Deathlands 124: Child of Slaughter
MORTAL RIFTS
When Doc is taken captive by a band of marauders in what was once Nebraska, Ryan and the companions rally to get him back. But they aren’t just fighting the local muties. They’re also up against the area’s terrifying terrain, which shifts and morphs at a moment’s notice. With their options dwindling in this mazelike region that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, the team joins forces with a beautiful and deadly woman who evens the odds on the battlefield. But while this warrior seems to be on their side, she has a secret agenda that could spell the end for them all…
THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
Since the nukecaust, the American dream has been reduced to a daily fight for survival. In the hellish landscape of Deathlands, few dare to dream of a better tomorrow. But Ryan Cawdor and his companions press on, driven by the need for a future less treacherous than the present.
Doc heard scuffling down by his feet.
“What now? Rats, I suppose, come to feast on my flesh.” He reached around for a rock to throw but found nothing. “Begone, vermin!” The scuffling got louder.
Suddenly, he heard a different sound from the same place, a distinctive sound that could not be mistaken for any other.
Giggling.
Doc’s heart hammered in his chest. He meant to snap some words of defiance to try to intimidate, but before he could, his visitor scrambled forward.
Hands grabbed hold of Doc’s ankles and wrenched his legs straight with an iron grip. Then he heard a voice, high-pitched and girlish in the lightless void. “You’re
mine
now. All
mine
.”
And all of a sudden, there were many more hands, coming from all directions. And all of them were grabbing at him…
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
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
Crimson Waters
No Man’s Land
Nemesis
Chrono Spasm
Sins of Honor
Storm Breakers
Dark Fathoms
Siren Song
End Program
Desolation Angels
Blood Red Tide
Polestar Omega
Hive Invasion
End Day
Forbidden Trespass
Iron Rage
CHILD OF SLAUGHTER
Man, a mere inhabitant of earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.
—Jules Verne,
The Steam House
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
Chapter One
The blast took Ryan Cawdor and his companions by surprise, knocking everyone off their feet before they knew what had hit them.
As Ryan crashed to the ground, he twisted and gaped through the smoke for a glimpse of who or what had attacked them.
A slender mutie stood not fifty yards away, his crimson skin glinting in the blazing sunlight. He scowled at Ryan from behind the sights of a shoulder-mounted, jury-rigged gren launcher.
There was no time to shout a warning. The mutie’s hand was on the firing mechanism.
Ryan swung up his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster, which already had a round chambered. Sucking in a deep breath to steady his hand, he sighted on the mutie and squeezed the trigger.
The one-eyed man was an experienced marksman. His shooting skills had played a major role in his surviving for so long in the hellish Deathlands—all that was left of the United States after the world blew up in 2001. So he knew for a fact that as soon as he pulled the trigger he’d fired a kill shot.
Ryan felt an unsettling stillness all around him, like the calm that descended before a terrible storm. Then he experienced an odd sensation, a combination of powerful suction and expulsion all at once, equally balanced.
Suddenly, a wave of force slammed into him. His body buzzed and shivered as he hung in the wave’s grip, caught like a moth in a spiderweb.
The wave held him there for a split second, then it let him go with a shock like a blow below the belt. As he gasped at the wrenching release, he saw the sun-scorched ground between him and the mutie ripple as if it was the surface of a lake.
A low hum started, building to a deep rumble that Ryan felt in his chest and bones. Then a flash of light exploded in front of him. When it faded, he saw that a tall rock wall now stood between him and the mutie.
It wasn’t an optical illusion. Ryan grimaced at a puff of dust springing from the striated reddish-brown rock wall. It was kicked up by the bullet he’d fired, the one that had been frozen and unfrozen in midair on its way to the mutie.
“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed.
“What the hell? Where did
that
come from?” asked J. B. Dix, Ryan’s longtime friend and one of his traveling companions. Known as the Armorer because of his mastery of all manner of weapons, J.B. was on the ground a few feet away. He’d been toppled by the gren blast like the rest of the team and was staying down out of the line of fire.
“Beats me.” Ryan rolled over to face forward again. Fresh rounds were punching across the flat land up ahead, fired from the blasters of the muties in the trenches. For the moment, at least, the greatest danger lay in that direction.
Lining up a nearby mutie in his sights, Ryan fired his Scout, grazing the side of the enemy’s head. Ryan’s companions smoothly followed his lead. J.B. flung himself around on his belly and whipped up his Mini-Uzi to open fire on the nearest trench.
“Where
any
this come from?” Jak, an albino who spoke as few words as possible, flipped onto his knees and aimed his .357 Magnum Colt Python at another trench. “Land
look solid before. No trenches.” At the first sign of a mutie popping up, he cracked off a shot and the mutie’s head exploded like a watermelon on a target range.
“Nice shot!” Ricky Morales scrambled up beside Jak. If he felt any aftereffects from the gren blast, he didn’t show it.
Ricky swung up his De Lisle carbine and swept it left while Jak swept his Python right. Seconds later, both young men were filling the noonday air with sizzling lead and hitting mutie targets on opposite ends of the middle trench.
