James Axler – Watersleep

Watersleep

A second blast of thunder ripped through the night

Dean slammed into Mildred, and the woman managed to hang on to his shirttail, keeping him upright. Doc reached out desperately, latching on to a metal lip that was attached to the bulkhead.

But Krysty had been thrown off her feet and onto her upper back and neck. The suddenness of the explosion smashed her down with terrific force, knocking her unconscious as she slid toward the gaping hole in the hull.

Jak twisted his lithe body as he fell, managing not to break his neck as he slipped through the hole and hit the churning water. Gasping for breath, he struggled to maintain some proper sense of which way was up.

Seeing Krysty’s limp body already being sucked into the undertow beneath the vessel, he pushed himself deeper into the chilling ocean and grasped a fistful of long red hair.

Then they both vanished from sight.

Watersleep

#39 in the Deathland series

James Axler

Prologue

Ryan Cawdor was drowning.

His chest echoed heavily with the dull thud of a waterlogged pump, each heartbeat growing slower and groggier. He tried to speak, and a precious dollop of his last few seconds of oxygen bubbled out of his open mouth. He watched the air bubbles float upward, following their path with his good right eye, and tried to focus on what might lie beyond them.

At first he thought his vision was blurred, but then Ryan realized there was no sky overhead, no clouds, no stars, nothing but water. He squinted and took in a sight his brain logically told him had to be the murky green fluid of the ocean. No lake or manmade pool had ever offered up such a color of green—a green duskier than the blackest of any moonless night, and just as dark and infinite.

The green was everywhere, surrounding his entire body and being.

Ryan had always imaged the ocean depths as being cold as ice, but he was strangely warm instead. He could almost taste sweat on his lips, but knew the salt on his tongue had to be coming from the seawater. Could a man sweat underwater if the temperature got hot enough, cook like a fish in a pot over an open fire? Ryan thought it was possible, but he’d have to try to remember to ask Mildred when…

Ask Mildred when they ended the jump.

And then he remembered—not where he was, but where he had been.

So many crumbling cities and villes, so many dif­ferent areas of Deathlands, all of them ultimately left behind as he pressed on, looking for a safe harbor.

Ryan’s mind raced, trying to sort out a confusing jumble of images. The last concrete event his memory recalled was in the military redoubt. As he’d done so many times before, he’d hurriedly slammed shut the heavy metal door that activated the mat-trans unit. The sec lock had clicked reassuringly, letting him know all was ready. This locking sound was followed in turn by the spectral appearance of the sinister pale mist that signaled the beginning of a jump.

The light fog continued to gather, thickening around the unearthly shimmering disks in the floor and ceiling, and an almost inaudible hum from within the bowels of the chamber began to make itself heard deep inside the group’s heads.

Ryan sat on the floor with Krysty Wrath’s hip next to his own. He could see the radiant fire of her long red hair out of the corner of his eye. On his other side, sharing his dark complexion and black, curly hair, was his son, Dean. Until recently the youngster had been a student at the Nicholas Brady School in Colorado, obtaining a much needed education.

A formal education of the sort Ryan had paid for didn’t come cheap in the hellish world of Deathlands, but he knew the boy would need some book schooling before returning to the harsh realities of daily sur­vival. Knowledge was just as useful a tool as a good blaster or a working war wag.

Across from Ryan was a young albino with features distinctive enough to bring more than a glancing no­tice, even among the more unusual appearances in Deathlands. Jak Lauren’s pallid complexion was paler than usual, throwing the crisscrossed scars on his face into sharp relief. His ruby eyes were at half-mast, and his mouth was drawn tight in anticipation of the jump to come.