Blood Harvest
The cataclysm of nuclear winter transmuted the world into a place both torturous and unforgiving. But there are those with the courage and perseverance to seek out something beyond the merciless life-and-death struggle of Deathlands. In a treacherous frontier that plays for keeps, staying alive is the best victory….Washed ashore in the North Atlantic, Ryan Cawdor and Doc Tanner discover two islands still pristinely intact after Skydark, but whose inhabitants suffer a darker, more horrifying punishment. A hideous strain of mutation manifests, turning some into half-monstrous giants with an unquenchable thirst for blood. The Nightwalkers unleash a hellish feast of horror when the sun goes down. Now Ryan and Doc struggle to survive this enclave of unimaginable terror, trapped in a baronial conflict between the rulers of night and day, with only one way out–internecine war in a world of the damned….
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Krysty lay on her side, gasping
Her vision smeared back into beingâtripled, doubled and then finally was normal. She felt as if it had just rained hammers. Every cell of her body ached, and she tasted the copper of a nosebleed in the back of her throat. She reached out. âRyanâ¦â
Mildred moaned.
Krysty blinked at the afterimages behind her eyes and yawned at the ringing in her ears. âRyanâ¦â
Every muscle screamed as she shoved herself up to her knees. Krysty snapped her glance around the jump chamber in a panic. She, Mildred, Jak and J.B. were in the same gateway of the same redoubt.
Ryan and Doc were gone.
Blood Harvest
Death Lands®
O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you! God made you âlittle lower than the angelsâ sin has made you little better than the devils.
âJoseph Alleine
1634â1668
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 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¦.
Contents
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 One
âMove! Move! Move!â
Ryan Cawdor and his companions needed little urging as they ran for their lives through the empty corridors of the redoubt. The facility they found themselves in was nothing but an empty concrete bunker. Whoever had occupied it had bugged out long ago and taken everything of value with them. Dead campfires, graffiti and bonesâhuman, animal and otherwiseâshowed there had been successive waves of habitation. At some point someone had managed to breach the main clamshell doors and then the interior ones. The spent shells of various makes littering the floors showed there had been many room-by-room firefights. It was odd that the victors hadnât bothered to retrieve the spent brass.
The companionsâ cautious venture outside the redoubt had drawn more stickies than the friends had shells to waste.
They raced for the mat-trans chamber. The pounding of their boots was counterpointed by the staccato slapping of scores of bare stickie feet behind them as the muties gazelled after them in rubbery, ground-eating bounds. âJ.B.!â Ryan shouted. âGren!â
The Armorer clawed into a pocket of his jacket as he ran and came out with his last grenade. âOne!â
âDo it!â Ryan roared.
The party passed the corridor junction, and as they turned J.B. pulled the pin on the grenade. The cotter lever pinged away and he tossed the bomb behind them. The hollow crack of the detonation echoed in the halls. Stickies hooted and shrieked. They loved fire and explosions. Unless it ripped their heads off, even stickies directly caught in them didnât seem to mind so much.
The companions charged toward the corridor that led to the hexagonal mat-trans unit. Ryan stopped and shouldered his Steyr longblaster as his people went through the doorway that led to the control room. âJ.B.! Close it!â
The door to the mat-trans was made of vanadium, and Ryan knew it would take powerful explosives to breach it. However, once it closed, the transportation cycle occurred, and Ryan wasnât quite ready to eliminate all other options. The chamber door didnât always lock. The outer door to the control room was ordinary steel. When the companions had arrived they had found the door jammed three inches ajar, and it had taken J.B. a good ten minutes of tinkering with the mechanism to get it to open. J.B. took a knee beside the inner control panel for the door and began fiddling with its guts.
