Desolation Angels

BETRAYED BY TOMORROW

A hundred years after the nukecaust, the tortured landscape of postapocalyptic America offers a brutal fight for survival. Yet tech secrets lie hidden, useful to those brave and strong enough to believe that hope can carry them toward ever-elusive peace.

BAD TO THE BONE

Violent gangs, a corrupt mayor and a heavily armed police force are the hallmarks of former Detroit, a mutie-infested, rubble-strewn metropolis. When Ryan and the companions show up, the Desolation Angels are waging a war to rule the streets. After saving the companions from being chilled by gangsters, the mayor hires Ryan and his friends to stop the Angels cold. But each hard blow toward victory proves there’s no good side to be fighting for. As Motor City erupts into bloody conflagration, the companions are caught in the crossfire. In Deathlands, hell is called home.

“They’re right behind us!” Mildred yelled

Ryan heard the boom of Ricky’s Webley hand blaster echo out of the stairwell, and started moving toward the window.

“Looks clear,” Jak said, peering around the edge of the empty frame. He promptly slipped from out of his cover and fled to the street.

Securing escape was more important than discouraging the stickies from following, and Ryan raced for the front door. The other companions were hot on his heels.

Ryan burst out of the building. The humidity hit him in the face like a wool blanket soaked in hot water. Quickly he took in how profuse the vegetation was, grass and flowers pushing up through big cracks heaved in the pavement.

Then he noticed the tall, skeleton-thin woman with an electric-green Mohawk strolling around the corner of the building across the street. But there was nothing casual about the way she whipped up the M16 she’d been carrying and aimed it at Ryan.

Desolation Angels

James Axler

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

—Lydia Maria Francis Child,

1802–1880

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 One

“Ryan! Wake up! We’ve got a problem!”

Mildred Wyeth’s urgent voice cut through the dreadful jump disorientation and summoned Ryan Cawdor’s soul back to his pain-racked body. His stomach felt as if it had been wrenched inside out.

Bad one, he thought. Been through worse.

When he opened his eye, he was already being helped up by a firm, dry grip on his forearm. That would be J. B. Dix, Ryan’s chief lieutenant, best friend and the armorer of the small group of companions who traveled the Deathlands.

“Tell me something new,” Ryan said, slurring his words. He swayed as he got to his feet and was steadied by J.B. “Is everyone else awake?”

J.B. didn’t have time to answer the question.

“Muties!” Ricky Morales screamed. There was no mistaking the hideous shapes visible through the opaque armaglass walls of the mat-trans unit.

Ryan was back in command of his body, and he slammed the heel of his hand on the big red button by the keypad that controlled the workings of the gateway. The LD button was a fail-safe designed to transfer the companions back to their last destination.

No one had a desire to return to what remained of the ville of Progress, but that was the least of their worries.

Nothing happened.

“So we’re stuck here,” Mildred said after several moments.

The stocky black woman, her hair in beaded plaits, didn’t even flinch as a face pressed itself against the glass, becoming nearly visible through the opaque wall. Its nose was two holes above a wide-open mouth full of jagged teeth. Its eyes, though unnaturally round, were disconcertingly humanlike. Enough to show an almost intolerable rage.

* * *

“RYAN,” KRYSTY WORTH CALLED. The statuesque beauty was staring at the base of the armaglass walls. Her sentient red hair was still coiled tightly to her scalp, as it tended to do in times of severe stress. “Water’s building up in here.”

“Great,” Mildred moaned. “Isn’t this a bit coincidental? I mean muties, yeah. Muties are everywhere. But we jump in here and the place decides to flood right now?”

“With the chamber door closed securely, that should be nearly impossible,” said a tall, silver-haired man. He shot the cuffs of the dingy white shirt he wore beneath his black frock coat with an elegance that belied the shabbiness of the garment. Doc Tanner knew a little about the workings of the network—and the white coats who built them—because they’d trawled him out of his own time in the 1890s to use and abuse as a subject for their experiments in time. And when Doc proved to be a most unwilling subject, he was sent into the future to what was now the Deathlands. Their experiments had prematurely aged him. Although he appeared to be a man in his late sixties, Doc was really in his thirties.

Ryan drew his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right hand and his panga with his left.

“Get ready to blast out of here,” he said. “J.B., you do the honors.”

