By the skin of his teeth, Harmonica Tom had escaped capture at Padre Island on his forty-foot sloop, Tempest. The companions might have made it to safety, too, if J.B.’s rib injury hadn’t held them back. That he had been the crew’s weak link, that his infirmity had brought them to such a fate, stuck deep in the Armorer’s craw.
The tug lurched so violently to starboard that J.B.’s knees buckled and he nearly fell headfirst over his bucket. Catching his balance, he looked up and saw Ryan and Mildred sitting side by side, hauling back on the same oar. Ryan’s dark hair was matted with sweat and tangled in a dense black growth of beard. The patch over his left eye was crusted with white salt, as was the long scar that divided brow and cheek. In three weeks Mildred had lost a tremendous amount of weight, the sinews in her caramel-brown forearms and biceps stood out like cables as she rowed. Some of the white beads in her hair had broken, and the carefully woven plaits had come unbraided; they hung in matted puffballs down her back.
Doc occupied the bench behind them, his lips moving as he muttered to himself nonstop. The Victorian time-traveler looked even more scarecrow and skeletal than usual, his clothes hanging loosely from stooped and shrunken shoulders. Wispy strands of gray beard did nothing to hide hollowed cheeks.
All three bared their teeth as they leaned hard into unison strokes, struggling to make way against the gathering headwind and jumbled seas.
J.B. couldn’t count the number of times he and his friends had been taken prisoner, but this time was different. The specific details of being exposed to the elements, starved, beaten, forced to eat, sleep and shit shackled to oars was unimportant. What mattered was, each pull southward took them farther away from everything they knew, from everything they believed in, and brought them that much closer to the truth about their place in the larger scheme of things.
So far the truth didn’t look all that promising.
During the companions’ multiday voyage east from Port Arthur ville to Padre Island, Harmonica Tom had passed on rumors about pockets of predark civilization thriving in the southern latitudes nearly untouched by nuke strikes. Were the Matachìn pirates a scouting party from a much more advanced, a much more populous culture? Was it possible that a complex, industrialized society had existed side by side with Deathlands ever since nukeday? If that was indeed the case, then J.B. knew he and his comrades faced an adversary with overwhelming advantages, an adversary that could chew them up like weevils in porridge. And there was no guarantee that any of the success strategies hard-won in the hellscape would save them.
The Armorer, who had fought on the winning side in dozens of campaigns and a thousand skirmishes, felt both helpless and insignificant. Being short of stature, he found those feelings particularly grating. The lack-of-size business was something he had lived with his entire life, and he’d come to terms with it by making himself extramean and extraquick. He’d been mean enough and fast enough to hold his own alongside Deathlands’s most famous warriors: Trader, Poet and Ryan Cawdor. In fact, Trader had often bragged around the convoy campfire that J.B. was the kind of sawed-off, fearless little bastard who would climb up your chest, stand on your shoulders and beat in your head with his gun butt.
The idea of being swallowed up by distance, technology and scale, of being truly, unutterably lost was no longer an abstract concept to J.B. Now he knew what Ryan had experienced when he had been singled out and spirited off to Shadow World. The lesson Ryan had learned on that overpopulated parallel Earth was to keep his head down and wait for an opportunity. No matter how bleak and impossible things looked in the present, to trust in fate that the seam would appear.
The cloud looming before them cast a vast shadow, turning the water beneath it inky-black. Over the coxswain’s drumbeat and the steady creak and splash of the oars, J.B. could hear the shrill hiss of heavy rain falling on the sea. As the sound of the downpour grew louder and louder, the headwind shrieked and the air temperature plummeted. J.B. shivered uncontrollably in his wet clothes, clenching his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering.
Then it was upon them, roaring.
An impenetrable curtain of rain swept over the tug’s bow. The volume of water was astounding, as was its power. It came down like a waterfall, hammering the metal awnings, flash-flooding the scuppers.
The tug wallowed through steep troughs, pressing deeper into the darkness and the din. Cold rain in a wave slammed down on J.B.’s fedora and shoulders, and again his knees almost gave way, this time from the sheer weight of the torrent. As he struggled to keep his feet, the deck lights above him snapped on.
At least it wasn’t chem rain, he thought.
This was drinkable water.
The five-gallon buckets filled in no time. The deck-watch forced the slaves to pass them hand to hand down the file and dump them into the stern’s freshwater holding tank. Again and again, the process was repeated, buckets allowed to fill to the brim and handed down the line. When the tank was finally topped off, the Matachìn sealed the hatch shut, then ducked back under an awning to escape the cascade’s pummeling.
The conga line had nowhere to go.
The tug didn’t immediately turn out from under the cloud and let her two sister ships have a go at filling their tanks. Its course and speed held it stationary beneath the downpour, leaving the linked slaves to flounder and slide, gasping from the concentration of water vapor in the air. J.B. groaned as his feet went out from under him and he hit the deck hard. Though he had cradled his ribs with his arms, trying to protect them, white-hot pain lanced through his torso.
On his knees, fighting for breath, J.B. squinted up at the wheelhouse, two stories above the main deck. He glimpsed the pirate captain leaning out through an open side window, chewing on a stub of fat black stogie as he peered down at them; his dreadlocks were piled high atop his head and laced with golden trinkets. The Matachìn commander reached up to the wheelhouse ceiling for a lanyard.
The ship’s horn unleashed a string of mocking blasts as the chained captives flopped on the deck.
Through the shifting veil of heavy rain, against the glare of the deck lights, J.B. could see the stinking bastard was laughing his head off.
Chapter One
The convoy’s lead tug rumbled onward through the dead-still night. Diesel engines shook the deck under Ryan’s boot soles; thick smoke poured from the twin stacks atop the superstructure, enveloping the stern in caustic particulate. Deep breathing was difficult. The smoke burned his one good eye and it left an awful, scorched petrochemical taste in his mouth.
Way nukin’ better than rowing, though, Ryan told himself. He’d had enough rowing to last him the rest of his life.
Oars shipped, the Matachìn were powering toward what he figured was their ultimate destination.
The Lantic had turned black-glass-smooth under a starry, moonless sky. In the distance, on the starboard side, its oily surface reflected a narrow band made up of brilliant points of light—white, yellow, red, green—dotting, demarcating an otherwise invisible shoreline. As the bow crested the widely spaced swells, the lights lurched skyward then abruptly dropped. Landfall, the first in more than three weeks, drew inexorably closer.
The lights definitely weren’t from fires or torches or anything combustible; Ryan knew that because they didn’t flicker or throb. They glowed steadily.
Which meant electricity.
Massive quantities of electricity.
Power to burn, in fact.
What bobbed ahead of them was no looted carcass of an underground redoubt, no shit-hammered, hand-to-mouth ville, no nuked-out urban ruin. This was a city, as cities were rumored of old, and from more than a mile offshore it looked to be very much alive.
Ryan