Nightmare Passage
“Come and die.” Ryan invited, beckoning to the Incarnate
J.B.’s Uzi suddenly stopped chattering, and Mildred shouted out wordlessly in anger and fear. Ryan spun on his heel in the direction of the chariot, then he was flat on his face on the ground.
His arms and legs were covered with half-frozen mud, and his thoughts stumbled and staggered, finally careening over to the brief, almost subliminal image of a nimbus of energy jumping from metal prongs.
A mahogany giant towered over him, a conical jeweled headpiece bisecting the sun and adding another six inches to his height. He wore a magnificent gem-encrusted leather harness over his muscled torso, and sunlight gleamed from the golden threads in the white fabric of his kilt.
“So,” he said in a deep melodic voice, “I didn’t frighten you away after all. Perhaps I’ll have to try harder next time.”
Then, smiling, the bronzed god kicked Ryan in the side of the head, kicked him down into a dark, spiraling hole.
Nightmare Passage
#40 in the Deathlands series
James Axler
Prologue
The horizon had been a dreary, saffron-tinted waste for as long as he could remember. Suddenly, a dark speck crawled across the vast sea of sand.
All around was a panorama of desolation—nothing but sand stretching to the skyline in every direction, barely relieved by the gray dome rearing out of the wasteland in the near distance.
The god blinked. The crawling speck was a vehicle; that much was certain. He expanded his awareness, his mind sprouting probing, identifying tentacles. The vehicle was a Jeep Cherokee. It was more than a hundred years old, the engine reconfigured to run on methane, and the rusted bodywork was painted in a striped camouflage pattern. Its four-wheel drive carried it easily across the undulating yellow sands that rose and fell in dunes. There were precisely three men and one woman aboard.
The distant, laboring rumble of the engine rolled over the desert, and the vehicle sank from sight behind the waves of sand. At that moment, a cloud passed over the face of the sun.
The god smiled. Slowly, he climbed down from the high sand hill upon which he had been meditating for the past three days. When he reached its base, he absently adjusted the heavy collar of beaten gold encircling his neck. It was a pointless and human thing to do. One of his first actions upon awakening and leaving his tomb six months before had been to interface with the molecular structure of any article on his body so it responded instantly to conscious thought.
Holding his metauh across his left breast, the god strolled across the sandy, windswept plain in the direction of his tomb. He had waited for six months for his worshipers to arrive, and there was no hurry now, even though they would reach his tomb a few minutes before he would. They, however, wouldn’t be able to open the portal.
By the time he reached the perimeter of his tomb, the vehicle was parked in front of the reinforced-stone-and-steel dome. The four people were totally engrossed in trying to figure out the workings of the massive, vanadium-alloy sec door. The god paused and looked at them. In less than a millisecond, he assimilated all that he needed from their minds.
He was pleased that English was still the primary language, though now peppered with new colloquialisms, vernacular and vulgarisms.
The four people were part of a larger group, a loosely knit conglomeration of wanderers, scavengers and self-styled salvage experts calling themselves Farers. They had come from a settlement of sorts only a day’s journey away, crossing the wasteland they called the Barrens.
The god wasn’t surprised by the vast changes from the world he had been born into. Even before his long sleep, the American continent was already molding itself into Deathlands.
He narrowed the focus of his probe to the individuals.
There was Danielson, the leader of this little band of survivors. He was black bearded, trim and erect, though wiry of stature. The woman beside him was Harrier, a woman who appeared brisk and no-nonsense in a neat white tunic, khaki shorts and high-laced boots. The other two men were Stockbridge and Javna, and they were identically attired in patched and stained coveralls. Javna was the oldest of the four, with thinning white hair and no teeth. Stockbridge was around Danielson’s age, a muscular black man of medium height.