The woman threw away her useless blaster
âMacahuitl!â she screamed. âMacahuitl!â
Ryan wondered if it was a prayer or a curse. It was neither. One of the handful of Chichimecs still on their feet tossed her one of the obsidian-edged clubs.
The female marauder fielded the club deftly. She hacked it savagely into the tentacle that gripped her. The volcanic glass, sharper than a surgeonâs scalpel, half severed the leg-thick member.
Holding the SIG-Sauer in both hands, Ryan backed cautiously away from the rail. He looked around quickly, trying to take stock of the tactical situation.
It was, basically, battle over.
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¦.
Away across the night the great paired mountains spewed arcs of orange fire. Their fury could be felt as well as heard, a continual mutter of thunder, punctuated by blasts that pained Ravenâs ears. If the fury of the old gods wasnât soon appeased with the blood and souls of the evildoers, so the priest Howling Wolf said, that pillar would grow to hide the heavens, choke sun and moon and stars, plunging all beneath into gloom. It had happened once before, during the time legend called the Great Skydark.
Only this time, Howling Wolf said, the dark would never end.
Reflected hoops of orange, distorted and wavering, were the only hints that a great lake lay like a discarded obsidian mirror between the fire mountains and the hogsback ridge behind which the horde was camped. Although the eyes of the man named Raven were no longer so keen close up as they had been in his youth, his far vision remained to justify his name. If he didnât gaze toward the flame fountains for a time, he could just make out tiny fugitive glimmers of light closer at hand, here and there down in the valley, and even in the rotted corpse of the dead city itself, which lay in the lake like a broken giant sprawled facedown in the pond that had drowned him.
Dead no more. Men once more crawled like maggots among the great bones of metal and stone and pale glass.