Siren Song

PARADISE LOST

Crawling from the wreckage of Armageddon, humanity endures, mutated and forever altered. Gone are the comforts of civilization, replaced by a bloodlust to survive. Deathlands is a tortured landscape where peace and hope struggle to take root. Still, Ryan Cawdor and his band push onward, seeking a place to call home.

SWARM OF MADNESS

If any kind of utopia exists in postapocalyptic America, Ryan and his companions have yet to find it. But high in the Virginian mountains, their quest may find its reward. Heaven Falls is an agrarian idyll, its thriving inhabitants harnessing powerful feminine energy and the medicinal qualities of honey. Bountiful and serene, this community is the closest thing to sanctuary the companions have ever encountered. But as they are seduced by a life they have only envisioned, they discover Heaven has a trapdoor that opens straight to hell…

“Help me,” the man called, his voice raised in panic

He glanced back to where Jak was hiding. “Please, you know what they’ll do....”

Five white-clad figures emerged from the trees, descending on the armed man. They were women, young, tall and svelte, with long hair styled on top of their heads in elaborate braids. Their robes were light and gauzy, covering each woman from neck to ankle. The skirts and sleeves billowed around them like mist.

“Die! Damn you all!” the man screamed, rising from his crouch and blasting wildly.

The women kept gliding toward him, gracefully, swiftly, sidestepping the shots with breathtaking ease.

The man was shouting nonsense now. Jak could see him squeezing the trigger, but he had no ammo left. He dropped backward in an uncoordinated stumble.

The white-robed women converged on him. What happened next, Jak couldn’t tell. All he saw was the billowing robes circling the spot where the man had gone down, fluttering there like waves.

Siren Song

James Axler

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

—Karl Marx, 1818-1883

For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.

—William Shakespeare

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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quotes

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

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

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Copyright

Chapter One

The road rushed toward Ricky Morales as he took the blast in his flank. A second later his face collided with the broken pavement. The burning flare in his hand sailed away, sparkling bright red as it rolled over and over across the tarmac like blood-drenched lightning. Beside it, the ball from the musket went rolling away down the road, splashed now with Ricky’s blood.

“Come on, boy, keep up,” J. B. Dix shouted, thrusting the barrel of his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun over Ricky’s head. A second later J.B. sent a roaring blast at the figures that chased them through the grove, momentarily silencing their sinister, animallike whooping.

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 a thin, silver-haired man in his sixties.

He wore a black frock coat, pants, a white shirt and black knee boots. Doc carried with him an ebony cane topped with a silver lion’s head, and inside the sheath was a blade of fine Toledo steel. Besides his swordstick, he carried a replica LeMat percussion pistol, which included a second barrel that functioned as a shotgun, and which could blast a single shot when needed. The fact that both swordstick and blaster contained a surprise pretty well said all that needed to be said about Doc Tanner—he was a man full of surprises.

Up ahead, the redoubt entrance looked like a tunnel that had become overgrown with creepers and moss. A line of orange trees had grown in front of the wide entrance like a fence, masking it further. Three hours earlier the entrance had been all but invisible. When the companions had emerged from it, they had cleared some of the flora out of the way—enough at least that they could pass through.

Jak was first to reach the doors, pulling away creepers from a keypad that rested against the wall at shoulder height. His white fingers punched in the three-digit entry code. As the heavy door slid aside on aged tracks, Jak glanced behind him, checking for Mildred and Doc and confirming that no one was following them.

Jak saw a figure appear behind Doc, still a little ways up the slope where once a dirt track had lain. Jak didn’t wait to see who the figure was; he just raised his Colt Python and fixed the shadow in its sights. Then he stroked the trigger and sent a single booming shot up the slope, cutting Doc’s pursuer dead center in his chest. The scalie went down in a splatter of blood and bone.

Mildred joined Jak an instant later, breathless, her eyes wide. “What was that?”

“Scalie,” Jak said, already slipping through the open doors to the redoubt. He spoke little, and rarely in full sentences.

