster. Mildred had her Czech-built target revolver in her right hand, bracing her right arm at the wrist with her left hand to steady it. J.B. had opted for his scattergun, despite its worrisome malfunction in his dream. Dean leveled his Browning Hi-Power and Jak brought up the rear with his Colt Python. Ryan had his SIG-Sauer ready, but since he was opening the door, it was unlikely he’d be the one taking the first shot in the event of trouble.

“Ready?” Ryan asked one last time.

Everyone nodded.

He opened the door to an empty room.

After a few moments of tension, the companions relaxed somewhat. The room was small and completely bare. The walls were made of cinder blocks, and the floor and ceiling had been constructed of poured concrete. When the door had opened, a single, naked bulb close to the high ceiling switched on, casting a dim light into the room. The room’s main feature was a concrete staircase that led almost straight up thirty or more feet before terminating at a landing that was about four feet directly below a set of large doors. The doors appeared to serve as a hatchway.

“What do you make of that?” Ryan asked.

“Strange,” Jak commented.

There was no arguing with Jak’s logic. The entrance to the redoubt was like nothing Ryan had seen before.

“Hey, there isn’t even a handle on the outside of the chamber,” Krysty said.

Ryan turned to take another look at the chamber and saw that what Krysty had said was true. If they shut the door they wouldn’t be able to use the chamber again.

“Looks like this really is a one-way chamber,” J.B. said. “And that—” he gestured to the stairway “—looks like the only way out.”

“Well, if that’s the only way out, we should quit standing around and find out where it goes,” Mildred suggested.

Without another word Ryan headed up the stairs toward the landing. When he reached it he had to crouch to avoid hitting his head on the doors above them. He signaled the others to join him.

“What now?” Krysty asked as the rest of the group reached the landing. Only Dean was able to stand up straight, but even he had to duck his head a bit to avoid hitting it against the heavy overhead doors.

Ryan pushed his right forearm against one of the doors. It didn’t budge. For the second try he put away his SIG-Sauer and pushed against the door with both arms. This time the door moved slightly.

“J.B. and Jak, one on either side of me,” Ryan said.

The Armorer and the albino took up positions to Ryan’s left and right and got ready to push on the door. The rest of the group readied their blasters.

“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two…”

On three they all pushed together. The door moved, and they could hear the metal hinges cracking, an understandable protest considering the hinges likely hadn’t moved in close to a century.

“Again,” Ryan urged.

Once more the three men pushed against the metal door. At last it began to move, allowing dirt, dust and daylight to spill down through the long crack that had opened up above them. They continued to push, but now Doc had joined them, giving just the little extra force they needed to get the door fully open.

The portal became lighter and lighter, then flopped over like a top hatch on a war wag. With the first door opened, they set to work on the second. It moved more easily than the first, and they soon found themselves standing at the edge of a long-abandoned farmer’s field, with nothing around them but knee-high grass, high stands of rocks and clumps of weeds covering acres of rolling land in every direction.

Ryan and the others took a look around. A stand of trees grew some fifty yards to their left, but mostly they saw only wide-open spaces. Farther on, perhaps a mile or two away, there were more wooded areas, and then more farmland.

“Any idea where we are now?” Krysty asked.

J.B. lowered his glasses. “Middle of nowhere’d be my guess.”

Ryan climbed up and out of the hole in the ground and onto the field. He immediately turned back to help lift out the others. In minutes they were all standing on firm ground.

“Close it up,” the one-eyed man ordered, putting a hand under the edge of one of the doors. With J.B.’s help, he lifted the door and let it fall. He hadn’t intended for it to make such a loud noise as it closed, but without anyone on the landing to ease the door into place, the noise couldn’t be helped. Jak and Doc lifted the second door and let it down on top of the first. It closed with a slightly smaller bang, but still one loud enough to attract attention.

With the doors closed, the exit to the gateway was nearly invisible. The ground was disturbed slightly, but after a few sweeps of their feet and hands, there was no evidence of anything unusual lying just beneath the surface of the field.

“Well, it’s definitely one-way,” J.B. said.

“Mebbe for escape,” Jak offered.

An escape hatch was definitely a possibility. That seemed to fit with the sparseness of the installation’s construction and outfitting. Anyone coming through this gateway was on a one-way trip, but why would such an installation be needed, and why here? Both questions, like all the others, Ryan knew, would be answered in time.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc thundered.

Ryan turned in time to see Doc’s feet being pulled out from under him by a strange mutie that had apparently crawled through the grass toward them. It was crouched low to the ground and seemed to move on all fours, like a spider. It was gnawing on Doc’s leg, trying to tear away the material of his pants in order to get at the pale white flesh that lay beneath.

Before the other members of the group could raise their weapons, Ryan had leveled his blaster and squeezed off a single shot that caught the mutie in the shoulder. The impact of the blast rolled the mutie away from Doc’s leg. As the one-eyed man prepared to get off a second shot at the mutie’s skull, a blaster roared on his right.

A neat black hole appeared in the middle of the mutant’s forehead, and a baseball-sized mass of gray matter and gore exploded out the back of the creature’s skull, taking its miserable life along with it.

