James Axler – Stoneface

Besides her medical skills, Mildred had proved herself invaluable as a tenacious survivalist. She had also won a silver medal for free pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic games.

Watching her ministrations with a clinical interest was another refugee from a past time period, Dr. T. A. Tanner. Unlike Mildred, who had bobbed unknowingly down the temporal stream, Doc was the subject of a cold-hearted scientific practice known in predark days as “trawling.”

Since the 1940s, American military scientists and their counterparts in other countries had tried to reconcile Einsteinian physics with quantum mechanics. By the 1990s, the reconciliation attempts had spawned the ultra-top-secret experiment known as the Totality Concept. There were several subdivisions of the experiment, such as Overproject Whisper, Project Cerberus, and, finally, Operation Chronos.

With the use of a complex matter-transfer device called a gateway, the project scientists had tried time and time again to snatch subjects from a past temporal line and “trawl” them to the present.

Their only success was a man from 1896. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, Ph.D., scientist and scholar, was plucked from the bosom of his beloved family and deposited in a sterile subterranean chamber a century hence.

Though he learned all he could about the twentieth century, Doc never forsook the hope of returning to his wife and two children. His constant attempts to return to his own era so angered the overlords of Operation Chronos that they eventually used him as a trawling subject again. Rather than sending him back, they opted to transfer him decades into the future. Like Mildred, he missed the nukecaust by less than a month.

All that remained of the Totality Concept and its spin-off researches were the matter-transfer units tucked away in underground redoubts.

The other members of the group were the products of the hellgrounds known as Deathlands.

Sixteen-year-old Jak Lauren had all the hard, bitter experience of a man twice his age. An albino, with fearsome ruby eyes and a shock of bone-white hair, he favored bladed weapons over blasters. He bore scars from many near-fatal encounters, the least of which curved up from the corner of his mouth and across his high-planed face.

Jak had buried two sets of families during his young lifehis folks back in Louisiana and his wife and infant daughter in New Mexico. He hid the tragedies behind a taciturn mask and an eerily calm, almost detached, manner.

Ryan Cawdor and John Barrymore Dix had been companions for well over a decade, since they traveled the Appalachians in a pair of huge war wags with the legendary Trader. The weapons dealer had been their undisputed leader and mentor, even something of a father figure to Ryan.

Trader had earned a considerable fortune by uncovering hidden stockpiles of weapons and fuel and using them to barter his way through the Deathlands. He had been a fearsome figure in his day, a reputation he fully lived up to and enjoyed.

Recently, after beating a case of rad cancer, Trader had been reunited with his former lieutenants. His long illness had changed him, leaving him sometimes confused, sometimes irrational, but still a dangerous man to cross. People had always treaded lightly around him, but his weathered skin had become so thin with age, it was anybodys guess as to what might provoke him.

He had resented that Ryan was his group’s undisputed leader, and that the younger man no longer showed him the deference he believed was due. Their reunion had been punctuated by many disagreements, with Ryan and Trader frequently going eyeball to eyeball over tactics and even ethics. Everyone had feared that one day Trader wouldn’t be the first to blink, and either he or Ryan would catch the last train west.

Though there was no denying that the grizzled veteran of Deathlands had gotten the group of friends out of a few tight spots, he’d gotten them into just as many, due to his temper and ego.

The last tight spot had been in California. Trader and Abe, the former main gunner of War Wag One, had apparently sacrificed themselves to save Ryan and the rest of the group from an enemy attack.

The love of Ryan’s life was Krysty Wroth, who was, by definition, a mutie. She possessed the empathic ability to sense danger. The few others with these prescient powers were called “doomseers” or “doomies.”