James Axler - Crimson Waters

NUKE SPAWN

Everyone who lives in Deathlands must endure the hellscape of a world mutilated by nukes and madness. Survival is a grim pursuit, achieved only by the most ruthless means. Yet Ryan Cawdor and his companions remain determined to persevere by doing whatever it takes to survive.

DEATH INFESTATION

When a mat-trans malfunction strands Ryan Cawdor and his friends in a gutted redoubt in the West Indies, the crystal waters offer them a tantalizing glimpse of untouched splendor. But the oasis is abruptly shattered by violent and ruthless pirates, and Ryan has to barter with a young guide, a teenage boy on a blood quest against a sadistic local warlord, to navigate a land teeming with predators—mutie, human and animal. The race is on to find a second redoubt, buried deep in the inhospitable heart of Monster Island. As pirates, mutie sec men and monsters converge, the kill zone widens, blood flows...and the group rushes to escape paradise before it destroys them.

Because even paradise has claws in Deathlands.

J.B. raced up the gangplank

He traveled its length in heartbeats, covering left as he sprinted past the cabin, but nobody lay in wait for him. He let the Uzi drop to the end of its sling and waved Mildred to follow from cover.

As she started up the gangplank, J.B. kicked aside the dead pirate sprawled behind the Browning and took his place.

A few seconds passed before Ryan appeared, running flat out, his longblaster slantwise across his chest. As he headed west from the street, a mob of pursuers burst onto the waterfront behind him.

Roaring in triumph, they leveled their blasters at Ryan’s fleeing back.

Crimson Waters

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.

—Calvin Coolidge,

30th President of

the United States

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 One

“Smoke!”

The cry penetrated the fog of ache and confusion that enveloped Ryan Cawdor’s brain and body.

“Need go! Now!”

Jak Lauren. He recognized the albino youth’s voice.

Also his urgency. Jak said little, even less than J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer. When he did speak, it was even more to the point.

Ryan made himself sit up. He wobbled. His head spun like a gyroscope. The mat-trans unit swirled with the usual jump mists, but the stench of ozone and burning insulation was cutting through the physical haze as well as that in his brain now. It made his eye water and his stomach feel even worse.

Jump sickness, he thought. The jump had been a rough one. Jumping outside normal space via mat-trans gateway was always a wrenchingly disorienting experience, but it seldom hit him as hard as this one had.

Someone tugged his arm. By sheer iron will he forced himself to move, despite the pain and nausea. He lurched unsteadily to his feet.

Another hand clutched the back of his coat. Before he could get his balance, he felt himself being towed forward. He had to speed-stagger to keep from falling on his face on the hard floor.

He tried to fight off his assistant. “Krysty!” he cried.

His voice came out a croak. Dense brown smoke watered his eye and scorched down his throat like lye.

“I’m fine, Ryan!” he heard her call. Her hoarseness didn’t encourage him to believe she was exactly telling the truth.

But the fact that she was awake and aware enough to respond reassured him. He put a hand down briefly to keep from collapsing despite what he was pretty sure was the wiry strength of Jak—a young man half his size—holding him up. Then he banged his left shoulder on the frame of the six-sided chamber’s door and was out.

At once the air cleared. He fell to his knees, coughing hard enough to bring up a lung. Jak let him go.

When the hacking fit passed he shook his head to clear it, then raised it to look around.

They were in the gateway’s antechamber. A few feet away his redheaded mate, Krysty Wroth, stood with one arm around the shoulders of Mildred Wyeth, helping her keep her feet.

Mildred was a black woman in her late thirties, with hair worn in beaded plaits. She was stocky, but after a few years of hiking across the Deathlands very little of that was fat. Despite Mildred’s weight, Krysty didn’t have much trouble holding her up. Mildred was also a freezie from predark.

Ryan became aware of Jak hovering at his side nervously. “Thanks,” he said to the youth, whose white hair had fallen forward to almost obscure his face. “I’m fit to fight. Help the others.”

“At last you rejoin us, my dear Ryan,” a deep voice said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Dr. Theophilus Tanner stood by a darkened bank of camp consoles, looking dapper, and surprisingly hale for a man who normally looked as if he were on his last leg after a jump. A tall stork of a man with silver-white hair hanging down to the collar of his old-time frock coat, he carried a black swordstick with a silver lion’s head.

His head still feeling as if it might go spinning off his shoulders at any moment, Ryan looked back at the mat-trans. The walls of the chamber were made of armaglass tinted a dull, nasty-looking mustard color. Smoke of a similar but darker hue still snaked out into the antechamber of the redoubt that housed the mat-trans.