Savage Armada
Savage Armada
#53 in the Deathland series
James Axler
Chapter One
Even as the swirling electronic mists began to fade, the first shock of pain shot through his body and Ryan Cawdor knew that something was terribly wrong with the jump.
“Fucking hell,” Ryan muttered, slumping to the cold concrete floor of the mat-trans chamber and gagging on the taste of sour bile that filled his throat. The big man swallowed a few times to clear his mouth. Fireblast! They hadn’t had a jump this bad in weeks. For one terrible moment, he wondered if the machinery had malfunctioned, scrambled their insides, or something equally awful.
But then the convulsions racking his body began to subside, and Ryan could hear the moans and curses of the others around him. Nobody was screaming, and there was no smell of blood. No malfunc then, just a rad-blasted bad jump. Dimly he could sense the others spreading out, all instinctively trying to get away from the source of their pain.
Time passed slowly, and Ryan finally summoned enough strength to sit and brush the wild profusion of black hair from his sweaty face. There was the expected stink of sweat and puke in the air, but much stronger than normal. Usually the life-support system of a redoubt cleared away any unpleasant traces within minutes. The atmosphere in the underground bunkers was usually scrubbed clean and smelled with chem disinfectants. But not this time, and Ryan didn’t like that.
Adjusting the patch that covered his ruined left eye, Ryan blinked his right into focus and weakly glanced about. Four, five, six, all of his friends were present, and looking as bad as the Deathlands warrior still felt.
Sprawled on the floor of the mat-trans unit, with one hand extended onto the concrete apron outside, was a tall slim man with silvery hair. Fighting for breath, the old man wore an old-fashioned frock coat, and a frilly white shirt drenched in sweat. An ebony walking stick with an elaborate silver lion’s head was clenched in a twitching hand, and a monstrously huge revolver with two barrels jutted from the holster on his hip. The leather belt supporting the hand cannon was made entirely of lumpy pouches tightly buttoned shut.
“You…okay, Doc?” Ryan asked, surprised at the hoarseness of his voice.
Dr. Theophilus Tanner forced open an eye and looked vaguely about until focusing on the speaker. “Have…” He stopped to swallow, then tried again. “Have we crossed the River Styx, my good Ryan?” he asked in a deep rumbling voice.
Just then a hacking cough took Ryan and he couldn’t answer for a while. Nuking hell, he thought, there was another bad smell in the air, something familiar that he couldn’t identify immediately. It lay under the stink of their tortured bodies like the scum under a river of sewage. Faint, but bad. Ryan seemed to have some trouble focusing his thoughts. Another side effect of the jump? Fumbling at his side, he found a canteen and tried to force his hands to unscrew the top without spilling the water everywhere.
“We’re not dead yet, you old coot,” murmured a stocky black woman flat on her stomach between the two men. Slumped over a canvas bag, a wild array of dreadlocks masked her features. A sleek revolver was holstered at her hip, a battered tin canteen draped over a shoulder. As she struggled to roll onto her side, a canvas lump was exposed as a bulky backpack patched with a dozen different pieces of cloth that almost hid the small red cross.
“As always, madam,” Doc rumbled softly, “I bow to your vast and profound expertise of vaunted medical knowledge.”
“Stuff it,” Dr. Mildred Wyeth told him.
“Ryan,” she added, “what happened?”
“Just a bad jump,” Ryan answered, lowering the canteen and replacing the cap. Every passing moment was pouring new strength into his body, but that odd smell was still lingering about them like flies over a corpse.
“Bad? Worst jump ever.” Sitting with his back to a wall of the unit, John Barrymore Dix rubbed his pale face with both hands. He covered his features for a moment, massaging his temples. A compact Uzi lay at his side, while a S&W 12-gauge shotgun was draped across his shoulder. On the floor alongside was a canvas bag with a dull red stick of dynamite and length of bright yellow fuse peeking from under the loose flap.