Axler, James - Deathlands 60 - Destiny's Truth

  Ryan leaped from his seat, fighting the jolt caused by the wag's halted momentum

  He threw himself backward, barely keeping his balance as he reached the tail end of the wag. The sec door crushed the roof of the wag at the front, driving metal down onto the seat where he had sat a few moments before.

  Ryan jumped from the wag and ran for cover, joining Krysty, Tammy and Mildred.

  "Glad you could drop in, lover," Krysty said dryly.

  "Just had a few things to do," he replied laconically.

  He saw that the crushed wag—driven down with such force that the rear wheels had left the ground—held the sec door open for a gap of three or four feet. There was little indication of whether or not the Illuminated sec beyond were still in cover, or whether they had retreated.

  Looking back, he could see through the open outer door, into the dawn light beyond.

  The larger war party was advancing.

  Destiny's Truth

  #60 in the Deathland series

  James Axler

  A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG • STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  First edition December 2002

  ISBN 0-373-62570-7

  DESTINY'S TRUTH

  Copyright © 2002 by Worldwide Library.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,

  Victory however long and hard the road may be; for

  Without victory there is no survival.

  —Sir Winston Churchill 1874-1965

  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…

  Prologue

  "Jak… Jak, honey, time to wake up…"

  Jak Lauren opened his red, sore eyes, feeling the earth spin away under him as he did so. A mat-trans jump always left him feeling weak and sick, his stomach muscles cramping to make him vomit substance where there was none. He spread his hands out to grasp the smooth armaglass floor of the chamber, expecting the cold and solid material to cool his fevered palms.

  But there was no armaglass; instead, registering with a ringing alarm bell in his still befuddled mind, there was warm, clammy dirt beneath his hands. His instincts fighting the jump sickness, he tried to raise himself on his elbows, his vision clearing the fog before him.

  Was it Gloria looking down at him?

  "Hey, honey, don't look so startled," the Gate queen said before drawing back a little so that Jak was able to see that they were now in the open air.

  The albino youth's senses began to cut into the confusion that had clouded him since awakening. He could smell the rich loam beneath him, soft and springy as Gloria stepped back. They were in a small clearing, surrounded by trees that looked like dwarfed and stunted elms, but in full leaf for all that. He could hear the hum of insects, and the rustles in among the undergrowth of small mammals—nothing big enough to be a threat, his senses told him. Normally, this would have made him relax, but in his bewildered state, his muscles remained tense, his attention struggling to focus as rapidly as possible.

  Where he would normally spring to his feet with a lithe ease, Jak found himself struggling to hoist himself upright. His limbs were still tingling from the aftereffects of the jump, and refused to obey the impulses from his brain.

  "Not right…" he said in a hoarse whisper. "Should be in mat-trans, not here. And Ryan? Others?"

  He was now on his feet, clearing his head with a tentative shake that made his focus blur and the earth spin again for a second before it settled.

  Gloria was now about twenty yards away from him, with her back turned toward him. There were marks on her skin that he couldn't identify from this distance, but it seemed like a patchwork of dark dots that randomly spread across her bared skin, disappearing under the long, flaming red tresses that hung down her back.

  "You feeling better now, sweets?" she asked, her husky voice low and yet carrying that melodious note that he knew so well by now. It was good to hear her. The last thing Jak remembered was the Gate tribe entering the other mat-trans chamber in the redoubt before they were flung to who knew where. There had been no guarantee that they would end up in the same place, given the unreliability of the old tech.

  But if they were here, where were the rest of the companions? And where was Gloria's faithful attendant, Tammy, and the rest of the Gate tribe?

  Even as that flickered across his mind, Jak was sniffing the air, attuning his hearing to the slightest sound around, attempting to identify its source.

  There was no one else around, no one human, that was, nothing but the smaller forms of wildlife that he had detected earlier.

  "You're not talking to me," Gloria admonished. "Why not?"

  "Not right," Jak repeated, almost to himself.

  "What isn't right?" she asked. Jak prickled as she spoke. There was something in her tone that had suddenly—for no a
pparent reason—turned hostile, and he was sure now that something was very wrong.

  The albino youth didn't reply. He steadied himself, trying to bring his still rebelling body under control, his every instinct screaming that he was going to need complete control of himself, of his fighting capabilities, before too long.