The one-eyed man took in his little group with a sweeping glance. Krysty stood resolutely at his right shoulder, gripping her Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 revolver in both hands. Mildred stood just behind her, holding her more substantial .38 ZKR target revolver at the ready. Doc had drawn both his LeMat replica handgun, with the stubby shotgun barrel beneath its immense cylinder holding nine rounds of .44 Special, and the blade concealed in his ebony sword stick with the silver lion’s head. Ricky held his Webley top-break .45 revolver.

Ryan stood right behind J.B.’s left shoulder. The Armorer had his Uzi slung muzzle down over his shoulder and his Smith & Wesson M4000 riot shotgun held level. Jak Lauren stood at J.B.’s right.

“Ready?” Ryan asked. More muties seemed to be crowding into the anteroom.

“Ready as we’re going to be,” Mildred said. The others voiced their agreement.

“Hit it,” Ryan told J.B.

He maneuvered the lever that opened the door, and water swirled in, almost to the tops of Ryan’s boots. With it came stink of sewage so thick the one-eyed man almost choked.

J.B. was already striding forward through the anteroom with his scattergun held level. The mutie that had pressed its hideous face against the armaglass swung a black-taloned hand at the Armorer.

He blasted it in the belly with a charge of #4 buckshot. The weapon’s report almost imploded Ryan’s eardrums in the walled confines of the jump chamber. The mutie vented a high-pitched squeal and doubled over, clutching its ruptured gut with three-fingered hands.

The Armorer dealt it an uppercut with the butt of his longblaster. Its round head snapped up on its stalk neck and it fell over backward. It raised a splash of foul-smelling water that was already up to the tops of J.B.’s ankles. By now the rest of the companions had left the jump chamber and were all through the anteroom and into the control room.

The other muties closed in as Ryan and Jak fanned out to the sides. Ryan stepped forward to close with a mutie slashing overhand at him. He blocked with his left forearm and hacked at the creature’s upper arm with the panga.

It felt more as though the weapon was hitting dense mud or clay rather than flesh, but it struck bone. The mutie keened and struck with its left claw. Ryan kicked it in the belly, and it staggered back with thick blood oozing from the gash in its arm.

A mutie attacked from Ryan’s left. Doc stepped forward and thrust his sword through the creature’s head. It fell.

Four of the muties were down. The other four hung back as if uncertain. Unfortunately, they were between Ryan’s group and the door.

A loud crack almost like thunder echoed through the facility. The floor shook once, hard, beneath Ryan’s boot. Raw sewage sloshed up the walls and on the inert, dark comp stations that lined them.

A grinding squeal sounded behind Ryan’s left shoulder. He snapped his head around. A section of concrete wall as high as his head split open, and a sheet of greenish-brown water shot into the control room. It splashed down.

“Aah, shit!” Mildred exclaimed as a wave of water broke as high as her waist. Ryan set his jaw against the stench. It wouldn’t kill him. The muties—or drowning in shit—might.

The long-armed muties dithered as if unsure whether to fight or flee. In other circumstances Ryan would have been glad to have his friends hold off, saving their energy, and ammo, to see if the creatures decided to bolt.

Unfortunately, the sewage was rising rapidly now. The sulfurous smell made Ryan’s eye water and his head swim.

“Power on through!” he shouted.

Following his own command, he charged ahead. He swatted a mutie in his path in the side of the head with the wide flat blade of the panga. Not because he was feeling unduly merciful, but because he didn’t want the knife getting stuck.

The door leading into the corridor was jammed open. Raising a brown wave from water already up to his thighs, Ryan sloshed down the hall, beating J.B. to a staircase and pounding upward. A mutie shambled down the steps toward him from the landing above. The one-eyed man gave the trigger a double tap, and both shots hit in the creature’s chest. It coughed in a very human-sounding way and fell against the wall. Ryan raced past. It didn’t even try to swipe at him with its claws. Just as he reached the landing, he heard the cry from below. “Ryan!”

He stopped and looked back. J.B., Doc and Jak were all on the stairs right behind him. Mildred and Krysty stood farther down with the foul water swirling around them, trying to drag Ricky up out of the sewage. Apparently it had either knocked him down or floated him off his feet. Muties were clinging to the youth with their long arms, holding him back from escaping the flooding corridor.

Chapter Two

Ryan realized that the muties seemed to be using Ricky as a flotation device rather than trying to drag him to his doom.

“I have had enough of this shit,” Mildred declared. She drew her ZKR 551 handblaster, which she’d holstered to try to help Ricky. Aiming quickly, she shot both muties through their round heads. One uttered a croak of dismay as it let go and floundered back into the eddying sewage. The other threw up its arms and sank without a sound.

