Wretched Earth
INTEGRITY LOST
After the Megacull, the weak died off, so that a century
later, the living have descended from only the toughest stock. Still, it takes
more than strength to survive Deathlands. It takes skill, cunning and a
warrior’s heart. But for Ryan Cawdor, staying alive isn’t just about living. In
this nuke-transformed America, it helps if somewhere, deep inside, there’s hope
of finding something better.
WALKING DEAD
A virulent strain of a predark biowep has been unleashed upon
the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating
monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his
companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They’ve
got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: turn the bloodlust of the ville’s
warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy. But that means
splitting up and hiring on as sec for both sides and surviving the
firefight—before the real hell is unleashed.
In Deathlands, time is blood.
The rottie yanked the youth against the wire
Other arms reached out to entangle him, their blackened nails
clawing at his flesh. Despite his frenzied thrashing, he couldn't break
free.
Several of the ville folk darted forward to try to help
him.
“Don't get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”
His friends tried pulling the youth away, but it did no good.
Then he screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit
deep into his ear.
Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance, his left arm crooked to
support his blaster hand, and fired a single round. The trapped boy's head
jerked, and he slumped.
His friends stared at Ryan in shock and fury.
“If you're bit, you're one of them!” Ryan growled. “Now learn
from that stupe and stay back!”
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Demons of Eden
The Mars
Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the
Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter:
Collector's Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia's Demise
Dark
Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora's Redoubt
Rat King
Zero
City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow
Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon
Gate
Destiny's Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil
Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death
Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual
Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
Strontium Swamp
Shatter
Zone
Perdition Valley
Cannibal Moon
Sky Raider
Remember
Tomorrow
Sunspot
Desert Kings
Apocalypse Unborn
Thunder
Road
Plague Lords
  (Empire of Xibalba Book I)
Dark
Resurrection
  (Empire of Xibalba Book II)
Eden's
Twilight
Desolation Crossing
Alpha Wave
Time
Castaways
Prophecy
Blood Harvest
Arcadian's Asylum
Baptism
of Rage
Doom Helix
Moonfeast
Downrigger Drift
Playfair's
Axiom
Tainted Cascade
Perception Fault
Prodigal's
Return
Lost Gates
Haven's Blight
Hell Road Warriors
Palaces
of Light
Wretched Earth
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are
increasing. The living are getting rarer.
âEugene Ionesco
1909-1994
Rhinoceros
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
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.…
Contents
Prologue
The four of them stood in the darkened vanadium-steel
room in the guts of the shattered redoubt: a tall rangy man in a tattered
greatcoat; a well-built woman whose hair showed auburn highlights in the
backsplash from their lamps off gleaming metal walls; a youth with a mane of
long black hair hanging past his shoulders; another youth only a bit older,
wearing a patched bomber jacket and glasses.
The woman played the bluish gleam of her solar-charging flash
on the walls of what he took to be a hexagonal chamber. To the kid with glasses
the walls looked like glass. What feeble illumination the quartet was able to
muster wasn't enough to let his weak eyes see anything beyond the glass.
“Shit,” the tall man said. “Nothing in this place. No food, no
ammo, no meds. It's been looted out. I feel like smashing those fancy
windows.”
“What good'll that do?” the woman asked.
The tall man shrugged. “Make me feel better.”
“You can't,” the youth said.
The others looked at him, their eyes glinting faintly. He
quailed a little under the pressure of their gaze. His own light, a dingy yellow
at best, faded to thirsty-man-piss color as he momentarily forgot to keep
pumping the little flywheel generator with the palm of his hand, which ached
from the constant squeezing.
The tall man raised a fist as if to backhand him.
“Step back, Drygulch. He may know something,” the woman
said.
“Yeah,” the tall man said, sneering. “He knows a lot of crap.
It's all he's good for.”
The youth in the glasses actually rallied at that. He did know
stuff. He was endlessly curious, always seeking to learn more. And he had a
memory like a miser's fist.
“Let him talk,” the woman said. She wore a homemade leather
jacket, the collar of which was lined with silver wolf hide. A belt held up her
khaki trousers and the flapped holster for her remade .45 handblaster. “He
does
know stuff.”
“Whatever you say, Lariat,” Drygulch agreed, scratching at his
cap of hair, which looked like short, tight curls of silver-frosted copper wire.
“What's on your mind, Hamster?”
“It's
Reno,
” he insisted. He didn't
even know how the older man had gotten hold of his hated childhood nickname.
“Whatever,” Drygulch said. He wasn't a bad type. He didn't
dislike Reno so much as he liked poking at him.