Mildred waited in the doorway with her Czech-made ZKR-551 target pistol in her hand, scanning the landscape for further movement. Jak’s eyesight was uncanny, but Mildred was confident she could spot a hostile figure in the overgrowth.

Doc joined Mildred seconds later and together they slipped through the open doorway and into the redoubt.

* * *

“FIREBLAST,” RYAN CAWDORmuttered as he watched the scene play out below him.

Belly on the ground, he lay amid the grass, the Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster stretched out in front of him, his finger resting on the trigger guard. All around him, dead bodies hung from the trees, casting long shadows as the sun rose over the cliff. This whole excursion had been a mistake from the get-go, he lamented as he watched the sloping ground through the longblaster’s scope.

Ryan was a tall man with broad shoulders and a mop of unruly black hair. His face had two days of stubble and a black patch over the left eye where he had lost it in a knife fight with his brother a lifetime ago. A scar ran up the side of his face, a pale line that cut through his emerging beard like an arrow pointing to the missing eye. Ryan had lived with it a long time.

Krysty Wroth crouched next to Ryan with her back against a tree, her expression fixed as she listened for an ambush. She was strikingly beautiful with vivid red hair and the kind of athletic frame and long legs that, once seen, men fantasized about long after the woman herself had departed.

The woman wore a red shirt and blue jeans, with blue cowboy boots whose heels added to her tall frame. She held a blaster in her hand—a compact Smith & Wesson .38 loaded with .158-grain lead slugs.

Ryan watched through the scope as J.B. and Ricky reached the end of the road. California was a lot different since the nukes hit. This place, for instance, was nothing more than a splinter of an island surrounded on all sides by blue ocean. For another, the place was maybe two miles long and a mile across, and it was covered in orange groves. Again, if they’d known that when they’d jumped into its mat-trans they might have had the sense to get the hell out of here before the scalies took umbrage at their appearance on what they obviously thought of as their own private island.

When the nukes had struck way back in 2001, a lot of California had gone missing. The San Andreas Fault had finally cracked, dropping a good portion of the western coast of the United States of America into the ocean and drowning millions with it. What was left now, besides the abbreviated West Coast itself, was a group of isles known as the Western Islands. This minuscule piece of land, it seemed, had once been the home to some out-of-town mall. “Twelve Starbucks and a JCPenney” was the way Mildred had described it to him.

Ryan guessed that visitors to the mall had been oblivious of the redoubt on its doorstep. He took another breath, watching through the Steyr’s crosshairs as the scalies swarmed toward J.B. and Ricky. He had known J.B. a long time, all the way back to their days with Trader when they had roamed the Deathlands, part of the crew of War Wag One. The two men were equals and as close as brothers, and they had an understanding that went beyond words.

The scalies were slowing now, wary of what J.B. and the kid were going to unleash on them. The flare had gotten their attention, which was just as they had planned it, ensuring Doc, Mildred and Jak could get to the redoubt safely without the scalies hot on their heels. Ryan watched the scalies emerge from the tree cover in ones and twos. He took another deep breath and slipped his finger behind the guard so that it rested against the trigger. Shoot on the exhale, he reminded himself automatically, when the body is at its steadiest.

* * *

J.B.’SBOOTHEEL scuffed against the cliff edge as he took another step backward, the sound of the ocean loud in his ears. Ricky was hunched over next to him with one arm around his belly. There was blood leaking through his fingers.

“Hang in there, kid,” J.B. murmured as scalies swarmed from cover.

There were more than two dozen of them now, closer to thirty, J.B. estimated. They were hairless and buck naked. Some had added rudimentary tattoos across their bodies, blue swirls and lines across shoulders and chest; one displayed a shape across his face that reminded J.B. of a bat.

As he emerged from the trees, the bat man said something, but J.B. couldn’t make sense of it. It sounded like a dog snarling, a low kind of growl. Around him, the other scalies began to laugh louder—now that was something J.B. did understand, the universal laughter of the mocking bully.

