Ryan ate like an animal, trying to satisfy a bottomless appetite. Though the food tasted delicious, it had no substance after he swallowed it. He had been eating for what seemed like hours, so long that his jaws ached from the chewing, and still his stomach felt hollow.
He sat in a throne chair on a dais, slightly elevated above the other diners. Beside him on a less ornate chair was his lover and battle mate, Krysty Wroth. The color of her low-cut, emerald-velvet gown matched the color of her eyes, and set off the blaze of her long sentient red hair, which had retracted into a mass of eager coils around her face. Perspiration glazed the silky cleft between her breasts and her cheeks were brightly flushed, consequences of the hall’s sweltering heat.
A wave of dizziness swept over Ryan, and he nearly passed out into his plate. He was so hungry he kept forgetting to breathe between bites. He forced himself to slow down and look up from the food.
The others seated at his table had come a long way to join the party.
From the far side of the grave, to be exact.
Prince Victor Boldt, Baron Nelson Mandeville, Mashashige, Yashimoto, Captain Pyra Quadde, Baron Sean Sharpe, Cissie Torrance, Baron Tourment and Ryan’s misshapen brother, Harvey, had thrown off their shrouds and were again housed in living flesh.
Despite the fact that Ryan had sealed their respective dooms, his old enemies seemed to bear him no grudge. They were in excellent spirits, gorging on the mounded banquet platters and drinking from steaming mugs of high-proof, buttered grog.
At the surrounding tables, through the shifting clouds of smoke, he glimpsed less familiar, but recognizable faces, the cannon fodder of a hundred battles, sec men and mercies who had fallen to his blaster or blade. It was among these triple stupes that the brawl had broken out.
Ryan was still pondering the puzzle of the party’s guest list when Harvey Cawdor got up from his chair. Death, it appeared, had shown him no more mercy than life: Harvey still had the cruelly twisted body he’d been born with. He hoisted his mug high in salute. “Here’s to Ryan Cawdor,” he cried, “the glorious hero of Deathlands!”
Harvey shouted over the cheers. “Considering what he did to each of us, I think one thing’s safe to say—we should have kept an eye out for him.”
The tired joke drew groans and boos. Boldt and Quadde pelted the deformed man with compressed wads of bread and bits of gristle.
“And how about that panga?” Harvey crowed, undeterred. “Sure, long is good when it comes to blades, but isn’t eighteen inches overcompensating for something?” He waggled his pinkie finger at Ryan.
A much better comedic effort.
Encouraged by the coarse laughter of his audience, Harvey climbed to a precarious perch on the seat of his chair. He plunged a hand into his fly and unlimbered himself. “Here’s to brotherhood!” he cried, urinating in a broad arc across the banquet table, spraying and scattering the guests on the other side.
“Judging from Little Harvey there,” Krysty remarked, “your knife must be a yard long.”
Her jibe put the diners over the top. As they howled in glee, they pounded on the table with their fists and the pommels of their knives. Harvey was so amused he fell off his chair.
Penis jokes and golden showers, normally grounds for bloodshed in Ryan’s world, raised no hackles this night. Everybody was having too good a time to take offense. The no-longer-dead hooted and backslapped one another as they reclaimed their places at the table.
Servants brought fresh platters of roasted meats, and long trays of cakes and pies. As everyone got busy, fiddle, squeezebox and drum started up right behind the guest of honor’s throne.
Krysty pointed at a corner of Ryan’s mouth. “You’re dripping,” she told him.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked down at a smear of red across his knuckles. Something tickled in the back of his throat, and he sneezed suddenly, and with great force. A gob of bloody matter shot out of his nose and landed on the tablecloth. As he stared at it, the gob fell apart, its minute components wriggling off in all directions. Ryan belched and tasted copper; his head started to spin, then his stomach convulsed. Hunching over, he vomited a shapeless, fluid mass onto his plate. Gray under their sheen of blood, like fibers of steel wool, the squirming wire worms gave off a rotten-egg stench.
Ryan shoved violently back from the table, and looking up, viewed the feast in a new light.
Literally.
The row of torches had ignited the threadbare tapestries, and the walls seethed with flame, brightly illuminating the hall—and its occupants. Seated at his table, and all the other tables were cobwebbed, moldering corpses. He turned to Krysty, and seeing her, let loose a bellow of pain.
A small, hairy-legged spider had built a home between her shriveled breasts. Her hair hung lank and lifeless to her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and deeply sunken in their sockets, but the skin of her eyelids, face and neck twitched and rippled, animated by the stillbusy parasites beneath.
As Ryan recoiled in shock, the high-pitched notes of the fiddle and squeezebox turned into a shrill, electronic whine, and the drumbeat became an intermittent whipcrack.
He came awake with a hard jerk, gasping for air.
There was none.
He lay curled on an armaglass floor, his throat scorched, a burning pain spearing deep in his lungs, and withering heat beating against his back. Gray smoke, thick with particulate matter, swirled in the small chamber, transected by wild flashes of electricity.
The jump dream had ended but his nightmare continued.
The mat-trans unit was on fire.
Beside him on the floor, he could see the slumping forms of his five companions. As he pushed up from the blistering hot armaglass, his world went dim around the edges—lack of oxygen was shutting down his brain. If he allowed himself to pass out, they would all die, and horribly. A tingling rush of adrenaline brought Ryan to full consciousness.
He had to use his shoulder to crack loose the door of the mat-trans unit, which was stuck in the jamb. It swung open, revealing an anteroom lit by a bank of flickering fluorescent bulbs. Fresh air rushed in around him, feeding the flames. Ryan sucked down a quick breath, then turned back to the blaze and his helpless friends.
He grabbed hold of the nearest arm and dragged its owner’s body over to the portal. The tails of Doc Tanner’s frock coat were smoking as Ryan tumbled him out of the chamber. The lanky old man didn’t move. There was no time to check for a pulse—fire was starting to shoot up along the expansion seams in the armaglass floor.
Ryan gathered Krysty in his arms. Though she was unconscious, her prehensile mutie hair had retracted into the tight ringlets of mortal fear. She moaned as he unceremoniously pitched her out of the doorway.
When Ryan tried to do the same for Jak Lauren, the albino came to in his grasp. Faster than a blink, the wild child of Deathlands had the razor-sharp point of a leaf-bladed knife jammed against the front of Ryan’s throat, his slitted, blood red eyes glittering.
“Jak, it’s me,” Ryan said, giving him a hard shake. “For nuke’s sake, wake up.”
The youth’s eyes widened, and he immediately lowered the blade.
“Come on,” Ryan said as he turned back for the others. “We’ve got to hurry….”
After dragging their two remaining companions over the threshold, he and Jak did the same with all their backpacks. Crossing the chamber was like being caught on an armaglass skillet. Impervious to heat, the unit’s floor plates weren’t burning; it was the material beneath—circuitry, floor joists, insulation—that was on fire. Boot soles melting, Ryan retrieved his predark treasure, a scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle.
Jak staggered out of the mat-trans ahead of him, his lank white hair