James Axler: Ritual Chill

“Which way?” Ryan snapped as they came to a halt.

Jak paused, his impassive face refusing to betray the intensity of his concentration.

“There…there…” he said simply, indicating the direction.

Ryan knew what the albino teen was thinking: it was an obvious move. These people either credited them with no intelligence or had an innate confidence in the conditions, leaving them with little option.

“Let’s do it,” Ryan stated. “I’ll go clockwise, you counterclockwise. See how many there are, and how they’re spread, then meet at the mouth of the passage, fill in the others.”

“What if they not want us meet up?” Jak queried.

Ryan grinned. It was cold, without mirth. “They’ll want that—right now they’re wondering where we are. They’ll be so relieved we’ve turned up and they’ve got us all in one place that they won’t wonder what we’ve been doing until it’s too late…”

Homeward Bound

Pony Soldiers

Dectra Chain

Ice and Fire

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

James Axler

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792–1822

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

Blackness whirled around, some parts darker than others, some so deep they were no longer black but something else, something to which he couldn’t put a name. Something that was sucking him in and tearing him apart at the same time: inclusion and expulsion in the same breath. Breath of what? This was just darkness: but a darkness that seemed to have sentience and life of its own.

Like a bellows that fanned flames, it seemed to puff and blow until finally it expelled him, sending him spinning upward, dizzyingly until…

He opened his eye, wincing at the light. It was, to all intents and purposes, muted, but to his vision seemed harsh and glaring. The icy blue orb watered as he blinked, slowly adjusting.

Fireblast, would there ever be a time when the mattrans jump became easier? Would there ever be a time when he could look at the opaque armaglass and the disks inlaid on the floor of the chamber, without a feeling of revulsion or nausea? Without—yes, he had to admit it—fear? Fear that he wouldn’t awaken from the vivid nightmares of the jump, fear that his disassembled being would be scattered into a dimension he couldn’t comprehend, let alone name. A fear that the solution was becoming worse than the problem.

The problem being that to escape whatever firefight they had become embroiled in, to escape whatever wasteland they had been traversing, they used the mattrans in the redoubt from which they had initially emerged. Of course there were exceptions: sometimes the redoubt had been destroyed in action, sometimes their journey had taken them far from their initial point of contact. Mostly, though, they would return to the chamber to effect an evacuation.

So where would they end up? They never really knew, only that there was a good chance it would be better than where they had recently departed. That’s if the redoubt hadn’t been damaged and they weren’t transmitted into a mass of rock or a watery grave. Which was always a possibility. But it hadn’t happened yet, and a continued existence was about riding your luck and playing the odds.

Sometimes, though, in the seconds that seemingly stretched into agonizing hours as they began to emerge from the unconsciousness of a jump, Ryan began to wonder about the effect it had on their bodies and their minds. To have your very being disassembled, scrambled and shot across vast distances before being reconstituted once more: what kind of damage did that do over time?

Ryan Cawdor pulled himself to his feet, shaky and unsteady, the world around him spinning rapidly one way, then slowly the opposite, as it gained equilibrium. He felt a rise of bile in his throat and spit a gob of phlegm onto the chamber floor, hoping it would halt the rising nausea. Breathing deeply, closing his eye, he felt his guts settle.