It was possible that they wouldnât find Steel Eyes at the journeyâs end. Yet there had been no arguments over the course of action. And no second thoughts once they had begun.
Magus was a plague on all their houses. It was said that his artificially prolonged life had allowed him to master everything there was to master. That he knew everything there was to know. That this mastery and knowledge had elevated him to a higher level of existence. To a kind of junkyard godhood. He had become his own creation, a malevolent deity whose dark schemes and willing soldiers victimized and degraded a desperate world.
The companions had taken on the mission because they all knew some things were worth dying for, even when the odds were slim.
And ridding the Deathlands of Magus was one of those things.
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing dovesâ¦in comparison.
âHeinrich Heine,
1797â1856
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 endureâin the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to natureâs 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 villeâs 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 Ryanâs 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 couldnât 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: Ryanâs 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 humanityâs last hopeâ¦.
Prologue
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
Colonel Graydon Bell took his first breath in more than a century. Compressed air rushed down the plastic tube in his throat, inflating his collapsed lungs. Simultaneously, microbursts of electric current jolted his brain stem, sending his naked body into convulsions, slamming elbows, knees, and forehead into the sides of the narrow, stainless-steel cryotank.
His restarted heart pounding in his ears, Colonel Bell clawed at the base of his skull, tearing away the tangle of electrical leads. This ended the violent spasms, but he continued to twitch and shudder; his knees buckled under his weight and he slumped to a squat. The ballooning pressure in his lungs felt like a chain saw splitting him in two. With trembling fingers he pried out the nose plugs and exhaled. Minutes passed while he gasped and gulped canned air, struggling to regain the rhythm of his breathing.
As suffocation panic faded, Bell fumbled for the edge of the pliable adhesive that sealed shut his eyes. He peeled the protective material from brow and cheeks, then cautiously raised one eyelid. Not cautiously enough. Light speared into long-dormant nerves with such force that he nearly bit through the oxygen tube.
Mewling, he made brief forays into that place of impossible hurt. Repeated exposure was the only way to reinitiate his optic nerves. Through streaming tears he could see the cryotankâs vacuum lid had opened, and on the ceiling above it a bank of fluorescent bulbs flickered erratically.
Bell yarded the intubation hose from his throat and let it drop, hissing, to his feet. The sickly sweet taste in his mouth was from trehalose, a sugar that was the key to successful reanimation from cryodeath. Prior to his immersion in deep cold, his tissues had been infused with this naturally occurring antifreeze. Trehalose kept the water in his body from turning to ice crystals, which would have ruptured his every cell, turning him upon defrost into two hundred pounds of slunky garbage.