James Axler: Moonfeast

“Yeah. I feel it, too,” Jak said, a concealed knife dropping into his hand from his sleeve.

“Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan said. “If we come back with a droid on us, we’ll need backup.”

Turning away, he saw that J.B. was already at the oval hatch, looking for traps.

“Clear,” the Armorer reported.

“Okay, friends, triple red.” SIG-Sauer at the ready, the one-eyed man pressed down the lever and the hatch swung open silently. Then with a snarl, Ryan instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.

In the next room, several men in Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps….

www.mirabooks.co.uk

They sang the song eternal, and strove to drums infernal. Then marched-marched-marched to the edge of the world. The damned fools sang as they marched to the edge of the world.

—Private A. B. Hassan,

Confederate Army 1861

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

Pretending to scratch his belly, Ryan Cawdor loosened the 9 mm blaster at his side. A seasoned veteran of hundreds of fights, the man knew when the blood was about to hit the fan. It was chilling time, that much was certain. Death was close. He just wasn’t sure from which direction. Not yet, anyway.

A tall man with broad shoulders, Ryan had long curly black hair, and a badly scarred face that rarely knew a smile. A wicked heavy eighteen-inch blade called a panga was sheathed on his thigh, a holstered SIG-Sauer 9 mm blaster balancing the oversize blade on the other side. A bolt-action Steyr longblaster hung from a shoulder. Spare ammunition filled the loops in his leather gunbelt, marking him as a wealthy man, and also a deadly killer. Brass was better than gold, as the saying went, and the Deathlands was filled with the unmarked graves of strong men who had been brutally aced for a single live round. To display that much live brass meant that you were tough enough to keep it, and thus served as a clear warning to anybody smarter than a stickie to stay away—or else.

Crude alcohol lanterns hung from the overhead wooden beams, filling the tavern with a murky blue light, and swirling clouds of pungent smoke filled the air of the Busted Axle like a morning mist on distant mountains. Everybody seemed to be puffing on homemade cigs, or corncob pipes, and the roaring blaze in the brick fireplace was leaking smoke out the sides to add a rich woodsy smell to the mixture of tobacco, maryjane and a local favorite called coot, hemp rope cigars soaked in sweet shine.

Most of the people in the tavern were eating dinner at their tables, hunched over the hubcap plates as if they were afraid somebody might try to jack the horse meat stew, which was highly unlikely. Uniformed sec men were playing dominoes at a large table near the front door, their scarred faces scowling in concentration. Each man had a handblaster tucked into his belt, and a flintlock longblaster hanging from the back of his chair, shiny chunks of flint jutting out from the cocked hammers. The museum pieces were in perfect working condition, and in a world where a single round of live brass bought a person a few days of food and bed, the black-powder rifles were the standard weapons for many ville sec men. No other table in the tavern was close enough for another patron to try for a grab. A drunken outlander had tried anyway, and his corpse was cooling outside, waiting for the loser of the game to bury the triple-stupe fool.

Small piles of live brass lay in front of each sec man, and everybody seemed to be playing with one hand hidden under the table clutching the handle of a knife. Just in case, as Baron Harrison always liked to say. The only cure for stupidity was a hot dose of lead in the head. True words, indeed.

In the corner, a young boy without shoes was playing a dilapidated upright piano with considerable skill, but there was no jack in the tip jar perched on top. On the second-floor balcony, a host of gaudy sluts leaned over the battered wooden railing, their bare breasts openly on display to entice new customers upstairs for fifteen minutes of sweaty delight.

Telling jokes and pouring shine behind a plywood counter, the bartender was a tall man named Mark Michalowski, a thin man with a shaved head and a wide, easy grin.

Gathered along the counter were a couple of sluts and a dozen burly men. Mountain men from the looks of them, Ryan guessed, remembering a friend of his from a long time ago. The hunters were dirty, unshaved, and dressed entirely in clothing made from animal hides: griz bear boots, deerskin pants and shirts, beaver coats and coonskin caps, minus the tails. They looked friendly enough, but machetes hung at their backs and muzzle-loading longblasters hung across their shoulders. The men looked so similar to one another that Ryan knew they had to be close kin, and from a pretty damn small gene pool, at that. Which only made them that much more dangerous. The only true law in the Deathlands was that kin helped kin, especially in a fight.

The mountain men were talking low among themselves, drinking shots of shine from cracked plastic tumblers and stuffing their bearded faces with handfuls of salted popcorn as if they’d never encountered the stuff before. Ryan knew that the locals used the stuff to feed their pigs when it got stale, but when it was fresh, Big Mike the bartender gave it away free, the heavy coating of rock salt a mighty inducement for his customers to drink more shine, and eventually end upstairs where their pockets could really be emptied. The one-eyed man knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch. That phrase had never been so nuking true than in the desert ville of Hobart where everything had a price. Baron Felix Harrison was so crooked that he could eat soup with a corkscrew, and the sooner Ryan and his companions were out of this rad pit the better he’d like it. But for the moment, they were trapped. Nobody could leave Hobart without a signed pass, and those were damn near impossible to get from the baron. However, Ryan knew one of the ville sec men from his days riding shotgun with the Trader, and the man was going to meet Ryan here at any moment.