James Axler - Blood Harvest

Her vision smeared back into being—tripled, doubled and then finally was normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out. “Ryan…”

Mildred moaned.

Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. “Ryan…”

Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were in the same gateway of the same redoubt.

Ryan and Doc were gone.

Death Lands®

www.mirabooks.co.uk

O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you! God made you “little lower than the angels” sin has made you little better than the devils.

—Joseph Alleine

1634–1668

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

“Move! Move! Move!”

Ryan Cawdor and his companions needed little urging as they ran for their lives through the empty corridors of the redoubt. The facility they found themselves in was nothing but an empty concrete bunker. Whoever had occupied it had bugged out long ago and taken everything of value with them. Dead campfires, graffiti and bones—human, animal and otherwise—showed there had been successive waves of habitation. At some point someone had managed to breach the main clamshell doors and then the interior ones. The spent shells of various makes littering the floors showed there had been many room-by-room firefights. It was odd that the victors hadn’t bothered to retrieve the spent brass.

The companions’ cautious venture outside the redoubt had drawn more stickies than the friends had shells to waste.

They raced for the mat-trans chamber. The pounding of their boots was counterpointed by the staccato slapping of scores of bare stickie feet behind them as the muties gazelled after them in rubbery, ground-eating bounds. “J.B.!” Ryan shouted. “Gren!”

The Armorer clawed into a pocket of his jacket as he ran and came out with his last grenade. “One!”

“Do it!” Ryan roared.

The party passed the corridor junction, and as they turned J.B. pulled the pin on the grenade. The cotter lever pinged away and he tossed the bomb behind them. The hollow crack of the detonation echoed in the halls. Stickies hooted and shrieked. They loved fire and explosions. Unless it ripped their heads off, even stickies directly caught in them didn’t seem to mind so much.

The companions charged toward the corridor that led to the hexagonal mat-trans unit. Ryan stopped and shouldered his Steyr longblaster as his people went through the doorway that led to the control room. “J.B.! Close it!”

The door to the mat-trans was made of vanadium, and Ryan knew it would take powerful explosives to breach it. However, once it closed, the transportation cycle occurred, and Ryan wasn’t quite ready to eliminate all other options. The chamber door didn’t always lock. The outer door to the control room was ordinary steel. When the companions had arrived they had found the door jammed three inches ajar, and it had taken J.B. a good ten minutes of tinkering with the mechanism to get it to open. J.B. took a knee beside the inner control panel for the door and began fiddling with its guts.

“Hurry,” Ryan advised.

J.B. twisted the exposed wires of the keypad together.

The stickies came around the bend in a fish-belly-white, boneless wave. Shrapnel scored some of the muties’ bodies, but it wasn’t slowing them. Doc stepped into the doorway and drew his LeMat revolver from beneath his frock coat. The weapon boomed as he fired the shotgun barrel, and the lead stickie’s head was pulverized by the fist-size swarm of buckshot. Doc cocked the weapon again and pushed the hammer cone up to fire the pistol chambers of the weapon. For Doc Tanner the choices of being torn limb from limb by stickies or taking a mat-trans jump were equally revolting propositions. He took aim and shot a second stickie between its huge, shark-black eyes.

Ryan took aim with his blaster. “J.B….”

“Working on it!” J.B. snarled.

Ryan cut loose. The range was swiftly closing to spitting distance, and he fired in rapid semiauto and went for the head shots. Pale skulls popped like pumpkins but more muties kept piling forward from behind. Even at close range the bobbing and weaving heads of the stickies weren’t easy targets. The corridor filled with the gray clouds of Doc’s ancient black-powder weapon as he methodically cocked and fired. He fired his last shot and stepped back. “Empty!”

Jak Lauren instantly stepped in and his .357 Magnum Colt Python began detonating like dynamite in the echoing confines of the corridor.

Ryan slammed in a fresh mag. “J.B….”

Wires sparked between J.B.’s hands. “Got it!”

Ryan and Jak stepped back as the steel door squealed and ground against the floor. Ryan’s lips split into a silent snarl as the door shrieked, then stopped, leaving the same three-inch gap they had first found. “Fire…Blast! J.B.!”

The Armorer threw up his hands. “The door’s shot! No way will it shut.”

Everyone jumped back as the stickies hit the door in a wave. The jammed portal rang and rattled as dozens of stickies slammed their rubbery bodies against it. Others shoved their suckered hands through the gap and began heaving at the steel with grotesque, elastic strength.