Ryan turned back and started moving again as the women got Ricky onto the steps. The water was following more rapidly now.

As Ryan turned on the landing to head up the next flight, Jak eeled past J.B., who halted, holding his shotgun muzzle up.

“More muties,” said the albino, who’d obviously slipped ahead to scout the next floor when Ryan paused.

“Waiting for us?” Ryan asked.

Jak shook his head.

“Most sleeping,” he said. “Some awake. Starting move this way.”

“Push on, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We can’t stay here.”

“On my way.”

He headed up, shotgun at the ready. Ryan bulled past Jak, intent on being right on J.B.’s heels when the little man hit the next level. Jak faded back against the wall to let Ryan pass, then followed close behind.

The next level was open space. The ceiling lighting had malfunctioned, leaving alternating areas of light and dark, interspersed with a few patches of flashing illumination. The stairwell itself was unenclosed. The open space was wide enough that its actual size was indeterminate in the shadows. It suggested a parking garage, though Ryan registered quickly that that was mainly because the sturdy structural columns were exposed to view.

The air was thick, barely stirred by the redoubt’s ventilation system. It smelled heavily of stale urine, feces, mildew and not-quite-human sweat.

Around him muties were stirring from what he could only think of as nests: little rough enclosures improvised of broken furniture and random scavenged material, with moldering cushions and bits of cloth for padding from the hard, bare concrete floor. Some muties began to shamble toward them, waving their arms menacingly, from a nest not twenty feet away.

J.B. raked them with two quick bursts from his Uzi, the copper-jacketed 9 mm slugs slamming the muties to the floor, where they lay clutching their guts and squalling piteously.

The noise roused the others, who came out of the well as J.B. headed up the exposed stairs.

Ryan followed J.B. tightly. He heard shots from behind.

“We’re fine!” Krysty shouted as the cracking concrete echoed through the vast empty space. “Keep moving! Water’s rising fast!”

Ryan moved. They hit the next landing and kept on going. A mutie turned onto the stairs from the floor above, silhouetting itself against a flickering glow from more malfunctioning overheads. It started down before registering norms were charging up.

J.B. slashed the creature with the butt of his M4000. It released an ear-splitting squeal and fell against the steel railing to the Armorer’s right. J.B. raced past.

Ryan split its teardrop-shaped head with an overhand stroke of his panga in passing and never even slowed. The creature toppled backward over the railing and plummeted to the floor.

The distinctive boom of the shotgun mounted on Doc’s LeMat echoed up the stairs at a volume that seemed to make the wall ripple. Ryan didn’t glance back.

“No more stairs!” J.B. called out as he reached the top of the flight.

“Find us a way out, J.B.,” Ryan said.

The Armorer let the M4000 fall to hang by its sling over one shoulder and scooped up the Uzi on the sling on the other. He hastily fired a short burst over the handrail. Ryan joined him.

This level was divided into rooms. A corridor ran along the near wall, while another stretched away from them at a T junction. As on the floor below, the lighting here was patchy.

By the flickering light and alternating patches of shine and shadow J.B. had just blasted a trio of muties coming at them along the corridor running away from the wall. One of them went down thrashing at the half-rotted rubber floor runners, spraying thick green blood everywhere. The others ran off twittering.

The bad news was they ducked into one of the doors standing open to both sides of the corridor.

Ryan took quick stock of their situation. They had three choices of which way to go from here—other than back down, which wasn’t happening. The corridor looked to move on to more lateral passages at either end. It was clear both ways for the moment.

“Gotta move!” Mildred’s voice boomed up from the stairs beneath Ryan. “Crap’s still coming. As well as a whole boatload of more muties!”

“Where is all this pressure coming from?” asked J.B. He swiveled his head constantly to make sure no new threats caught them unawares.

“Clearly, the sewage floats on water coming from a substantial body of it, whether lake, river or even ocean,” Doc called up.

He punctuated his statement with two quick, echoing blasts of his .44 blaster. Then he continued unperturbedly. “Quite nearby. Possibly above us.”

“Above us?” Mildred repeated. “That’s great. So what if there’s no way out?”

“They didn’t build this place with no exit other than the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “There’s a way out.”

“Also a way in,” J.B. added. “Unless they bred those muties here. And unless they don’t have to eat.”

“Got too many pointy teeth for that,” Ryan growled.

“Look!” Jak pointed along the corridor where the death throes of the mutie J.B. had shot were subsiding to chirps and twitches. An overhead light had come on at the far end, revealing a door with a grated window that looked suspiciously as if it led to another set of stairs.

