James Axler – Deathlands

“Gaia!” The voice belonged to the flame-haired woman sitting next to Ryan. “Wonders never cease. I actually don’t feel sick, lover. It’s hot in here.”

Krysty Wroth was Ryan’s partner, lover and friend. Her long red hair was strangely sentient and reacted to a threat of danger. Now her tresses were curled tightly and defensively at her nape. The woman herself had a mutie quality, being able to sense the presence of other life forms and identify them as a possible menace, though she wasn’t a full-fledged doomie, able to pinpoint what was going to happen.

She yawned and stretched, catlike and graceful, looking around at the others and seeing that Dean was the only one not yet back with them. “Air feels triple moist, like being in a Hopi sweat bath,” she said.

“Must be somewhere south,” Ryan replied. “Down the keys or the bayous.”

The seventh and last of the group of traveling friends uncoiled himself from the corner of the chamber, next around in the circle from J.B.

Jak Lauren was sixteen years old, standing a bare five feet four and tipping the scales at a little over one-ten. He had the lean body of a trained acrobat, and wore a ragged collection of cotton and leather clothing. His obvious weapon was a satin-finish .357 Magnum Colt Python, holstered on his hip, but Jak wasn’t keen on blasters and preferred to rely on his hidden arsenal of leaf-bladed throwing knives.

But the first thing that everyone noticed about Jak was his mane of hair, as white as a magnesium night flare, then his eyes glittering like molten rubies. The young man was a true albino.

Jak had traveled with Ryan and company on two separate occasions. They’d first encountered one another in the swamps of Louisiana, when they’d helped him against the vicious Baron Tourment, murderer of his father. Some time later Jak had met and married Christina Ballinger and they’d had a daughter, Jenny, sharing a brief happiness on their New Mexico spread. Happiness in Deathlands was something you grabbed at as it rode by. And it didn’t often last long. It wasn’t all that many weeks since Jak had buried his wife and child.

And now he was back with Ryan and the other companions.

Dean was finally coming around from the effects of the mat-trans jump, blinking open his dark brown eyes and looking immediately for his father. “All right, Dad?”

“Yeah. All right. Seems to have been a good jump. How do you feel?”

Dean sniffed and raised a hand to his face, coming away with a smear of blood on his fingers. “Nose,” he explained. “Think I must’ve banged it on my knee or something. Apart from that I feel like a real hot pipe.”

Ryan nodded, though he still made no effort to get up. His brain felt the feathery, tumbling sickness that always came from a jump, but the discomfort was nothing compared to the usual bone-deep nausea.

“Everyone take it easy for a few minutes,” he warned. “Don’t get fooled into thinking that we’re all aces on the lines, just because we haven’t thrown up or stuff.”

While he sat resting in the locked gateway chamber, Ryan checked out his own array of weapons.

The eighteen-inch panga was sheathed on his hip, its tip like a needle, its double edge honed to a whispering sharpness. On his other hip was the powerful SIG-Sauer P-226. It had a four-and-a-half-inch barrel and held fifteen rounds of full-metal-jacket 9 mm bullets. The built-in baffle silencer was no longer as efficient as it had once been, but it still muffled the sharp explosive crack when the trigger was squeezed. His Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action rifle fired ten lethal 7.62 mm rounds. It also had a laser image enhancer and a Starlite night scope.

As Ryan looked over his weapons, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that the Armorer was doing the same with his own blasters.

Once he was satisfied, Ryan glanced around the six-sided chamber. “We all ready to move on?”

There was a nodding of heads and a muttering of agreement from everyone.

“Double red,” Ryan said. “Here we go.”