James Axler - Playfair's Axiom

Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see the spot where a small portion of his leather jacket had been pushed aside a fraction of an inch by the heavy-caliber slug that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into red droplets as it distanced itself from him.

With a roaring in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a young pup, spin and topple into the dust.

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For the St. Louis Science Fiction Society

for years of friendship. Your lovely hometown

deserves better than it gets herein.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

—Epicurus

3rd century BCE

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

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

“We followed!” Jak Lauren stated.

The long-haired albino teen had his pallid lips pressed so close to Ryan Cawdor’s ear that he could smell his funk, even though after days of harsh exertion in close unwashed company his nostrils had become inured to such. The fact that it was nuke hot and swamp humid close to the Sippi River didn’t much help.

“I know.” A canny fighter and consummate survivor, veteran of years of trekking across the hellscape of the Deathlands, Ryan reckoned that a low grunt of acknowledgment was less likely to alert their shadowers that they had been spotted than even the slightest nod of his head.

Picking his way over a mound of dust-covered rubble, Ryan swept the ruins with his lone blue eye. It was morning, bright and hot. They were in the midst of what had been a great city’s downtown. Now it looked as if it had been picked up about two hundred feet and dropped.

They’d left the gutted bunker an hour before and had seemingly made scarcely any progress at all clambering south through the urban devastation. Around them jumbles of busted-up masonry rose in heaps against the sides of mostly intact buildings, some as high as three or four stories. Behind them rose taller buildings, skyscrapers, some canted precariously, with windows blank of glass like blinded staring eyes. Not all of them had fallen the same way, although it was clear that a nuke-blast some distance to the west had done most of the damage.

To their right rear rose a vast mound, its white surface cracked like a colossal egg. Over everything a single dark skyscraper towered like a nail impaling a pale yellow sky. It dominated the devastated downtown. South of it a solitary flying creature kited on huge wings.

Sweat ran down Ryan’s face from the line of his long black curly hair. His mouth felt as if it had a prickly pear lobe lodged inside it. The long ragged scar that ran down the side of his face throbbed.

He ignored his discomfort. Minor pains meant nothing to Ryan Cawdor. A person could never tell from looking at him that he’d been raised in privilege and comparative luxury in the prosperous eastern barony of Front Royal. He was a creature of the Deathlands; and like the Deathlands everything had been stripped away from his six-two frame but the hard and the tough. He was the ultimate adapter. The ultimate survivor.

Perching on a tilted chunk of concrete with rebar protruding like twisted fangs, he halted to let his small party pass. Jak, taking a quick swig of water from a worn canteen, headed back out in the lead, skipping over the treacherous footing like rocks in a stream. Ryan used his brief halt to grab some relief from his own tearing thirst, swirling a tiny bit of water from his own canteen around his mouth and swallowing. It went down his throat as if it had knives in it.

At least we know where we are, he thought. J.B.’s sextant had identified the anonymous mass of cracked blocks and twisted steel as St. Louis, by the great river most people now called the Sippi.

He tried not to react to the furtive flickers of movement, visible through gaps in standing walls or past man-high heaps of debris that stank of concrete dust and rotting flesh. He waited until their rear guard, a short man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a fedora he used to cover the steady retreat of his hairline, came up to him.

“So you saw our little shadows,” John Barrymore Dix said as he approached. He carried his heavy 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun easily in front of his hips. There was a lot more strength in his wiry little frame than there looked to be.

Of course, that could be said for all of them. The truth was, no one looked tough enough to live through what they had.

“Jak’s got them,” Ryan said quietly.

“What do you reckon they want?”

Ryan’s mouth tensed up. “Hard call,” he said. “Can’t read much ’cause they haven’t hit us yet. May just be looking for the best spot to make their move.”

J.B. showed him a quick thin smile. “Chill or enslave, doesn’t matter much, does it?”