“Go,” Ryan said as another pair of shots boomed out from just below. He recognized the sound of his lover’s Smith & Wesson 640. Its short barrel produced more noise than muzzle energy. If Krysty was blasting, it meant the muties were getting close.

Jak was usually a master of stealth, but he set off running at full speed. His long white hair streamed out behind his head like the neck cloth of a cap.

J.B. took off after him at a trot. He’d already swapped the Uzi for the M4000.

Ryan followed, panga and SIG Sauer at the ready. Jak was clearly bent on reaching the possible exit—at least from this level—as fast as possible. His companions had to keep the muties from the side rooms off his back and away from themselves. And above all, they had to keep moving.

There would be no room-by-room sweep, despite the fact it was safer, to say nothing of the possible scavvy awaiting them. Right then the only thing that gave them a chance at surviving another ten minutes was speed, speed and more speed.

For a moment, Ryan thought Jak was going to run the gauntlet of open doors unscathed. Then a mutie popped out of a room to the right, just at the end.

Jak punched it across the face with the knuckleduster hilt of the trench knife he carried and never slowed. The creature reeled back out of sight, clutching itself and keening in anguish.

Jak sped to the other end of the corridor, the open doorways to either side spewing claw-waving muties in his wake.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “We can’t shoot or we might hit him!”

He and J.B. kept charging ahead regardless. There was nothing else to do.

But Jak had grown up fighting. He knew he was in his friends’ line of fire as well as they did. Through the crowd of fluting, growling, arm-waving muties blocking their way, Ryan saw the slim white figure slip aside, out of his line of sight. A moment later the boom of his .357 Magnum Colt Python reverberated down the hallway, muted only slightly by the dropped ceiling.

J.B. promptly snagged the grip of his Uzi in his left hand, rotated the muzzle upward and fired a quick blast into the mutie mob. Apparently oblivious to Jak’s passage, or just attracted by the more target-rich environment the other way, they had surged toward him and Ryan.

As before, the front rank of creatures staggered back. One fell backward, flailing its long arms. Others tried to bolt back—into the faces of their fellows.

The Armorer charged into that ball of confusion. He let the Uzi drop to the end of its sling and grabbed the foregrip of his M4000 shotgun.

He fired two quick blasts into the mass. Green ichor flew. Muties bleated and shrilled in pain and fear.

Then J.B. was into them like a buzz saw. His scattergun was designed and built to be used as a riot baton as much as a blaster. There was nothing delicate about the weapon.

J.B. made full use of it. He jabbed the muzzle into the sunken chest of a mutie that was trying to hold in its guts and pushed it out of the way. A high-pitched scream issued from the mutie as the still-hot steel branded its chest.

J.B. flung it to the left, knocking an apparently unwounded mutie into the wall along with it. Then he broke a second’s spindly neck with a backstroke of the butt plate.

These things aren’t so tough, Ryan thought as he followed hard behind J.B. So far things had gone the way of his friends and himself.

The mutie J.B. had forced out of his path with the dying body of its comrade caught Ryan across the cheek with a swipe of its long black talons.

That was his blind side. He yanked his panga free of the mutie he’d just dispatched and, turning his head that way, slashed savagely in reprisal. He caught a look of round-eyed surprise. The eyes were big and blue and altogether human—too human. The monster yelped and flung up its arm protectively.

A pulse of viscous green mutie blood gushed toward Ryan as the claw-tipped arm was slashed below the wrist.

The mutie howled. It grabbed its hosing stump with its remaining hand and slid down the wall.

Ryan turned his face the other way in time to intercept another claw coming for his good eye. Blue-gray fingers flew into the air. Ryan raised the SIG Sauer in his left hand and fired a shot into the open saw-toothed mouth. Brains splattered across the bare wall behind the mutie’s head. Behind him he heard a mutie squeak in alarm, then a wet sound, followed by Doc crowing triumph. “Be gone, brigand!”

Apparently the old man had chosen to wade in close behind Ryan, as Ryan had done with J.B. That put the three with the most effective melee weapons in the lead, leaving the women and Ricky to guard their backs. For all his occasional mental deficiency and frail demeanor, Doc was as seasoned and formidable a fighter as any of them.

Unlike some muties, these weird, long-armed creatures with their rubbery flesh were total berserk diehards who kept attacking regardless of how many were killed. Their wailing and chirping changed pitch, taking on a frantic tone. They began to jostle and fall across one another in their haste to dive back into the rooms they’d just left.