Moving farther over the veld, Jak came across the third of the chills. A youth on the cusp of his teenage years, with a strong jawline and a mop of thick, black, curly hair. His blaster—a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power— was still in an outstretched hand. Even at this distance, Jak could smell the cordite where the blaster had been discharged. But not enough to save the boy, who had been hit eight times across the torso with shells that looked, from the entry wounds, to have been high caliber. The front of the boy’s clothing was soaked in blood.
Jak didn’t bother to turn the corpse over, but knew that such a number of entry wounds, and of such a caliber, would probably have left exit wounds that had taken away more than half the boy’s backbone and flesh. As if this weren’t enough, there were two further entry wounds, one on each knee. It suggested he had been brought down and then savagely chilled when he had used up all his ammo. The boy was Jak’s friend, Dean Cawdor.
Moving soundlessly across the veld, Jak came to the next chill. A woman, voluptuously curved and with a shock of long, Titian hair that had curled around her skull and neck, hugging close in death to her skin, framing the contorted agony of her death throes, now frozen on her once-beautiful face. The hair had been sentient, curling close to her when danger beckoned, a visible sign of her mutie heritage, fostered in her home ville of Harmony. The warning had obviously not been quick enough, as her body had been hacked into ribbons by multiple blade wounds. Fragments of bloodied cloth merged with flayed flesh, white bone showing through. The earth around her was stained dark with her blood. Her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640 revolver lay by her side, unfired. She had once been Krysty Wroth, one of Jak’s traveling companions and lover of Ryan Cawdor, the leader of their group. Now she was nothing more than carrion.
With a dreadful inevitability, Jak trod into the longer grass, where the last two corpses were concealed, their positions notable only by the gaps they created in the wall of green.
The first corpse was an older version of Dean: taller, harder, leaner in the sense of having more finely honed muscles. Over six feet in height, he lay stretched to his full length, his throat an open wound. One startling blue eye stared sightlessly to the sky, and where the other eye should be there was a patch covering an empty socket, the long, puckered scar from that socket running the length of his cheek, distorting the rugged features. About his person was a SIG-Sauer blaster, a Steyr rifle and a razor-honed panga that was still sheathed to his thigh. Apart from the gaping wound at his throat, there was little sign of a struggle. The chill had come quick and fast to him.
Not so to the last member of the party, whom Jak found a few yards to his left. Doc Tanner was a thin, scrawny man. He looked old and weather beaten, with a mane of gray-white hair that framed a lined face. Yet Doc was only somewhere in his mid-thirties, his apparent age the result of an incredible experience. Tanner was the only successful subject of a predark project known as Operation Chronos, part of the Totality Concept with which the old U.S.A. had prepared itself for the all out nukecaust that had led to the formation of the Deathlands. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been a family man and academic, snatched at random from his own time period in the 1880s, and pulled through the 1990s by the whitecoat scientists of Chronos. He had been so obstreperous that the whitecoats, tiring of him, had catapulted him forward in time, thus inadvertently saving his life, albeit plunging him into what was a living hell until he was rescued by Ryan Cawdor.
The immense stresses on the man’s body and mind had aged him physically and made his grasp on sanity fragile. And yet Doc managed to keep himself together at crucial moments and made it through the dangers. Until now. Doc’s death was the worst of all. He had put up a fight, as there was still the smell of burned powder about the ancient LeMat percussion pistol he favored, and both the shot and ball barrels had been discharged. The LeMat lay a few feet to his left, and his left hand still clutched the unsheathed swordstick with the silver lion’s head that also supported him as a walking stick in his weaker moments. Dried blood coated the glinting blade. Whatever else, Doc had fought the fight of his life, for his life.