Reno swelled inside with the warmth that came from Lariat's
acknowledgment of his value to them. To
her.
He held
on desperately to the hope that someday the auburn-haired adventuress would
realize his real worth, and return the fiercely burning love he harbored for
her.
“That's some kind of armored glass,” he said. “Your wrecking
bar'd just bounce off. So would bullets, so forget all about shooting at the
walls.”
Drygulch's badlands face crumpled even more than it had to
start with. But he lowered the revolver in his right hand. His left held up a
kerosene lantern whose smoke filled the room with an oily smell.
“This is a triple-bust,” the tall man growled. “We're wastin'
our time.”
“No, my friends,” said the young man who was the party's fourth
member. He wore a long, plaid flannel shirt over holey jeans. The soles of his
ancient, pointy-toed cowboy boots were held on by thin pieces of leather, sewed
around when wet and allowed to tighten into place as they dried. He carried a
well-worn M-1 carbine. “There is treasure down here, I tell you. I have seen it
with my own eyes.”
“Then why didn't you lead us right to it without dicking
around?” Drygulch asked.
The black-haired kid's name was Johnny Hueco. He wasn't one of
them. He was a local who'd fast-talked the trio into hiring him to guide them
into the busted-open redoubt, where he claimed he knew where to lay hands on a
baron's ransom in prime scavvie.
“Because we wanted to make sure nothing was going to jump on
our backs when we walked all fat, dumb and happy past doors without checking
what was behind 'em,” Lariat said. “Also because we wanted to make sure we
didn't miss anything worth hauling out of here. So step back off the trigger,
Drygulch.”
“We got to hurry,” Johnny Hueco said, shifting his weight
uneasily from foot to foot. “Things come out at night. Or in.”
That was why the bunch he'd been with when they'd stumbled onto
this place, in what once was western Kansas and was now triple hard core
Deathlands, hadn't stripped the redoubt of its fabulous treasure. So he said.
Something had jumped them in the dark. Only Johnny got out alive, and only
because he was closest to the door.
And because whatever it was had been too busy eating his
friends, his new companions reckoned. Not that they held it against him. Loyalty
was as good as jack or ammo in the Deathlands. Because it was so rare.
When muties or monsters attacked, sometimes all you could do
was bug out, and stickies take the slow. Like jack or ammo or white lightning,
loyalty could run out.
“Lead on, then,” Lariat said.
Johnny led them back out into the broad main corridor. Their
footsteps chased each other up and down the bare metal walls like small
frightened creatures.
“Shouldn't there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno
asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of
coarse material that didn't seem quite like rock.
“Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”
“I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast 'em just right, they can be
mighty tasty. If they ain't been eatin' too much fresh shit or old chills.”
Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was.
He hadn't eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of
dawn.
It wasn't just his wits and his packrat memory that had
sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people
were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been
feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.
“Here, what's this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside
Johnny.
They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a
large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: DangerâRestricted
AreaâAuthorized Laboratory Personnel Only.
Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what's that mean?”
“It means we're not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.
“I know that, ass face. I'm not stupe. I mean, what's it mean
here?
”
“It means there's valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.
“What if there's something living in there?” Reno asked,
hustling to catch up. He didn't think his friends would cut him out on any ace
scavvie they found. He just didn't like to leave too much to chance.
It was cold in hereâas above, so below. Topside, the plains
were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno's
skin prickled as if sunburned.
He hoped it wasn't caused by rads from fallout from the old
ground-burst crater a few miles west, drifting in through the cracks in the
installation's immensely thick concrete containment shell. They had no way of
telling. Unless your skin started getting all mottled and your hair began
falling out in clumps. Or you just went straight to the
convulsions-and-bloody-shits stage.
With the first you might not die. With the second, you might
not die soon
enough.
He'd seen both.
Drygulch held up his kerosene lantern. Next to the sign was a
door that had been jammed partway open.
“Strike,” Lariat said. She poked her head through and shone her
own flashlight around. “Looks like some kind of lab, all right.”
“I don't know,” Drygulch said. “I don't feel triple-good
fucking with whitecoat stuff. Especially not from old days.”
“You think we're in here scuffling like rats for rations and
ammo?” the woman scoffed.
“Well, yeah. That and meds. Mebbe some blasters. Boots. I could
use me some new boots.”
“Small-time. Mebbe you're satisfied with that. Not me.”
Reno caught up. “I don't think we'll find much of that kinda
stuff, anyway,” he said. “Place has seemed picked pretty clean so far.”
But Johnny Hueco was dancing from one disintegrating boot to
another. “This is it!” he said. “It's what I told you about.”
“No shit?” Drygulch said dubiously.