  He wasn't wrong.

  "Not talking to me again," Gloria said, an angry hiss running through her tone. "That's not good, is it, sweets?"

  "Mebbe," Jak replied with as neutral a tone as he could muster. It was hard, as his own hostility was rising with every moment, screaming at him that the whole situation was wrong, and that there was something even more perilous about the Gate queen than the threat of attack.

  "Mebbe?" Her body tensed at that. He could see the muscles rippling beneath the dark lines of dots across her tanned skin. Her posture was still relaxed, but the muscle tone gave that as a lie. She was feigning her repose, preparing for attack.

  Jak felt the rush of adrenaline through his body, washing the sluggishness from his system, tightening his muscles and tautening his nerves until he was ready for almost anything.

  Almost…

  "Mebbe, mebbe, mebbe…" Gloria muttered. "Mebbe it's time for you to die, then."

  Jak was prepared. It was like a nightmare, or a time and place where this wasn't the real Gloria, but still it hit him hard. He hadn't quite realized how his feelings for the Gate queen had grown until the sense of betrayal hit him in the pit of the stomach. However, such emotion had been rare in the life of the albino teenager, and he had had the briefest of it snatched from him before, where his wife and child had been slaughtered. After that, this was easy to quell, to put into a place where he could ignore and concentrate on the immediate danger.

  For danger he was sure there was. He knew with that instinct that had kept him alive for so long that he was about to be attacked.

  But why?

  There was no time for him to think about this—if, indeed, he could ever be bothered—as the need for action overtook the luxury of thought.

  Gloria pivoted on her heel and sprang at him. Despite her pose of a relaxed posture, Jak had been able to see at twenty yards the way in which the corded sinew and muscle in her bare thighs and calves had tensed, ready for the sudden, explosive spring.

  What he could not have been ready for was her face as she turned and leaped, her light red hair flying out around her, making her face visible to him as she soared through the stilled air.

  The look of naked fury and aggression he would have expected from such an action: her face was contorted in a snarling scream of rage and explosive anger, her lips back over her vulpine teeth, sharp and gleaming. Her long nose was wrinkled by the tension in her face muscles, nostrils distended as she sought more oxygen to power her attack. Her eyes were sharp, pupils reduced to mere dots in the ocean of color by the adrenaline rush that also coursed through her as it did through Jak.

  This was only to be expected. Any warrior in action would be reduced to the same set of facial characteristics, and Jak had faced this many a time in his life and—should that life continue—would face it many more times to come. But it wasn't that that, for the briefest of moments, froze him in confusion and fear— fear not of the warrior before him, but of what may be affecting her.

  For Gloria's face was, like the skin on her back and—he could now see—the skin on the front of her torso, covered in a map of the black dots. Except that, as she got closer, sailing through the air in motion so slow to him that she almost seemed static, it was possible to see that those dots were more than just discolorations of the skin. They were the black-ringed holes of open sores, the centers red and raw and running yellow and green with discharge and pus. The crusts of these sores pulled at the skin of her face, seeming to stretch it out of shape, almost out of recognition the more that he looked at her. It didn't seem possible that this was the same woman whom he had joined in battle only a few hours previously.

  It couldn't be. But whoever it was had only one thing now in mind: the chilling of Jak Lauren.

  His attention had been so taken by the sight of her face that the bone-chilling scream, high pitched and wailing, yet with a throaty undertone that gave it almost a dual-note quality of primal terror, had hardly penetrated his consciousness.

  Now it did, leaving him with a sudden awakening and a thrill of terror that made the muscles ripple down his spine. It was a totally instinctive reaction, and it was a necessary one. It jolted him from the moment of frozen confusion and made him click into the fighting mode that operated only on an instinctive level.

  Gloria was too close to him now for any attempt at an evasive maneuver. That would only make it easier for him to be chilled. Instead, Jak yielded to her attack, and began to fall back as she landed upon him, relaxing his muscles so that he hit the ground without damaging his thin, wiry frame. The earth was soft, but at speed and with the accelerating and falling weight of the Gate queen, to fall awkwardly could injure him and leave him easy prey for a follow-up attack. As it was, Gloria descended on top of him with her long-bladed panga in one hand and her other clawed, ready to lash out. She expected, at the back of her crazed mind, to drive him into the earth, knocking the air from him and leaving him vulnerable to a slashing blow from the panga.

