Latitude Zero by James Axler
Latitude Zero by James Axler
Chapter One
BEHIND RYAN CAWDOR and his five companions, the apocalyptic pillar of swirling red and orange dust rose thousands of feet into the clear sky. The choking cloud contained the disintegrated ruins of a long-hidden redoubt that had honeycombed the mountain, the remains of which still towered above the friends. The complex had been destroyed by a self-terminate device placed there by some long-dead hand nearly a hundred years ago, before the brief and savage nuclear war that had ravaged the United States of America, turning it into what was now simply called Deathlands.
Within the redoubt had been one of the rare mat-trans devices known as gateways, which would have enabled Ryan and the others to make an instantaneous jump from that particular redoubt to another, maybe a thousand miles away.
With its destruction came the bitter awareness that the companions were stranded in that bleak desert land with little food or water, and no sign of any semblance of civilization as far as the eye could see.
J. B. Dix, the armorer of the group, was busily checking figures off his micro-sextant, trying to find out where they were. Ryan wiped grit from his one good eye and looked around, guessing that they could be somewhere in the Southwest.
But the nuking of the year 2001 had done more than wipe out all the cities and virtually all the people. It had also produced almost indescribable changes in the formation of the country. Half of California had slithered into the Pacific; mountains had fallen and burst up again five hundred miles away; there were monstrous steaming lagoons filled with water so acidic it would separate flesh from bone; there were forests where there had been deserts and there were deserts that had once been rolling acres of fertile grazing land.
“New Mexico, I think. Not all that far from the border with old Texas.” J.B. wiped his wire-rimmed spectacles on his shirtsleeve and looked across at Ryan.
“Don’t know this region all that well. We were here with Trader, ten years or more ago. There’s plenty of old hot spots around here.”
Out of habit he glanced down at the miniature rad counter buttoned to his coat. It was showing a pale yellow light that barely shaded above the green of safety. It showed there was some kind of radiation within twenty miles or so, or a milder area a little nearer. The rad counters weren’t all that accurate or reliable.
Mildred Wyeth had been sitting on the ground, resting her head on her hand. “Sure is warm after that dank, cold dungeon. I haven’t been so cold since they froze me.”
The black woman had been in her midthirties when minor abdominal surgery had led to complications. She’d been one of the leading experts in the United States on the relatively new science of cryogenics and cryosurgery, and had been one of a number of people whose bodies had been frozen in the hope of reviving and curing them at some unspecified future date. Mildred had been thawed out by Ryan and the others when they’d found the cryo-center in what had once been called Minnesota.
Apart from the column of dust slowly drifting away, the sky was clear of any threatening chem clouds. Ryan glanced once at the battered comm dishcovered in stones and bouldersthat had saved their lives when the self-destruct blew out the redoubt. The area for several hundred yards around was scattered with similar rocks, most no bigger than a baseball, a few of them the size of a house.
Jak Lauren, the albino teenager, caught Ryan’s look. “Fucked without dish,” he said, trying to brush the thick dust from his mane of pure white hair.
“We’d have been in serious trouble if it’d run away with the spoon, wouldn’t we?” said Krysty Wroth, grinning.
“What spoon?”
The woman’s grin broadened. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you rhymes when you were young, Jak? Mother Sonja told me that poem when I was a young girl in Harmony ville.”
“Never young,” the boy replied.
“I recall it,” Doc Tanner boomed in his rich, mellow voice. “The dish running off with the spoon and the cat playing upon a violin and a heifer leaping across the lunar landscape. A diminutive canine that found the entire subject fit for considerable merriment. Ah, yes. I do remember it well, Krysty.”