Ricky winced at the noise of the blast, his eyes narrowed against the bright explosion. Behind him, at least a dozen human shapes were stalking through the grove. The trees didn’t help matters. At some point someone had had the bright idea of hanging folks from their upper branches like a gallows, leaving the decaying corpses swinging in the wind in bloody warning. It was a warning that Ricky wished he and his companions had heeded when they had arrived in this place just a few hours earlier. But they had been hungry, and it had been pitch-black when they had emerged from the redoubt.
J.B. blasted another burst of buckshot from his weapon, carving a crescent moon through one side of a thick tree trunk and felling the figure poised behind it.
“You moving or am I leaving you?” J.B. snarled.
Ricky raised his Webley Mk VI revolver and sent four shots into the shadows of the trees, peppering the area with lead. He smiled with bleak satisfaction as he saw one of the scalies crash to the ground. Beside him, the flare continued to fizz, sending up sparks of red as it butted against the ground.
“I’m coming,” Ricky insisted, pulling himself up to a standing position. He reached for the flare and stopped. His side hurt, and his belly was churning so much that he could taste that stolen meal coming back up his throat. “¡Madre de Dios!” Ricky cursed the pain that seared through him.
J.B. chanced a look at the youth between his scanning of the trees. “You look green,” he said noncommittally. J.B. was a short man with wire-rimmed glasses and a fedora hat on his head. He looked to be about forty-five, but it was hard to tell—life in the Deathlands prematurely aged a person, especially the kind of life that J.B. led.
He was a weaponsmith, an expert in firearms and explosives and able to turn his hand to just about any weapon a person cared to name. He was the Armorer of the group, and he had traveled with Ryan Cawdor the longest.
Ryan was the nominal leader. There were six others in the group, including J.B., with Ricky the youngest and most recent addition. Ricky was sixteen with black hair and dark brown eyes. He was good-looking in a skinny kind of way, still more youth than man but growing every day. He had met Ryan and J.B. when they had visited Nuestra Señora, a small seaport on Monster Island. Nuestra Señora was Ricky’s home, but with his sister missing and so much that had happened there, he had chosen to stick with Ryan and his companions as they traveled the Deathlands in search of a better life.
Just now, this was not that better place. “California” was what J.B. had called it when they had emerged from the hidden redoubt. J.B. knew maps and geography, and he had a way of mapping their location using a device he carried called a mini-sextant.
It had been dark when they had arrived, emerging from the redoubt via its mat-trans system into what appeared to be a grove of oranges. The oranges were as big as a baby’s head, weighing down the branches of the trees that lined the little ribbon of road. The trouble was they were radioactive oranges. J.B. had taken one glance at his lapel rad counter, left them on the trees and gone in search of other nutrition. They had found a scalie settlement located in a flat-faced pyramid beside a graveyard for rusted cars.
“Shopping mall,” Mildred had explained when she saw it. Mildred Wyeth had grown up in the twentieth century and sometimes she made reference to things that Ricky couldn’t make sense of. She was a handsome black woman who wore her hair in beaded plaits. She had been a medical doctor back in the twentieth century, specializing in cryogenic research. When she had suffered complications during routine abdominal surgery, the decision had been made to place her temporarily in cryogenic hibernation. “Temporarily” turned out to be about a hundred years, during which a nuclear exchange between the U.S.A. and USSR had heralded the end of Western civilization. Mildred had woken up to a world that had driven through the gates of hell and just kept on accelerating.
J.B.’s hand pressed against Ricky’s back, propelling him faster along the road with a mighty shove. “Head in the game, boy!”
Ricky’s side was bleeding, wetness seeping into his shirt and making it stick. He ignored it; whatever wound he had, be it lethal or a graze, stopping now to check would get them both chilled.
Behind Ricky, the Armorer’s other hand was working the M-4000, sending another cacophonous burst of fire at their pursuers.
“They’ve got our scent,” J.B. yelled. “Forget the flare!”
Their pursuers were scalies: mutated humanoid creatures with hard, blistered skin. Scalies were just one of a whole variety of genetic twists that had happened to humanity since the widespread nuclear fallout had sent planetary radiation levels through the stratosphere. Humanity also suffered at the hands of genetically developed beings that were used as bioweapons.
Scalies were insular and some had proved capable of forming a society. This group clearly took it personally when anyone accidentally stepped into their territory. But then, the figures hanging from the trees gave that away, now that Ricky thought about it.
They had to get back to the redoubt, but the scalies were right behind them. They’d have to lure the muties away, then double back to the redoubt so that the companions weren’t swarmed before they got inside.
J.B.’s shotgun roared again and a shower of watermelon-size oranges dropped from a tree like cannonballs, slapping two of their pursuers to the ground. The others continued to give chase, stopping every few steps to pitch fist-size rocks at the two companions. Surprisingly, a few of the scalies were armed with muskets. They were cobbled together, based on more efficient designs—probably something the scalies had found in the pyramid structure that had once been a shopping mall. Whatever they were, getting hit by a projectile from one was still going to hurt like hell.
J.B. was mentally counting his shots, and knew he needed to reload the M-4000. He fumbled with its breech on the run, his legs pumping as he sought the right pocket of his jacket for more ammo.
Ahead of J.B., Ricky skidded to an abrupt halt, his arms windmilling as he fought to keep his balance, the Webley revolver drawing circles in the air.
“What the hell, kid?” J.B. asked as he came up alongside Ricky. Then he saw why the youth had stopped. They were out of road. Literally. The blacktop ended in a sudden drop—a cliff that fell about two hundred feet to the ocean below. J.B. figured that hitting the surface from this height would be like hitting a solid wall.
* * *
DOC TANNERWAS struggling to keep pace with Mildred and Jak.
Jak had short legs but he moved like a jackrabbit on jolt, barreling down the slope toward the redoubt entrance. Jak Lauren was an albino, with hair and skin that were chalk-white and eyes a ruby-red that made him look almost ghostlike. A few inches over five feet tall, Jak had a slight, wiry build that was surprisingly tough, and the barrel of his Colt Python pointed ahead of him as he scanned the overgrown scrub that all but hid the entrance to the redoubt.
Mildred kept pace with Jak easily enough, head down so that the wind blew her plaits past her shoulders, regulating her breathing as she ran. “You all right back there, Doc?” she asked as they zipped between dead trees on the pronounced slope.
Doc nodded, breathlessly muttering that he was fine, but it ended up sounding more like a straining steam engine trying to speak than a man.
Mildred glanced at him, concern etched on her face. “We’re almost there,” she assured him. “Just a few dozen yards.”
Doc nodded again, appreciating the heads-up. His vision was whirling a little, as if he was on one of those old fairground rides that used to visit his hometown back in his youth.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, to give him his full appellation, was an unwilling time traveler who had been dumped in the Deathlands following a rather cruel experiment by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The chron jumps had affected his body, aging him prematurely. When he was trawled from the nineteenth century, Doc had been in his early thirties. Now he resembled