Desert Kings

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

Epilogue

Ryan opened his eye and discovered that the jump was over. He was sprawled on the cold floor of a mat-trans chamber, the electronic mists slowly fading. His SIG-Sauer pistol was digging into his hip and his leather eye patch was askew. Son of a bitch, what a nightmare he’d endured this time, the Deathlands warrior thought sluggishly, reality slowly returning like waves rushing toward shore. The dream about the Mutie Wars had been startlingly vivid.

Suddenly a severe pain hit Ryan and he grabbed his head in both hands until the throbbing subsided.

The jump-mares he suffered seemed to be getting worse. Mildred had told him time and again that it was a natural side effect of using the mat-trans units, instantly traveling from one redoubt to another, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles apart. But nobody knew for sure. All of the whitecoats who had built the mat-trans units were long dead, and nobody had ever found an operating manual. Mildred had had a CD with codes, but that was long gone.

Personally, Ryan didn’t care much about the pain. Jumping hurt, and that was simply the price they paid for being able to move freely around Deathlands. As Trader often said, pain was life. Only the dead felt nothing.

Weakly, the man rose onto his arms and rolled over to rest against the armaglass wall. The material was deliciously cool through his jacket, and he gratefully pulled in lungfuls of air until his mind began to clear. He checked his weapons: a Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action longblaster, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer hand-blaster and a curved panga.

Adjusting his eye patch, Ryan looked around the chamber at the five people sprawled on the floor. They were panting hard and drenched in sweat. The shock of instantaneous travel through the predark machinery was always painful to the companions, but obviously this jump had been particularly bad for everybody.

A low moan sounded from a redheaded woman. Krysty Wroth lifted her face and wiped away a string of drool with the back of her hand.

“Hi, lover,” Krysty whispered hoarsely. The woman wore a shaggy black fur coat and green military fatigues. A gunbelt encircled her trim waist, supporting a holstered S&W .38 revolver, along with a couple of ammo pouches. A canvas backpack lay on the floor near her blue cowboy boots, the silver tips glistening in the harsh fluorescent light.

“Hey, yourself,” Ryan replied, smiling back. “Triple bitch of a jump, eh?”

“Been through worse,” Krysty said softly, then broke into a ragged cough. Once, they had jumped into a flooded redoubt full of rotting corpses. The stench was so overpowering that Krysty was still amazed that anyone had the presence of mind to hit the Last Destination button so they could jump out of there.

At the grim memory, she experimentally sniffed. The air of the redoubt smelled flat and artificial, without any trace of other living creatures. Good. Several times they had jumped somewhere only to find the walls had been breached and there were coldhearts or muties inside the redoubt. But this one smelled clean and empty.

“Here, drink this,” a stocky black woman said, proffering a battered canteen.

“Any chance it’s water?” Krysty asked hopefully, taking the container.

“Nope, a new batch of jump juice,” Mildred Wyeth replied, brushing a pair of beaded plaits from her face. The woman was dressed in a flannel work shirt and heavy denim pants tucked into U.S. Army boots. A Czech-made ZKR target pistol jutted from her gunbelt, and there was a worn canvas bag hanging at her side bearing the faded letters M*A*S*H.

Back in the twentieth century, Dr. Mildred Wyeth had been a physician who specialized in cryogenics research. On a crisp December day she had entered the hospital for what was deemed routine surgery. But there had been complications and she’d ended up in a cryogenic freezing unit, and slept through the nuclear holocaust. A hundred years later she was awakened by Ryan and the others to find a strange new world of radioactive ruins, acid rain storms, mutants and cannibals.

One of the physician’s projects was to try to perfect some sort of tonic that would ease the agony some of the companions endured following a jump. Sometimes the companions arrived at a redoubt racked with pain, vomiting their last meal, totally helpless for several minutes. In the Deathlands, that was a good way to get chilled. So far, none of her concoctions had helped much, but she always had hope for the next batch. These days, hope was all anybody had.

“Jump juice,” Krysty said without enthusiasm. Then she sighed and took a sip. She paused to swallow, then drank some more. “Gaia, this tastes like coffee!”