Amazon Gate
Amazon Gate
#59 in the Deathland series
James Axler
Chapter One
Something was wrong, but for the life of him—and it could mean that—Jak Lauren was unable to work out exactly what it was.
The albino hugged the ground, smelling the rich loam as it filled his nostrils with a heady scent. The roots and leaves of the plants mixed into a rich aroma that still couldn’t hide the stench of death, the rancid aroma of rotting flesh and dried blood that permeated his clothes and into his very skin.
He blinked, his red eyes stung by the sweat that trickled into them. Despite the irritation, he resisted the temptation to reach up and wipe the liquid away, loath to move his arm and disturb the foliage around him. Until he was sure what was happening, even the slightest movement was a danger. Even the merest whisper of a rustle could bring death down on him.
Jak’s long white hair was lank and loose around his face, strands of it plastered to his skin while other loose hairs tickled and poked at the corners of his nose and mouth. Like the sweat, he ignored the irritation.
Instead, he focused on what was around, straining every nerve end, concentrating his senses so hard that he could almost hear the blood pounding in his veins, the hissing of his own central nervous system.
None of that did anything to waylay the gnawing at the pit of his stomach. Jak knew fear; despite his always seeming calm in the middle of a firefight, his stillness when hunting and stalking, his almost stoic acceptance of every dangerous situation he had faced in his journeys across the Deathlands, Jak knew fear, recognized and embraced it. Embraced it, and yielded to it rather than fight it and set his body at war with itself. It was only by knowing fear and accepting it that he could gain the calm to find space in which to act rather than react, to take control and win.
Jak knew fear, and this wasn’t fear. The nagging, insistent feeling was more akin to anxiety, to a fear of the future, to a knowledge that there was something awful and awe-filled around the corner. Something large and unknown that would leave him with no indication of how to defeat it.
It was then that he realized what the gnawing was. It wasn’t fear; it was the terrible knowledge that he couldn’t win. The inevitability of the great chill.
His breathing stilled until it had almost stopped. He returned the center of his attention to the immediate surroundings. It was still and calm, with no life or movement around him. The smell of death was now old, no longer immediate.
Jak knew it was time to move. With an infinite degree of care, he moved his sinuous muscles, bringing his limbs to a position where he was able to lift his prone body in one swift and flowing movement, rising to his feet in a fraction of a second, hair and skin like the white tip of a suddenly peaking wave. At the apex of his rise, he shot a glance around before dropping to his haunches. There had been nothing in view, no movement of any kind. Unusual for that alone—no sign of bird or animal life, no predators or scavengers moving in on the chilled corpses. Now, hunkered in the grass and foliage, partially sheltered but still able to keep a clear view for a full 360 degrees, Jak took stock of his thoughts and tried to remember what had happened.
He frowned, the scarred and pitted white skin of his face puckering in displeasure. He had no memory of anything before this point. He had never blacked out and lost his memory in a firefight before, so it was something that disturbed him. Almost as an automatic gesture, he drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python that was his preferred blaster. He sniffed; it hadn’t been fired recently. There was a shell in the chamber, and it was fully loaded. Reaching into the pockets and concealed holes of his patched camou jacket, moving probing fingers gently past the small shards of metal and glass that were also sewn onto the fabric, he could feel that he still had a full complement of ammo, and all of his leaf-bladed throwing knives were still in their concealed positions.