  It didn't quite work that way. Jak's hands attached themselves to her wrists as she landed on him, fastening on with an iron tight grip, his elbows braced to keep those hands at bay. He fell back into the momentum of her fall, landing on his back and rolling as he did so, converting that momentum into a drive from his legs that flipped the woman over his head. He loosened his grip on her wrists as his legs began the drive up into her, so she was free to fly over his head and land a few yards away.

  Before she had even hit the ground, Jak had already finished the backward roll, landing on his feet and pivoting so that he was facing her. Her face had been close to him for only a fraction of a second, but close enough for him to smell the decay on her skin, her rancid breath steaming into his nostrils. Her eyes had been bloodshot, with yellow around the iris, pinpoint pupils smaller than any he had seen on jolt, and the pus had been running from the sores on her face, disturbed from their crusted little pools by the motion of her attack.

  Jak had been ready for her and ready for the recovery. Gloria hadn't, in her fury, expected such a maneuver. She had been nowhere near ready, and landed with a bone-jarring jolt on her back, the panga flying from her hand. Jak was surprised. The Gloria he had known would have recovered herself at least partially in midair, and been able to minimize the bad effects of such a landing. It crossed Jak's mind, in a fraction of a moment, that this couldn't be the real Gloria. How had she acquired such a disease—whatever it was that scored her skin—so quickly? Why had she so swiftly turned against he who had been her lover? And why was she fighting so badly when she had been the finest warrior he had ever met? None of this made sense to him in any way.

  But there was scant time for reflection. Already, he was aware that in pausing he had allowed her to recover, as she had rolled on her side to recover the panga and was scrambling to her feet.

  He couldn't make that mistake again. At any time it could prove fatal. From within his jacket, Jak withdrew one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives. He should finish this quickly if it was at all possible. He was acutely aware that it was the adrenaline that was keeping him at this pitch, and his body still hadn't recovered properly from the jump. Too long in combat, and it could start to fail him at a crucial moment.

  With one fluid motion, the knife came from within the hidden recesses of his combat jacket, was palmed and then flicked between his fingers. Then his arm was drawn back and released in one simple motion.

  The knife sped toward its target. Jak was already reaching for the next knife, to be certain; but usually there was little doubt that the sharpened and lethal piece of metal would fulfill its function.

  Not this time. With a speed equal to that of the albino yout
h, Gloria swept her panga through the air, seemingly in a random motion. There was a flash of light as the weak sun caught the blade, a spark as metal met metal, and the leaf-bladed knife was deflected harmlessly into the trees.

  "Have to do better than that, sweets," Gloria gloated.

  Jak didn't answer. He wasn't going to waste energy and breath on idle words. Instead, he stood and waited. Every sinew and fiber itched to attack, but the cool hunter's brain that had made him wait silently for days on his prey back in the Louisiana bayou, where he learned to listen to his instincts, told him to let her make the first move.

  Gloria stood, swaying, the panga held loosely in her fist. She laughed, a harsh, bitter gasp of breath, her lips drawing back over her teeth in a leer and her eyes—for one brief moment—returning to the Gloria that he knew.

  Before this had time to register in his mind as anything more than the briefest of impressions, she was on him again. With a yell that cleansed her mind and galvanized her spirit, she flew at him, the panga weaving a pattern before her that cleaved the air with the razor-honed blade in such a way that to get past the defense would be the surest way to lose an arm.

  Jak's answer was simple and efficient. The arc of the panga proscribed the air at a lowest point around the Gate queen's knees. It would take her only a few steps to reach him—she had already taken the first when Jak took action.

  The albino flung himself down and forward, so that he was close to the ground. The warm smell of the loam rose up strongly, almost as a stench, and hit the back of his throat as he grazed the ground. Rolling, he was under the defense of the blade, looking up as the panga grazed the air above his face. It began to dip as Gloria's reaction clued in to Jak's offensive maneuver, but not enough to literally cut him off. Jak was past the arc of defense and took the Gate queen at the calves, sweeping them out from under her so that she fell forward.