Moving in a blur, Dredda grabbed one of the white-coat’s gloved wrists. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast, and as she did, she applied pressure to the slender bones on the back of his hand with her thumb. “Delay of any kind is unacceptable,” she told him.
“I understand your impatience—just do not rip the glove. You must not break the Level Four containment. If you relax for a moment, everything will be fine.”
The other gauntlets rapidly emptied as biotech workers moved out of her reach.
“Let me out of here now.”
“Please, listen to reason…”
There was no reason but hers, no need but hers. Under the ball of her thumb, the small bones snapped like dry twigs. A piercing scream burst through the intercom.
“Open the door!” she shouted. Her booming voice made the walls of the steel chamber vibrate.
Seconds later, the airlock door popped open and she was free.
Chapter Two
Ryan Cawdor stepped over an exposed tree root, slick, dark and as big as a human corpse sprawled across his path. A profusion of bare roots laced the winding trail and made the footing treacherous. The dim light didn’t help matters, either. Though it was high noon, everything was cloaked in shadow, thanks to the dense canopy overhead and the seemingly endless groves of black-barked trees.
In all his travels, he had never seen this type of rad-mutated oak before. Its wood was like iron; hand axes bounced off of it, hardly making a dent. The bark and leaves were chem-rain resistant, as were the parasitic strangler vines that spiraled up trunks and limbs to reach the sunlight.
The forest’s canopy had protected Ryan and his companions from the searing downpours they had endured since their last mat-trans jump, several days earlier. The intense storm activity of the past forty-eight hours had forced them to take shelter in a cave. From the safety of its entrance, they had winced at sizzling nearby lightning strikes and watched methane ice hail, as blue as robin’s eggs and just as big, pound the earth. In scattered heaps, the chem ice had steamed for hours before it finally melted away.
If the local trees and vines had somehow adapted to survive the caustic rains, other types of foliage had not. There was no ground cover to speak of around the trunks, just slippery piles of fallen, blade-shaped leaves that rustled underfoot.
The passing storm front had left the air extremely hot and punishingly humid—it felt equatorial to Ryan. The weather was the only clue where he and the companions had materialized. The cloud cover and forest canopy had made it impossible for them to orient using the stars.
As he rounded a tight bend, he saw the group’s pointman frozen like a bird dog fifty feet ahead. Ryan swung to hip height the scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle he carried, Jak Lauren, his pale skin and lank white hair almost luminous in the forest’s half-light, held up a hand, indicating caution. Jak was a man of few words. Fiercely loyal, without an ounce of guile or deceit, he was a true wild child of Deathlands. Jak’s weapon, a battle-scarred .357 Magnum Colt Python, remained in its holster. Whatever he’d found, there was no immediate danger.
“Cook fire,” Jak said softly as Ryan stepped up, his albino eyes as red as rabies. He raised a hand to point downslope. “There…”
Ryan caught the faintest smell of woodsmoke, filtering up the winding trail through the forest. It was the first sign of another human presence since the mat-trans jump.
It smelled delicious.
For three days Ryan and his companions had been on starvation rations of mutie rattlesnake jerky and tepid water. The forest’s lack of undergrowth meant there was no ground-dwelling large or small game for them to hunt. During the day, they had caught a few glimpses of little creatures darting about high in the branches, but the dense canopy made shooting at them a waste of ammo. And at night it was so black they couldn’t see their own feet.
Though all their bellies rumbled, no one had complained.
A tall, skinny man, dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots, moved up the trail and closed ranks with Ryan and Jak.