James Axler – Shadowfall

Trader had found two massively powerful war wags up in the Appalachians and used them in his trading and traveling until he was one of the most feared men in Deathlands. Even the barons of some of the largest villes were wary of upsetting the uncertain temper of Trader.

The diminutive figure next to Trader, with a drooping mustache, was Abe, once the gunner on War Wag One. When Trader had vanished, many many long months ago, it was widely accepted that he’d gone off alone into the woods to chill himself, as he was known to be suffering from a painful and probably terminal rad cancer.

Then the whispering started. Trader had been seen down in Yuma; had chilled a whole ville in Peoria; was running a frontier gaudy with twenty beautiful girls, somewhere east of Taos.

It got so that Abe couldn’t stand the rumors and had set off to try to track down his old leader.

Eventually he had succeeded in his quest, locating the grizzled veteran close to the ruins of old Seattle, Washington.

Ryan had mentally ticked them all off, as the disks in floor and ceiling began to glow and the white fog wraiths appeared in the gateway chamber Krysty, Dean, Mildred, J.B., Trader, Abe.

And Jak and Doc.

Jak Lauren looked as comfortable as if he were relaxing on a goose-feather mattress. Sixteen years old, he was the finest acrobat that Ryan had ever known, as well as being murderously accurate with any of the half dozen leaf-bladed throwing knives that he kept concealed about his skinny person.

He came originally from West Lowellton, near Lafayette, in the swamps. Ryan and the others had met him when they became involved with Jak’s battles against the evil Baron Tourment. The albino teenager, with a mane of stark white hair and ruby eyes, had traveled with them for some months, until he’d met and married Christina Ballinger. They had lived happily on a spread in New Mexico, with baby Jenny coming along to cement their love for each other.

Then tragedy had struck, and the woman and child had been butchered. Jak had come to the very brink of suicidal madness, but Ryan and Krysty and the others had helped him through the darkness and out once more into the light.

Last, and certainly not least, of their party was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner.

None of the nine could have been called “normal” by any acceptable standards, but Doc Tanner was less normal than any of them.

The date of his birth was February 14, 1868, in a white frame house in the pretty hamlet of South Strafford, Vermont.

On June 17, 1891, he had married Miss Emily Chandler. A daughter, Rachel, had blessed their union two years later, followed by their ever-smiling little baby boy, Jolyon, in 1895.

Doc, whose degree was in science from Harvard, backed with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, England, had the whole world in his hands.

But the American military scientists in the unknowable future had other ideas.

First, there was the Totality Concept, which spawned Overproject Whisper, of which Project Cerberus dealing with gatewayswas an integral part. Another subdivision of the Totality Concept was Operation Chronos.

The slang name for their experiments was “Trawling.” It meant seeking out individuals from the past and using a complex and unreliable variant on the mat-trans system to pluck them from their own time, to the cold research laboratories of the late 1990s. There were many failures. The results of some of the failures were hideous beyond human imagining. There was really only one clear-cut success in all of Operation Chronos. Dr. Theo Tanner.

One moment he was in mid-Victorian times with his wife and children and then, a heartbeat later, he was dragged more than a hundred years into the future.

But the whitecoat experimenters came to regret their single success.

Having Doc Tanner loose in their organization was like having a panther running loose in a tornado.

He made himself so difficult and obstructive that they eventually resorted to trawling him forward, dumping him nearly a hundred years into the Deathlands future and leaving him there to fend for himself.