Crucible of Time
Crucible of Time
#44 in the Deathlands series
James Axler
“Belief is exercised through shared thoughts and words of wisdom.
Blind belief can only be exercised along the barrel of a rifle.”
-From: Happiness Is the Good Book and a Warm Gun
by Blessed Bob “Bobcat” Bobson,
Apocalypse Press, Waco, Texas
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a straggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope…
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor moaned and blinked open his eye.
His head felt like someone had been using it to grind flour. He cautiously parted his lips and swallowed, tasting the bitterness of bile. It seemed as if a gang of muties had been using his mouth for an outhouse.
“Fireblast!” he whispered, his voice sounding high, thin and cracked.
The flash of dazzling light that had drilled through the optic nerve into the forepart of his brain had made him close his good right eye immediately. He took several long, slow breaths, trying to gain a measure of control over mind and body.
All he knew was that the mat-trans jump had been a bad one. The leap from one gateway to another was never a pleasant experience, but some jumps were worse than others.
“Bad one,” he muttered to himself.
There was only the briefest memory of starting the jump. All of them had sat down on the floor with its pattern on steel disks, matched by the ones in the ceiling. His back settled against the cold armaglass, with Krysty Wroth at his right and Dean, his son, on his left. Doc Tanner, Mildred Wyeth, J.B. Dix and Jak Lauren had ranged themselves around the hexagonal chamber.
The door had been slammed, triggering the mechanism that would whisk them from that location to someplace else in the blighted remnants of the United States, now known as Deathlands. They had no control over their destination.
Ryan sat still, swallowing hard to avoid throwing up. He eased open his eye again, squinting to see how his companions had survived the jump.
The first thing he noticed was the color of the armaglass walls of the chamber. They had been blue; now they were a deep maroon, like venous blood.
As far as Ryan could tell, everyone else was still alive and breathing. Krysty’s head was on her shoulder, mouth open, her fiery scarlet hair coiled tight at her nape. Her long fingers were clenched tightly into the palms of her hands, and he could make out a worm of bright blood inching across the pale skin. Her emerald eyes were clamped shut, and a thread of saliva dangled from a corner of her lips.
“Bad one,” Ryan repeated.