Ryan turned and saw Mildred lower her blaster.

A little embarrassed by being taken unawares, Doc got to his feet, unsheathed his sword and was about to run the mutie through when Jak’s voice stopped him.

“More.”

Ryan looked across the field toward the nearby stand of trees and could see that there were at least half a dozen more of the hungry muties ambling toward them. They were all bone thin, filthy dirty and naked except for a flap of material around their midsections. They moved low to the ground, like spiders, hidden by the grass, but betrayed by it as their bodies pushed the tall grass under and left a trail across the field that any scout could follow.

“Hold your fire!” Ryan ordered. He had his blaster leveled, but he wasn’t sure that the muties were going to try what the first one had. And as he watched, his instincts turned out to be right. Instead of attacking the members of the group, the half-dozen muties crawled up to their dead brother and immediately set into its body with their teeth and hands. In minutes they were feeding wildly on the carcass, ripping into its flesh and muscles with all the savagery of a pack of starving wolves.

“Cannies,” Ryan muttered.

“And crazed ones to boot,” Mildred offered.

“Looks like they’ll be busy for a while,” Ryan said.

“So which way do we go?” J.B. asked.

“Feel anything, lover?” Ryan asked Krysty.

The fiery-headed woman closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, trying to see if she could sense any nearby danger. “Can’t feel anything at all.”

“Okay, then, let’s head up that rise to get the lay of the land. I’ll take point, then Krysty, Jak, Dean, Doc and Mildred. J.B., you cover the rear. Okay, people, let’s go.”

Chapter Two

There was fear in her eyes, and Baron Franz Fox liked it. She was terrified of him, afraid of what he might do to her or what he might give others permission to do to her.

“It’s been five months since your last,” Baron Fox said softly. It was a statement, but both the baron and the woman knew it was intended more as a question. He placed his hands together, the fingertips pressing against each other. “Well, I’m waiting.”

The woman was in her early forties. She was heavy-set, especially in her hips, and her breasts sagged, which was to be expected after giving birth to five children in the past forty-eight months. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt that left her big dark nipples clearly visible through the worn cotton fabric. She also wore a pair of old denim shorts and pair of fairly new black Western boots, her reward for delivering a set of twins a couple of terms back. The outfit would have looked good on a woman half her age, but as it was, the clothes looked a lot like the woman wearing them—old, tired and worn-out.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said, her voice a little breathless and tinged with fear. “I’ve been rutting almost every night.”

“With who?” the baron asked, walking the length of his office before turning to pace back across the same track of plush red shag. His burgundy bedroom slippers had worn a path in the carpet from years of pacing. When she didn’t answer his question, he came to a stop in front of her and put a hand under her chin. He lifted her head up so that she would have to look him in the eyes when she answered the question. “With who?”

“Jon,” she replied. “Jonathan Wyndam.”

“The entire time?”

She tried to nod, but the baron held her head firmly in place.

“Has he sired with anyone else in the past five months?” Fox asked his number-one man, Norman Bauer, who was standing quietly off to the side, observing. Bauer was an accountant by trade, and his ability to handle numbers and other statistics had made him invaluable in the successful operation of Fox Farm.

Bauer opened his ledger, leafed back and forth until he came to the page listing Jonathan Wyndam’s breeding history. “According to the ledger,” Bauer said, “Wyndam’s sired fifteen in the past two years—all norms—but none in the past five months. Either Wyndam has gone sterile, or the bitch is barren.”

In a flash, Fox pulled the riding crop from a specially designed pocket of his bathrobe and slashed the kneeling woman across the face. “You bitch!” he screamed. “When you knew you weren’t conceiving, why didn’t you turn Wyndam back to stud?”

An angry red welt appeared on the woman’s left cheek, and beads of blood were beginning to well up through the reddened skin. “He didn’t want—”

“Don’t fuck with me!” the baron roared, striking her again with the crop, this time with a backhand stroke that put a matching red line on her right cheek.

She shook her head. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, similar tears of blood leaving red streaks down her cheeks. “He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay with me. He—”

Fox raised his hand again. “Don’t even think of saying it.”

“—loves me,” she said, her face flush with anger. “He loves me and I love—”

Fox didn’t let her finish. He struck her again and again with the riding crop about the head, neck and shoulders, much harder than before. Her T-shirt shredded and fell from her shoulders, exposing her breasts. Fox slashed at them, too, putting a series of X-like gashes across her chest.

“I don’t want to hear talk like that…ever!” Fox bellowed. He was in the business of making and trading slaves, of selling babies and love wasn’t allowed. Love destroyed everything, as evidenced by this over-the-hill bitch’s romantic notion of living happily ever after. She’d figured that if she didn’t get heavy she’d be able to spend more nights with Wyndam. She was right, of course, but the arrangement could never last long. At her age, five months without getting heavy and her days as a breeder were over. Same for Wyndam. Five months without siring a child, and he’d be on the next slave convoy out of Fox Farm. Then it would be six months to a year working in some mill or refinery and by then it would be time to board the last train west. And all for some triple-stupe notion like love.