James Axler - Ghostwalk

Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, and try to figure out a way to enslave your fellow human beings.”

Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead.”

“Thanks,” retorted Grant. “I will.”

“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently. “Why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”

Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”

“Whose attention?” Kane asked, a steel edge in his voice.

Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost walkers.”

Outlanders ®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks to Mark Ellis for his contribution to the Outlanders concept, developed for Gold Eagle.

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence. What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends. But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Kane did not hear the shot or see anyone with a gun.

The shock of the bullet’s impact high on his right shoulder jerked him around, his feet tangling, his back slamming hard against the adobe wall.

Kane let his body sag to the ground. He could hear only his own strained breath as he swallowed air into his emptied lungs. As quickly as he could, he crawled behind a heap of chipped masonry. Pain streaked up and down his arm like flares of heat lightning, but he didn’t think any bones were broken. Still, he had to clamp his jaws tightly shut against a groan of pain. He fingered the small hole punched through his tricolor desert-camouflage blouse and winced.

His mind swam with anger. Your own fault, dumbass, he snapped at himself. He knew he should have checked out every structure in the ruins of the old village before leaving the shelter of the walls, but concern over a missing team member had made him reckless.

A single dirt lane led to the settlement, which was a cluster of small huts, most of them roofless, surrounding a well. The north wall had collapsed into rubble and dried mud bricks long ago. The place looked like a typical abandoned Outland village so Kane hadn’t strolled through it with any particular caution.

He hitched around, careful not to dislodge any loose stones and give away his position. The lowering sun was a blinding red ball, and if nothing else, Kane appreciated his sunglasses. His eyes swept over the featureless sandy plain. Less than a hundred yards to his right rose a range of low hills with a rolling tongue of sand dunes between them.

High, rust-red mesas towered between the low hills. He resisted taking a drink from his canteen, straining his hearing for any sound of movement. He heard only the singing silence of the desert stirred by the constant hot breeze. Sand and the dry wind sapped all the juices from his body, parching the throat and dehydrating the flesh.

The sun dropped down behind one of the flat-topped outcroppings, and long shadows stretched toward him. Heat waves blurred the far horizon. The peaks of the Jemez Mountain Range were only a wavering mirage many miles to the south.

Kane had been walking point, a habit he had acquired during his years as a Magistrate because of his uncanny ability to detect imminent danger. He called it a sixth sense, but his pointman’s sense was really a combined manifestation of the five he had trained to the epitome of keenness. When he walked point, Kane felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing. Most of the time, he could sense danger from far off.

Now he wondered if his senses, his instincts, were failing him. In potential killzones, he normally walked with such care it was almost a form of paranoia. He had grown accustomed to always being watchful and alert, to expecting the unexpected. This time his pointman’s sense had let him down.