Several of the scalies were sticking close to the trees as they reloaded their muskets. They were cumbersome weapons, and J.B. could see that the shot they fired was large and ball-like, approximately the size of an old table-tennis ball. It was one of those that had hit Ricky, large enough to tear clothes and skin, but not refined enough to pierce through the flesh.

The Armorer calculated that Ricky had two bullets left before he would need to reload, which meant, unless he got his shotgun reloaded, the odds were lousy.

“We going to chill them,” Ricky whispered, “or what?” The kid trusted J.B. to make these decisions. He had volunteered to carry the flare even when J.B. had tried to dissuade him. “Two blasters are better than one,” he had told the Armorer, “and you’ll have my back, right?”

Sure, J.B. had his back all right. And look where that had got them.

The leader with the bat tattoo was walking purposefully along the overgrown roadway toward J.B., its dark eyes flicking down to the open shotgun where J.B. had not had a chance to reload. “Outta time tuh load blasta,” Bat Tattoo taunted as he approached the Armorer. His voice was rough, like sandpaper, the accent all but impenetrable. The leader’s lips pulled back from his sharp teeth and he began to laugh. And then his head burst like a watermelon and a thunderclap echoed through the grove.

“Dark night, Ryan, but you took your sweet bastard time!” J.B. muttered as the mutie leader went caroming past him and over the cliff edge, his head a ruined mess of brain and bone.

Around him, the scalies were reacting with shock at their leader’s death, scrambling this way and that as they searched for their new attacker. Another shot cut the air and one of the musket-carrying muties went sailing to the ground in a sprawl of limbs.

J.B. slipped new ammo into his shotgun’s breech as he moved, then stroked the shotgun’s trigger, sending a fearsome burst of fire at the two nearest scalies. They went down with yelps of pain, blood splattering across the blacktop.

Beside J.B., Ricky had sunk to one knee and was firing shots from his own blaster before switching to his second weapon, a reproduction De Lisle carbine. The De Lisle was about half as long as Ricky was tall, with a bolt action and mock-wood finishing. It boomed with each shot like a miniature rumble of thunder, and each time another scalie dropped to the ground. Despite the pain in his flank, Ricky felt alive.

* * *

THINGSWEREAmess inside the redoubt. Located underground, it was like a concrete rabbit warren, flickering lights illuminating gray walls on which were painted dusty stripes of red, green and yellow. Bird caws echoed down the corridors. There was sand and dirt splashed over the walls by the wind, and bird droppings and insect husks carpeted the floors. Some of the corridors ended in rubble while others ended in sheer drops that looked straight out onto the ocean. Mildred followed Jak, trusting his keen tracker instincts to retrace the path they had taken a few hours ago when they had arrived.

They had left Doc at the redoubt entrance, either to welcome Ryan and J.B. or to blast the living crap out of anyone—or anything—else who tried to enter.

The redoubt itself was set half out to sea, one entire side cut away by the quake that had turned this strip of land into an island decades before. Despite that destruction, its automated facilities still functioned, including the ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights and, crucially, the mat-trans unit. Quite how the mat-trans could still operate when so much of the building had been wrenched away was beyond Mildred’s comprehension. They’d built these old places tough.

The mat-trans was a twentieth-century invention designed to move troops and matériel between locations with the minimum of fuss. The matter-transporter units were located in dozens of abandoned military redoubts across the old United States of America and several other parts of the world. While the redoubts remained mostly untampered with by the locals, locked up and hidden away as they were, Mildred and her companions had utilized the mat-trans units for a number of years, zipping from location to location as they sought a better life away from the routine bloodshed of the Deathlands. Finding somewhere to settle had proved a lot harder than Mildred had expected.

Leading the way, Jak stepped into the redoubt control room. Twin aisles of desks ran lengthwise across the room, facing a screen that was blotched with the white stripes of bird feces. The desks, too, were smothered with droppings, and as Mildred entered the room she saw a gull flap its wings in surprise as it rose from one corner. The bird had a nest here, tucked out of sight. Mildred ignored the gull as it swooped around the room, cawing in distress.