“Doesn't look touched in here,” Lariat said, backing out.
“If there really was anything worthwhile in there, wouldn't
somebody have gotten to it by now?” Drygulch asked.
“Mebbe not,” Reno said. “Mebbe the door hasn't been open
long.”
“Why'd it be open now, Reno?” Lariat asked.
“Earthquakes,” he said. “Get a lot of seismic activity in this
area. Some big quakes. Mighta shaken it open.”
Lariat studied him a moment longer. Her auburn hair hung to
just above the wolf-fur-trimmed collar of her jacket, framing wide cheekbones
and dark eyes with a touch of the Orient to them. Mebbe she wasn't a beauty,
Reno thought. Most men found her good-looking. She was queen of Reno's
world.
She'd made it clear early and emphatically that she was too
good for the likes of Drygulch and Reno. They might be trail mates and partners,
but no touchy-feely stuff.
Lariat nodded now. “Could be it. I'm going in. Who's with
me?”
“Might be bad animals in there, Lariat,” Drygulch said. “Muties
even.”
She drew her .45 handblaster, pinching back the slide to
confirm she had a round chambered.
“So, might be animals,” she said. “Right. I'm ready. Who wants
to live forever?”
“Um, just a sec,” Reno said. The others turned, then followed
his flywheel flashlight beam upward. The ceiling, higher in here than in the
corridor, had buckled sharply downward. “So, if the concrete's seriously
cracked, the whole fucking thing might cave in on our heads at any minute.”
“It hasn't fallen yet,” Lariat said blithely, and went in.
Eager as a hound pup, Johnny followed her. Drygulch sent an eye
roll Reno's way before he went on through.
Reno carried a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge scattergun on a
rope sling over his shoulder. A pump model with a hammer and a 5-round tube
magazine, it had been old, Reno had read somewhere in an old scavvied magazine,
even before the Big Nuke lit the skies with hell's own light. At some point in
the weapon's long history the barrel had been sawed off a few inches past the
end of the mag.
Transferring the flywheel flashlight from his right hand, which
had seriously begun to cramp, Reno took the best hold he could on the shotgun's
grip and swung the barrel up. What possible good the weapon could do against a
potential cave-in, the young man had no clue. He only knew holding it made him
feel better.
“Okay, what's âprions' mean?” Drygulch was asking suspiciously
when Reno entered the lab. He was peering at a cabinet stenciled prominently
with that word, plus numerous danger symbols and scary messages. “I never heard
of prions.”
There was a smell in there Reno couldn't name. More than just
cold metal and dust. Not like anything that had crept inside recently and died.
And he knew that if anybody had died down here during the Big Nuke, in the
hundred years and more that had passed, they'd have got their stinking done long
since. But still,
something
made him think of
death.
Then again, he reminded himself, that's an occupational hazard
for a scavvie. They were basically all about stealing dead people's stuff, and
trying not to join them in the process.
“Hamster,” Drygulch said, “you're the one with your rat nose
always buried in a book. What's it mean?”
Reno frowned and scratched his brow. Questions he couldn't
answer tickled. “No idea,” he said.
“Call him Reno,” said Lariat, who didn't look up from flicking
through random debris on a countertop with hands encased in fingerless leather
gloves. “Anyway, it means âthe goods.' Means we struck black gold.”
“You know this how?” Drygulch asked.
“Whatever prions are,” the woman said with an air of tested
patience, “the whitecoats back before Fire Day thought they were worth
squirreling away under that million tons of concrete and steel that's got Reno's
panties in a bunch.
And
a sealed heavy door inside
of that. I'd say that's valuable whatever the fuck it is, wouldn't you?”
“Cabinet's locked,” Drygulch complained.
“Well, open it,” Lariat said. “Use your pry bar. Reno, guard
the door.”
Johnny prowled the room. Lariat stood watching as Drygulch drew
the four-foot pry bar from its scabbard fastened to his big rucksack. They all
carried empty packs. Their possessions were cached a half mile from the
installation's entrance.
The metal cabinet marked Prions wasn't all that sturdy. A
little poking for purchase, a grunt and heave and a squeal of tormented metal,
and the door popped open.
Drygulch resheathed the bar, picked up his lantern and hunkered
down to peer inside.
“Little vials in here,” he said.
“Load 'em in your pack,” Lariat said.
Their guide walked to a door at the back of the room. It looked
as if it opened by sliding sideways into the alloy wall.
“There's more through here,” he said.
“Can we open it?” Reno asked dubiously. “Looks a little hefty
for Drygulch's bar.”
“It was open when I was here before,” Johnny said. “I swear
it.”