Shadowfall
Shadowfall
26 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor closed his eye and entered the darkness.
He had lost count of the number of times in the past couple of years that he’d gone through this experienceentering the gateway chamber of one of the long-buried military complexes, known as redoubts, to make a mat-trans jump. The process utilized the lost technology from the predark days, before the ultimate nuclear holocaust that had effectively destroyed civilization around the globe.
The present jump was beginning in the heart of what had once been Acadia National Park, in the area of the old United States that had been called Maine. None of the group of nine companions had the least idea where the jump would take them. Knowledge of how to control the gateways had been lost in the nuke-tainted years of the long winters. All they knew was that they would arrive in a similar gateway, elsewhere.
The one control element that they’d stumbled upon was that gateways had an automatic thirty-minute reset, enabling you to jump back to where you’d just been. As well, there was a setting, generally the coded buttons L and D , that would also take you to the last destination.
Ryan’s final sight, before the swirling mists closed his good right eye and his mind down, had been his eight friends.
Next to him, holding his hand in hers, was Krysty Wroth, the great love of his life. In her mid-twenties she was about ten years younger than Ryan, and three inches shorter than his six feet two. The green-eyed, red-haired Krysty had the “mutie” power of being able to “feel” when danger threatened. She was also able, in the direst of straits, to call on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, taught her by her own mother back in the ville of Harmony, where she’d spent her childhood. This power brought Krysty way beyond the edge of total exhaustion but gave her, briefly, an almost supernatural strength.
On Ryan’s other side was his eleven-year-old son, Dean. Ryan had been totally unaware of the boy’s existencethe result of a fleeting relationshipuntil a year or so earlier. Now he would have given his own life for the lad. Dean was meeting the jump sitting with his back against the dark gray walls, clutching his turquoise-hilted knife in his lap.
Next around the circle was Mildred Wyeth. The stocky black woman had been a doctor, specializing in cryonics, or the medical effects of freezing. Born in 1965, Mildred had gone into a hospital in late December of the year 2000 for minor exploratory abdominal surgery, but she had never gotten that far. A freak reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her comatose body being frozen. The world blew apart less than a month later, and she rested on in dark silence, forgotten, her life-support system powered by an undamaged nuke plant. She had finally been awakened from her long sleep by Ryan.
Other than her medical talents, Mildred also had an even more useful skill for survival in the wasteland that had once been the United States of America.
In the last-ever Olympic Games, held in Miami in 1996, Mildred had represented her country in the free pistol shooting, winning the silver medal. Now, with her ZKR 551 6-shot Czech revolver, chambered to take the Smith amp; Wesson .38 round, she was probably the finest shot in Deathlands.
In the past few months Mildred had begun a relationship with the person next around the circle.
John Barrymore Dix, known as J.B. or as the Armorer, was about the same age as Ryan and had been his closest friend for the past dozen years or so. J.B. was the greatest living authority on firearms and weaponry in general. Despite his appearancefive feet eight inches and one-forty pounds soaking wet, with glasseshis combat experience was almost unrivaled.
He sat next to Mildred, his sallow complexion even more pale than usual, his 9 mm Uzi and Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun lying at his side. In his lap he held his beloved fedora hat.
Squatting next to J.B., and holding a battered Armalite, was a lean, grizzled man in his fifties. Known throughout much of Deathlands simply as the Trader, he was the person who’d originally brought Ryan and J.B. together, enlisting them as young bloods and training them until they became his right- and left-hand men.