James Axler - Perception Fault

Heedless of his own injuries, J.B. bolted to his side, firing his Uzi through the veil of smoke. Grabbing Ryan by the legs, he dragged him back to the wall. “How bad is it?”

“Not…good. I know that much,” Ryan gritted. He brought his trembling neck muscles under control to look down at his shoulders, seeing a lot of blood and the jagged end of a bone poking up through the skin.

J.B. gingerly explored the wound. “This is going to hurt a lot.” The Armorer eased himself under his old friend’s right arm, eliciting a groan of pain from him as he gripped his hand tight to keep him in place.

When J.B. stood, Ryan nearly passed out from the agony shooting through his shoulders. The Armorer half dragged the one-eyed man forward, intent on getting clear of the underground pit and getting help for Ryan….

Death Lands ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the “dragon,” in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.

—D. H. Lawrence

1885–1930

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

Epilogue

Crouched behind a half-ruined wall, Ryan Cawdor wiped gritty concrete dust from his tanned face, black eye patch and curly black hair. He peeked around the left side of the barrier, searching for the person with the longblaster who’d come within a couple inches of sending him on the last train west.

The day had started well enough. He and his companions had come out of a mat-trans near what they thought were the ruins of what used to be Denver, Colorado. It was an area they were fairly familiar with, since two of their group had grown up around these parts. Traveling north to check out the ville, they had reached the outskirts without incident. The quiet should have been a warning. They had just set up a campsite with an outdoor fire they’d thought was sheltered from passing eyes, and were roasting their freshly killed dinner. But as Krysty Wroth was turning the giant, heronlike bird on their makeshift spit, she had looked up with that shocked expression everyone knew all too well, sending each of the other five diving for weapons, cover or both. The first shot had cracked out a second later, and now the group was pinned down and facing an unknown force.

The ambush had been well planned and executed. But the targets the raiders had chosen weren’t farmers or traders traveling the Deathlands hawking their wares. They weren’t even a ragtag band of mercies looking for work, their blasters available for hire to anyone who had the jack.

Ryan and his five companions had spent years roaming the length and breadth of the radiation and chem-ravaged land that had been called America long ago. They had encountered much during their journeys, from mutant animals and humanoids of every shape and size to power-hungry barons carving out their empires from the postholocaust savagery, offering refuge—of a sort—to anyone who could pay or barter for the price of admission.

The companions had met just about every variety of man, mutant or monster inhabiting this world—and had left many of them on their back, staring sightlessly at the sky while their lifeblood leaked into the dirt. Each member of the group was a master of chilling in just about every way, shape and form possible, with Ryan perhaps the best of them all—a fact these coldhearts were about to find out the hard way.

He glanced over at his old friend, J. B. Dix, who held his mini-Uzi tucked into his shoulder. The sallow-faced man was hunched down behind the same wall as Ryan, but his expression was as calm as if he were strolling through a mountain meadow in spring.

Ryan risked another peek out only to draw another bullet for his trouble, the lead slug ricocheting off the side of the wall. “See anything?”

“Not yet. They picked a good time to spring this surprise. Dusk means better cover, and they used the fire as their targeting point, neatly pinning us near it.”

“What I really want to know is how we’re going to get the drop on them.”

The short, bespectacled man adjusted the battered fedora on his head and half turned to Ryan. “Working on it. You got a line on anyone else?”

“Krysty and Jak took cover to my right, about ten yards out. Don’t know where Mildred and Doc.”

“Mildred ended up on the other side of the street, in that falling-down house with half a second floor. That could be useful. Probably better that Doc’s taken cover. He can man the fort with me.”

Ryan wrinkled his nose as he smelled burning meat. Their untended dinner was going up in flames. “Fireblast and fuck! There goes the turkey.” Adding insult to injury, another large-caliber round cracked out, and the carcass burst apart in an explosion of half-raw meat, bone fragments and watery liquid. Ryan snarled, his growling stomach adding its own comment on the travesty that had just happened in front of him. “Now they’ve really pissed me off.”