The two companions made their way to the door to the anteroom, where they waited for their friends to join them.

* * *

ITWASPANDEMONIUM. Scalies were running in all directions.

While most of the muties had scattered in blind panic, several came searching for the sniper who had executed their leader. Krysty watched from her hiding place in the bole of a tree, the Smith & Wesson .38 clutched close to her breast as two figures broke from the tree line where the bodies hung, running toward Ryan where he lay on the grass picking off their companions. One of the scalies held a knife, and it flashed as it reflected the sunlight. Glass, Krysty realized.

As the two scalies vaulted over a fallen log, Krysty emerged and popped off two shots from the .38. The first plowed into the chest of the scalie on the left, and he seemed to flip over himself as he was driven back and to the ground. But her second shot missed, whipping away just an inch over the right hand scalie’s shoulder. Tough break—he was the one with the knife.

The scalie changed direction. He ran not for Ryan now but for Krysty, drawing the glass knife back in preparation to swing. Krysty whipped up the .38, but the scalie was on her before she could squeeze the trigger.

The two of them went down with a thud of bone-jarring impact. Krysty fell backward as the knife swished through the air just inches from her face. The scalie spread his legs to hold her down, crouching over her crab-style to stop her from escaping. The knife swung again, eight inches of blade flashing with the sun’s rays.

Krysty brought up her blaster and squeezed the trigger. The .38 fired at point-blank range, but the bullet deflected on a callused section of her attacker’s armor-like flesh. The scalie howled in pain and, in the same instant, reached out with his free hand and grabbed Krysty’s blaster by the muzzle, shoving it aside.

Krysty groaned as her wrist was bent backward. The scalie’s grip was as strong as a vise and she could feel the bones of her wrist grinding together as he clenched tighter.

Looming above Krysty, the mutie brought his glass blade down toward her face, hissing through clenched teeth in some eerie victory trill, the blade racing toward her.

Gaia help me, Krysty thought as she watched the blade carving the air. Hear my prayer and come to my aid in my time of need.

Then everything seemed to slow down; the blade hovered in the air as if it was a static object.

Krysty had grown up in Harmony ville where her mother, Sonja, had taught her how to tap into a wellspring of energy that she called Gaia power. Quite how that ability worked, no one could explain, but it drew on the Earth Mother herself to feed her with a burst of incredible strength and stamina. That “Gaia power” had saved Krysty’s life on numerous occasions, but it came at a cost—each time she used it, it ran out fast and she was left as weak as a kitten. Right now, Krysty figured that cost was worth it.

As she focused on her chant, Krysty could feel the power of the Earth Mother race through her like an electric current charging her veins. Krysty’s emerald eyes seemed to shine as she snatched the scalie’s wrist and pulled, altering the angle of the stabbing knife and yanking the scalie with such force that he went sailing from her with a howl of surprise. An instant later the scalie’s flying body slammed against the trunk of a nearby orange tree, and Krysty heard his neck snap.

She lay there breathing hard as the Gaia energies coursed through her, making her feel every whisper of breeze, every blade of grass, as it seared through her body like a fire. Moments later the power ebbed, then was gone.

Still lying in the grass, Ryan picked off the last few stragglers of the attacking party, watching through the scope as the remaining scalies ran for the safety of their pyramid-like home.

“You okay?” he asked, his single eye still fixed on the rifle’s scope.

“Been better, lover,” Krysty replied weakly. She was shaking, and her voice had that familiar tremble, the result of using the Gaia force.

When he looked at her, Krysty was checking her right wrist where the scalie had tried to break it.

“Time to go,” Ryan said.

Krysty nodded. Her wrist was still working, although she may sport a bruise there for the next few days. Ryan bent to help her to her feet. He put his arm around her shoulder and they headed toward the redoubt.