James Axler - Shatter Zone

It was a new and different kind of hoot that none of the companions had ever heard before. Almost immediately, a distant hoot answered.

“Dark night, it’s calling for help!” J.B. gasped, dropping a spent clip and slapping in a spare. “What is going on here?”

Even as she frantically reloaded, Mildred considered the matter, and knew that she had no possible answer. Nobody knew for sure where the stickies came from in the first place, whether they were accidents of Nature caused by the nuclear holocaust, devolved humans, escaped genetic experiments, bioweps or what. But there was one singular, unarguable factor about the mutants. They lived, and anything alive always tried to improve itself, to make the next generation stronger.

Mildred shivered at the idea. Stickies with weapons. Oh, dear God in Heaven, protect our mortal souls….

Red Equinox

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

Bloodfire

Hellbenders

Separation

Death Hunt

Shaking Earth

Black Harvest

Vengeance Trail

Ritual Chill

Atlantis Reprise

Labyrinth

Strontium Swamp

Shatter Zone

DEATH LANDS ®

James Axler

To my parents

For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

—Ecclesiastes 9:11–12

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….

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

The blowing dust of the Manitoba desert tinted the air red, as if the world had been painted in fresh blood.

Patches walked carefully among the tall barbed cactus plants, a small knife in his weathered hand. The wep was a homie, just a piece of window glass repeatedly rubbed against stone until it was razor-sharp, with a piece of rat skin wrapped around the bottom to make a handle. The wrinklie remembered once seeing a baron with a steel knife. But then the ruler of that ville had also carried a working blaster, a wheelgun with live brass. The glass knife would be useless in a fight against a black-powder handcannon like that, but it served him well enough for the harvesting.

Stopping his slow progress near a tall cactus, Patches eased his hand into a cluster of the barbed needles and cut free a fat purple globe. As the juicy fruit fell, he neatly caught it with his other hand, and tucked it away into the patched canvas bag hanging at his side. The bag was almost half full and Patches smiled at the thought of how happy his wife would be knowing that they would eat this night.

The cactus plants replenished the harvested fruit very quickly, but always in new patterns, and he had never found another way of harvesting the fruit except by wandering through the deadly grove. There were many much larger fruits still nesting inside the cluster of needles, ripe and ready for the taking, but all of them were too big to retrieve without getting his arm punctured.

A fluttering from above caught his attention and the old man looked up to see a bird of some kind land on top of a tall cactus and start pecking at a fruit. Patches salivated at the thought of fresh meat, but he knew it was already too late.

Suddenly the little bird gave a horrid squawk and reared back with a quill sticking out of its wing. As it shook the wing, the needle fell out and the bird went happily back to the plump fruit.

“Three,” Patches whispered softly. “Two, one…”

Violently shuddering all over, the bird went limp and toppled off the cactus, bouncing from limb to limb of the plants. Then the aced bird was gone from sight, lost somewhere deep inside the overlapping needles covering the spreading arms of the tall cactus.

Goodbye, meat. With a sigh, Patches thumbed the desert sand from beneath his eye patch, then returned to the arduous work at hand.

The air of the desert grove was sweet, rich with a tangy infusion of citrus from the clusters of plump red fruits hanging from the flowering sides of each green cactus. A few of the plants lacked flowers, and those he simply avoided as a waste of time. No flowers meant no fruit. Although the venom in the needles of those cacti was much stronger, perfect to tip the arrows of his crossbow. A man didn’t have to be a very good shot with one of those on his arrow. Shoot a slaver in the leg and before he finished cursing, the flesh peddler would go stiff and topple over, a new passenger on the last train west.