James Axler - Doom Helix

Ryan, his son Dean and the companions had themselves toiled in the sweltering, poisonous shafts at Ground Zero. Although they had eventually fought their way free, they had been unable to stop the she-hes from escaping this reality and Deathlands’ brand of justice. They had, however, waylaid and beaten one of the invaders’ vilest puppets to within an inch of his life.

That puppet was Big Mike.

They had decided to let him live because he was already an amputee. He had only the one hand, which made his surviving in the hellscape a constant, and ultimately losing battle. After all the pain and suffering he’d inflicted on innocent folk, simply chilling him would have been too much of a kindness. Ryan was surprised he’d lasted so long.

“Come on out,” the one-eyed warrior said. “We’re not going to beat you again.”

“Swear to it?”

“Come out now, you tub of shit,” J.B. ordered, “or we’re going to leave you here to rot. Put your hands up and keep them up.”

Big Mike obeyed, moaning as he forced himself out of the cave, holding his arms above his head.

“You seem to have lost something else since we last crossed paths,” Ryan said, gesturing with the muzzle of the SIG.

Big Mike glanced up at his left arm, which now ended in a stump. It was cut through clean, like it had been sliced off with a bandsaw.

And recently.

The massive scab was black and the skin around it an angry red.

“In a place as hard as Deathlands,” Krysty said, “a man who’s missing all you’re missing is in one hell of a pickle.”

“Hell, pickle ain’t the half of it,” Big Mike said. “Lookee here.” He held out his artificial hand. “Only way I can grip down on something is if I use my teeth on the fucking knob.”

“What happened to the other one?” Ryan asked. “From the looks of that stump, it wasn’t mutie coyotes who took it.”

“You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” J.B. said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement.

“My former bosses, the cockroaches from alternate Earth,” Big Mike replied. “The bastards are back at Slake City, working the mines again, only this time they’ve cut out the middleman. They’re rounding up their own slaves. They took me for a slave, too.”

Big Mike waved the blackened stump in their faces. “Getting free cost me this,” he said.

Ryan sized up the double amputee, who sat in the shade of a slab of basalt, drinking greedily from a plastic water bottle death-gripped in his prosthetic hand. The grime caked on the big man’s face made his eyeballs and teeth appear much whiter than they were, as if he was peering out from behind a mask. He wore filthy bib-front overalls, a holed-out khaki T-shirt and battered, unlaced boots. His blinding reek reminded Ryan of a bear pit in midsummer.

In the past, Big Mike had proved himself a backstabbing con man, but the evidence of that fresh stump couldn’t be ignored. The cut at the wrist and the crust of scab looked far too neat for bladework. The only instrument Ryan had seen that could make such a precise cut—and simultaneously seal off the wound—was a laser. A technology lost in the wake of Armageddon, but perfected to a high degree by the invaders from Shadow Earth.

The last time Ryan and the companions had crossed paths with the she-hes, the combination of advanced weapons and intelligent armor had been more than they could handle. Unable to return effective fire against the battlesuits’ EM shields, they had been captured, then marched out to the middle of the hundred-square-mile, Slake City massif—the remains of a once-great, predark city melted and fused into a glacier of thermoglass by a multiwarhead, airburst nuke strike. At Ground Zero they were forced to mine radioactive ore from the maze of tunnels full of bloodthirsty stickies. They had no food but the rats they caught and cooked themselves. And just enough water to keep them working underground until they dropped dead of starvation or rad sickness.

Despite the long odds against survival, none of them had lost heart, and in the end, thanks to ingenuity and luck, they had prevailed. Ryan remembered with pride how his young son Dean had stood his ground, fighting alongside the others, turning the enemy’s own weapons against them.

Memories turned bittersweet.

Some time after the nuke mine ordeal, in the dead of night, Dean’s mother, Sharona, had stolen the boy away and taken him to who knew where. Ryan smothered the surge of fury that rose up whenever he thought about what she’d done. He couldn’t change the past, and dwelling on it only led to guilt and self-recrimination that served no purpose. His abiding hope was that his son Dean wasn’t lost to him forever, that he had just gone missing until they somehow, someway managed to find each other again. The boy was never far from his thoughts.

After the encounter at Slake City, it was clear to Ryan and his companions that if the black-armored invaders hadn’t come down with a hideous pox, if the disease hadn’t forced them to jump universes, the battle for Deathlands would have been lost. Though they were relatively few in number, nothing in the hellscape could stand against them. The battlesuits’ shields deflected even point-blank blasterfire. With their all-terrain wags and flying machines, they had the advantage of speed, maneuver and firepower. And the cherry on top, they alone could fully reap the bounty of Armageddon. They ran all their equipment, from the tribarreled laser rifles to the gyroplanes, with reprocessed radioactive waste.

If the she-hes had managed to establish a permanent base at Slake City, within a year they would have toppled the hellscape’s baronies, one by one.

While Ryan had no love for Deathlands’ brutal feudal system, it was paradise compared to what the invaders offered. And the ambitions of the Shadow Earthlings had no limits.

Ryan knew what the Shadow Earthlings had done to their home world because he’d been there—as proof of their success and the hope it offered the starving multitudes, the first expeditionary force had transported him back to their point of origin. On the parallel Earth he had seen what made the colonization of a place like Deathlands so appealing and so necessary. Shadow World was a planet stripped clean of resources.

At the top of the teeming human population of 100 billion were the CEOs of FIVE, the ruling corporate conglomerate, and their whitecoat minions; at the bottom, in the sprawling underground ghetto known as Gloomtown, the vast, expendable segment of the population was reduced to eating pulverized rock disguised as fast food. While the masses slowly wasted away from a lack of calories, the toxic side effects of “Beefie Cheesies” and “Tater Cheesies” drove them homicidally insane.

A bioengineered agrobacteria, touted as the solution to the global food crisis, had run amok, the resulting Slime Zone threatening to carpet the entire planet in green slunk. In order to slow the growth of the unemployable classes, the one-world-government’s Population Control Service had released a flesh-eating bioweapon into the environment, and like the agrobacteria, the self-replicating carniphages had promptly taken root in the megalopolis. They bloomed at random and picked clean the bones of anyone who didn’t reach cover in time.

What the Shadow Earthlings had done to themselves, to their own world, Ryan knew they were hell-bound to do elsewhere.

Big Mike lowered the nearly empty bottle and belched resonantly. “The cockroaches are attacking the nearby villes and sweeping up all comers,” he said. “Anyone who can hoist a chunk of ore they’re dumping at Slake City’s Ground Zero. The folks who can’t do a lick of work, the too-young and too-old, they just slice into chunks with their tribarrels. They’re leaving the villes empty except for the buzzards. And the buzzards are having a grand old time.”