James Axler: Wretched Earth

INTEGRITY LOST

After the Megacull, the weak died off, so that a century later, the living have descended from only the toughest stock. Still, it takes more than strength to survive Deathlands. It takes skill, cunning and a warrior’s heart. But for Ryan Cawdor, staying alive isn’t just about living. In this nuke-transformed America, it helps if somewhere, deep inside, there’s hope of finding something better.

WALKING DEAD

A virulent strain of a predark biowep has been unleashed upon the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They’ve got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: turn the bloodlust of the ville’s warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy. But that means splitting up and hiring on as sec for both sides and surviving the firefight—before the real hell is unleashed.

In Deathlands, time is blood.

The rottie yanked the youth against the wire

Other arms reached out to entangle him, their blackened nails clawing at his flesh. Despite his frenzied thrashing, he couldn’t break free.

Several of the ville folk darted forward to try to help him.

“Don’t get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”

His friends tried pulling the youth away, but it did no good. Then he screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit deep into his ear.

Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance, his left arm crooked to support his blaster hand, and fired a single round. The trapped boy’s head jerked, and he slumped.

His friends stared at Ryan in shock and fury.

“If you’re bit, you’re one of them!” Ryan growled. “Now learn from that stupe and stay back!”

Wretched Earth

Death Lands ®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

—Eugene Ionesco

1909-1994

Rhinoceros

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

Prologue

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

Prologue

The four of them stood in the darkened vanadium-steel room in the guts of the shattered redoubt: a tall rangy man in a tattered greatcoat; a well-built woman whose hair showed auburn highlights in the backsplash from their lamps off gleaming metal walls; a youth with a mane of long black hair hanging past his shoulders; another youth only a bit older, wearing a patched bomber jacket and glasses.

The woman played the bluish gleam of her solar-charging flash on the walls of what he took to be a hexagonal chamber. To the kid with glasses the walls looked like glass. What feeble illumination the quartet was able to muster wasn’t enough to let his weak eyes see anything beyond the glass.

“Shit,” the tall man said. “Nothing in this place. No food, no ammo, no meds. It’s been looted out. I feel like smashing those fancy windows.”

“What good’ll that do?” the woman asked.

The tall man shrugged. “Make me feel better.”

“You can’t,” the youth said.

The others looked at him, their eyes glinting faintly. He quailed a little under the pressure of their gaze. His own light, a dingy yellow at best, faded to thirsty-man-piss color as he momentarily forgot to keep pumping the little flywheel generator with the palm of his hand, which ached from the constant squeezing.

The tall man raised a fist as if to backhand him.

“Step back, Drygulch. He may know something,” the woman said.

“Yeah,” the tall man said, sneering. “He knows a lot of crap. It’s all he’s good for.”

The youth in the glasses actually rallied at that. He did know stuff. He was endlessly curious, always seeking to learn more. And he had a memory like a miser’s fist.

“Let him talk,” the woman said. She wore a homemade leather jacket, the collar of which was lined with silver wolf hide. A belt held up her khaki trousers and the flapped holster for her remade .45 handblaster. “He does know stuff.”

“Whatever you say, Lariat,” Drygulch agreed, scratching at his cap of hair, which looked like short, tight curls of silver-frosted copper wire. “What’s on your mind, Hamster?”

“It’s Reno,” he insisted. He didn’t even know how the older man had gotten hold of his hated childhood nickname.

“Whatever,” Drygulch said. He wasn’t a bad type. He didn’t dislike Reno so much as he liked poking at him.

Reno swelled inside with the warmth that came from Lariat’s acknowledgment of his value to them. To her. He held on desperately to the hope that someday the auburn-haired adventuress would realize his real worth, and return the fiercely burning love he harbored for her.

“That’s some kind of armored glass,” he said. “Your wrecking bar’d just bounce off. So would bullets, so forget all about shooting at the walls.”

Drygulch’s badlands face crumpled even more than it had to start with. But he lowered the revolver in his right hand. His left held up a kerosene lantern whose smoke filled the room with an oily smell.

“This is a triple-bust,” the tall man growled. “We’re wastin’ our time.”

“No, my friends,” said the young man who was the party’s fourth member. He wore a long, plaid flannel shirt over holey jeans. The soles of his ancient, pointy-toed cowboy boots were held on by thin pieces of leather, sewed around when wet and allowed to tighten into place as they dried. He carried a well-worn M-1 carbine. “There is treasure down here, I tell you. I have seen it with my own eyes.”