James Axler - Time Castaways

The baron’s wife smiled and slid a worn plastic bracelet off her wrist.

“Thank you, my lady,” Mildred replied with a forced grin, trying to appease the woman. In her time, the garish trinket had been the kind of thing you could buy from a vending machine for a quarter. Nowadays, it was the jewelry of the high and mighty.

However, as the physician reached out to accept the bracelet, the woman roughly grabbed her hand and pulled Mildred closer, staring intently at her face. Then she nodded in grim satisfaction.

“Yes, I thought so!” she shouted in triumph. “Look there—metal! The outlander bitch has steel in her mouth!”

Jerking free from the grip, Mildred stared at the woman as if she was insane. Then the truth of the matter hit her like an express train. Her fillings! Mildred had completely forgotten about the silver fillings in her back molars!

“Close the gate! Protect the baron!” Donovan roared.

But as fast as the sec chief was, Ryan matched his speed, whipping out the SIG-Sauer in a blur of motion, and the two men fired simultaneously at point-blank range.

Death Lands ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I come to do the deed that must be done—Nor thou, nor sheltering angels, could prevent me.

—C. R. Maturin, 1780–1824

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….

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

Epilogue

The creature exploded out of the laurel bushes and charged across the dirt road, its four arms raised for a fast chill, the black talons dripping green venom.

“Ambush!” sec chief Charles Donovan cried, flicking off the safety on his massive crossbow. “Gene and Rosemary, stay with the cart! Everybody else, form a firing line!”

As the team of horses whinnied in fear, the sec man in the buckboard wagon holding the reins tried to control the animals while his partner lifted a balanced pair of throwing axes into view. Meanwhile the rest of the platoon brandished their crossbows and formed a defensive line between the charging monster and the imperial treasure cart. Assuming a marksman stance, Donovan aimed his heavy crossbow and fired. A split second later the other sec men did the same with their smaller version, unleashing a maelstrom of wooden shafts.

Bristling with arrows, the creature recoiled from the staggering impacts, but the heavy wooden slats covering the giant man were not penetrated. Bellowing loudly, the armored coldheart shook his two arms in rage, the fake arms suspended underneath them duplicating the motion precisely. Then a second armored man came out of the bushes, closely followed by two more.

“Keep firing!” Donovan bellowed, reaching over a shoulder to pull a stone quarrel from the quiver on his back.

At the sight of the additional coldhearts, the Anchor ville sec men needed no prompting to work the levers on their complex crossbows, the wooden machinery automatically drawing back the bow string and feeding another half-size arrow into the firing notch from the box magazine mounted on top. They fired in unison, and one of the attackers dropped to a knee, blood pouring from a small gap between his leg and belly.

Stepping protectively in front of their wounded brother, the other coldhearts coughed inside their misshapen headmasks, and something flashed across the dirt road too fast to see clearly.

Dropping their weapons, two of the sec men staggered backward. Gurgling horribly, they raked fingernails along their throats, desperately clawing at the tiny feathered darts buried in their skin. Already their flesh was turning a bilious green, and flecks of foam began to appear on their deathly pale lips.

Pausing for only a moment, Donovan mercifully shot an arrow through the head of the nearest sec man, while the rest of the platoon did the same for the second man. There was no antidote for kraken poison.

Reloading quickly, the sec men fired again, wounding another of what they called Hillies. Retreating slightly, the coldhearts coughed again, but ready this time, the sec men managed to dodge the incoming darts successfully. However, that was when Donovan suddenly noticed a dozen figures moving among the trees edging the road. Shitfire, he thought, the rad-suckers had to have brought along the whole tribe for this attack! The grim man had no idea how the bastards knew about the cargo in the treasure wag, but there was no way he was going to let his baron’s prize fall into the dirty hands of these stinking inbreed throwbacks.

Tossing aside his loaded crossbow, Donovan clawed open the sealed holster at his side and hauled a predark blaster into view. Lovingly polished every day, the revolver shone rainbow bright with the reflected lights of the aurora borealis filling the sky.

“Akhmed, Hannigan, watch the trees,” Donovan shouted, sliding a single brass round into the blaster and closing the cylinder with a jerk of his wrist. “Everybody else, flanking positions.”

Launching another volley, the sec men hastily reloaded and quickly formed a wing formation behind their chief. Coughing out more darts, the Hillies bellowed angrily, then charged, concentrating on a young sec man struggling to clear an arrow jammed in the loading mechanism of his crossbow.

Hastily taking aim, Donovan fired, and a Hilly stopped running, blood pouring from the mouth of his carved wooden mask. But even as the dying coldheart sank to his knees, the rest of the Hillies converged on the teenager just as the jam came free. The sec man raised his weapon and fired, but the half-arrow only dully thudded into the thick chest armor of the lead coldheart. Then the others struck, the bear talons on their four arms raking the youth, slicing him open and ripping out bloody gobbets of flesh.