James Axler – Deathlands

He reached out to retrieve his lion’s-head ebony cane, which concealed a gleaming rapier of Toledo steel, stretching his long, skinny legs in their cracked knee boots. Then his hand automatically went for the unusual handblaster that was holstered at his hip.

It was an ornate Le Mat, a weapon that dated back to the early days of the Civil War. The blaster was engraved and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the immortal memory of James Ewell Brown StuartJeb Stuart, the greatest cavalryman of his country. The massive cannon, weighing over three and a half pounds, had two barrels and an adjustable hammer. It fired a single .63-caliber round, like a shotgun. As well, a revolver chamber held nine .44-caliber rounds.

At any range around twenty feet it was devastatingly lethal. At much over fifty feet it was fairly innocuous in the old man’s hands.

The Armorer was also sitting next to Doc, feeling for his neatly folded spectacles in a pocket of his worn leather jacket, finally perching them on the bridge of his narrow nose. Five feet eight inches tall, and just about reaching one-forty when soaking wet, John Barrymore Dix was Ryan’s oldest friend. They had both joined the legendary Trader and his armored war wags when they were young men, filled with sand and gall. And they had learned many things from Trader, mostly about surviving, about mistakes not made.

J. B. Dix was undeniably the greatest authority on weaponry in all of Deathlands.

His own armament consisted of a 20-round 9 mm Uzi automatic machine pistol, and an unusual scattergun. The Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 didn’t fire ordinary rounds. It held eight Remington 12-gauge cartridges, each with twenty flechettes, tiny, murderous inch-long darts.

J.B. grinned at Ryan and picked up his beloved fedora with his left hand, blowing dust from the crown and placing it carefully on his head.

“That’s one of the best jumps I ever had,” he said. “But it’s hot and wet, isn’t it? Where in the black dust have we jumped to this time?”

He turned to look at the stocky black woman who sat next to him, reaching out to hold her hand as she jerked back into consciousness.

Mildred Winona Wyeth was in her middle thirties, the daughter of a Baptist minister who had been burned to death by Klans in a firebombing back in 1965.

A leading expert in her field of cryogenics and cryosurgery, she was also a brilliant shot with a pistol and had won the free-shooting silver medal in the last Olympic Games of all time, in Atlanta in 1996. The event four years later had been canceled due to the terminal deterioration in world politics.

Three days before the end of the year 2000, Mildred had been admitted to hospital for a minor operation. Unpredictably the anesthetic produced a near-fatal reaction. In a desperate bid to save Mildred’s life, her doctor had, ironically, frozen her, putting the woman into suspended animation in a nuke-powered hospital, hoping to revive her at some future time from the coma that had claimed her. There she had stayed in an endless, dreamless sleep, until Ryan and the others, ragged Prince Charmings, had come along and awakened her from both the coma and her suspended state. The tiny beads in Mildred’s plaited hair rattled as she moved her head. “Guess I don’t feel too bad,” she stated. Mildred was wearing a quilt-lined denim jacket, and reinforced military jeans tucked into black calf-length boots. On her hip was a Czech-made target revolver, the ZKR 551, from the Zbrojovka works in Brno. It was a 6-shot blaster, chambered to take a Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round, with a solid frame-side rod ejector and a short-fall thumb-cocking hammer. Mildred used to claim she could take out a gnat’s eye at forty paces with the weapon. She wasn’t joking.

Next to her, still sleeping, was eleven-year-old Dean Cawdor. He had his father’s dark complexion and shock of black, curly hair. It was only in the last year or so that Ryan had ever known that he had a son, the result of a single sexual encounter with a woman named Sharona. The boy and his mother had roamed Deathlands until she had died, rad sick, handing over responsibility for Dean to a friend who had eventually met Ryan and the companions in a chance encounter in Newyork.