RED HOLOCAUST
JAMES AXLER
RED HOLOCAUST
JAMES AXLER
Chapter One
RYAN CAWDOR BLINKED, wincing as he tried to sit up. The lights still glowed in
the patterned metal plates set in the floor and ceiling. The armored glass walls
were pale blue streaked with gray. Instinctively his hand fell to the smooth
butt of the SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm pistol on his hip.
There was the now-familiar feeling of nausea as he backed against the wall,
shaking his head to clear the cobwebs of the mat-trans jump. Only a frozen
moment ago he and his colleagues had been facing death in the Darks, the
mountainous region that had once been called Montana. Now they were…?
“Where the firestorm are we?” he muttered.
It was their fifth jump within an hour. Each one had been accompanied by a
gut-wrenching sickness and a whirling in the brain, as if every single particle
of tissue was being dissolved and spun through a suction pump.
Ryan couldn’t even begin to think how the complex machines might work. Probably
nobody now alive had any ideas. All of that came from before the war.
NEARLY A HUNDRED YEARS had passed since Doomsday—high noon on the twentieth day
of January in the year of our Lord 2001. The last day of our Lord. The missiles
rose and the skies darkened. The death toll was countless and humanity stood on
the brink of extinction. But there were survivors. There will always be
survivors.
From the caves and mines and shelters, they emerged to find a changed world
where a nuclear winter raged for nearly a generation. But again there were
survivors. And they bred and their children bred.
Three generations and close to a hundred years passed. Most of the United States
was changed. Deserts in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico became fiery nuke hot
spots where storms carrying rain of undiluted acid howled in from the Gulf. Most
of California had slipped unprotesting into the seething Pacific. Volcanoes and
earthquakes had changed the maps forever.
Except that there weren’t any maps.
On the East Coast, the big cities crumbled in the endless rain. From the lawless
elements rose a new breed of leader, barons who ran their own fiefdoms like
medieval lords, paying armies of mercenaries to protect and expand their
borders.
In the middle of the country, known as the Deathlands, civilization was reduced
to several scattered communities linked by a frail network of poor roads. Along
these roads came the merchants, trading in food or supplies or medicine or
blasters, and roving bands of freakish muties that set ambushes and raped and
killed. And, on occasion, indulged their taste for human flesh.
Best known of the merchants was the man called the Trader. And the most
respected, was his first lieutenant, Ryan Cawdor.
RYAN SAT STILL, fighting to steady his breathing. Sweating, he wiped his face,
his fingers touching the patch over his left eye. Then he traced the long,
puckered scar that ran down the right side of his face, then tugged at the
corner of his narrow mouth.
His mouth was dry and he licked his lips. His first firefight back East had
occurred when he was twelve. That was nineteen years ago. A skinny kid with a
mop of curly black hair, hefting a battered Armalite. For the first time,
killing a man. Funny how you remembered the first. Remembered the first man you
killed. First woman you made love to.
Both times Ryan had been twelve. On a trip into the Appalachians he’d met a
web-fingered mutie and blew half his guts away, spilling the loops of greasy
intestines into the man’s lap. First woman had been a mulatto whore in a bawdy
house near Butcher’s Creek.
What brought all that back? “Yeah,” he whispered, to himself. “Mouth gets dry
and your hands get wet. Mebbe should be the other way round.”
Hearing a low groan, he looked to one side of the chamber. It was Finnegan. Fat,
jolly Finn, with a red stain drying to brown on his hip, where Hennings had bled
on him as Finn hauled his friend to safety. Henn lay still, his breathing ragged
and harsh, blood still oozing from the ax-cut along his thigh. Hun-aker was