James Axler - Haven's Blight

BLUNT FORCE

The future rose from the ashes of nuke-scorched America with a vengeance. The unchecked wrath of Deathlands pits Ryan Cawdor and his companions against long odds. But their skill as survivors, strategists and warriors is unmatched and they’ve held on to something more precious than life: their humanity. They nurture the hope that somewhere, hidden amidst the grotesquerie of a tortured land, safety and sanctuary awaits.

RANDOM GENERATOR

Bartering their expertise to a nautical band of brilliant technomads, Ryan’s group finds trouble waiting in the steaming, fetid swamplands of the Louisiana Gulf. Merciless storms and pirates strand them in Haven. But the barony’s inviting name masks a ville hijacked by fear, territorial conflict and monstrous horror. With the gravely injured Krysty Wroth’s fate uncertain, a desperate Ryan aids the strange but hospitable Baron Blackwell in his effort to save Haven from a genetic blood curse. He’ll succeed, provided his luck—and his options—don’t run out first.

A hippo-size foot caught Ryan in the side

The kick seemed to be almost in slow motion, yet was monstrously powerful. It threw him out of the water and onto his back on the wet grass.

He heard screams, shots. Shaking his head to clear his eye of water, he saw an unbelievable sight: a man as tall as himself, with a trim waist, powerful chest, bare from the waist up, his skin and long flying hair as albino-white as Jak Lauren’s, swinging a pair of swords at a group of swampies while other men surged out of the wind-whipped brush, holding spears, cutlasses and longblasters.

Then a pale fist the size of Ryan’s head slammed into his solar plexus, doubling him like a dying caterpillar. The air erupted out of him, and he passed out.

Haven’s Blight

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

—Charles Baudelaire 1821–1867

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

With a loud splash, something huge flew out of the black bayou water and smashed to pieces the water-strider boat pedal-driven by the gangly young Tech-nomad called Scooter. The motion of the dark form breaking the surface had caught Krysty Wroth’s eye as she stood in the stinging sun by the rail of the yacht Snowy Egret talking with Mildred Wyeth. Now she stared horrorstruck as the enormous shape slid back below the surface as if being absorbed into the thick water. Her long red hair stirred around her shoulders, although there wasn’t a breath of wind on the bayou.

A cry of fury and despair came from New Hope, the lead ship of the Tech-nomad convoy. Krysty looked that way to see a woman built not that much differently than she was, buxom and broad-shouldered, standing in the prow shouting for someone to do something. She had a brush of russet hair, and was dressed in a dark green tank top and baggy camou cargo pants with lots of pockets, clothing the Tech-nomads seemed to like.

“That’s Jenn,” Mildred said. “The poor bastard’s woman.”

The group’s healer, Mildred was shorter than Krysty and stockier. A fairly light-skinned black woman, she, like Krysty, wore a long-sleeved shirt. And like the ivory-skinned Krysty, she had a tendency to burn in the harsh Gulf of Mexico sunlight. Her hair, braided into beaded plaits, was covered by a floppy canvas hat.

“They’re all around us!” a voice shouted. Krysty looked around to see mounds resembling living hills of water rolling on all sides of the little fleet. The other water-striders were fleeing as fast as their pilots’ legs could drive them. Their function was to scout out danger.

They had.

Krysty saw Ryan, the companions’ nominal leader, up on the Hope’s bow beside Jenn, forward of the first of its three weird cylindrical rotor sails. The tall and rangy man, his long black hair tossed by the stiff breeze, shouldered his Steyr sniper rifle, bringing the eyepiece of its telescopic sight to his single piercing blue eye. Despite the danger of the vast dark plunging forms surrounding him, Krysty’s heart thrilled to the sight of him. To her he epitomized everything good about a man in a desolate world.

Beside Ryan the slim form of Jak Lauren crouched on the rail, clutching a guyline in one hand. His big .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver glinted in the other. Krysty thought the albino team resembled an updated version of a typical pirate from one of the few picture books she’d read as a girl. Which was ironic, in that pirates were a major reason the normally pacific—and reclusive—Tech-nomads had hired the six companions onto the convoy. The companions and Tech-nomads had a history.

In general Ryan and his companions were aboard to provide protection against nautical dangers. Such as seaborne raiders—and whatever the gray shapes were, easily the size of land wags, humping the dark water all around and vanishing beneath.

“These people are pretty well-heeled for pacifists,” Mildred muttered, unslinging the weapon their employers had lent her to augment her favored ZKR 551 target revolver. It was an M-1 Garand semiautomatic military rifle that had been elderly when Mildred herself was born, decades before the skydark. Longblasters were also coming into view up on the white rotor-ship ahead of them. Jenn waved bare sun-browned arms, shouting at people not to shoot for fear of hitting Scooter.