James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem Read online

  Rachel was on her feet, her hair and clothing whipping around her frail body by seemingly gale-force winds. The red scarf she wore plumed from her neck like a signal flare. "Father!" she called, but the screaming of mother and daughter was blocked, torn away, by the rift hanging near the sidewalk.

  And Tanner...he was somehow suspended in midair, his frock coat flowing behind him like a cape, his shoulder-length hair streaming from his skull, each fine fiber standing up and out, crackling with static electricity.

  "Thunder and damnation," he said in an unsteady voice.

  Struggling to keep her footing in the maelstrom,

  Emily reached out and felt her fingers brush Tanner's hand. "I love you," he managed to yell above the unholy sound coming from the doorway, and then he vanished into nothingness.

  Rachel Tanner wasn't as lucky. Buffeted by the unholy winds, doomed by her very proximity to the gateway, her young body was ripped apart by the sudden closing of the rift matrix and, as it fell inward upon itself, she perished before her mother's frightened gaze.

  Her fragile corpse was shredded into wet hunks of meat. Arms, legs, fingers, toes, flesh, bone and blood spun in the air, intermingled with the mist and the bits of the blue dress the child had been wearing. The red scarf coiled like a serpent, rearing and striking at an invisible foe.

  Emily vomited, one arm going to her heaving stomach in a reflex action, loosening her grip on Jol-yon and before she could react, the winds tore her other child, her baby boy, away from her, leaving nothing behind but a dismembered torso dressed in blood-soaked pajamas, a lifeless carcass that fell with a wet plop once the rift collapsed fully upon itself, sucking back the unexplained mist and vanishing as quickly as it had come. The ghastly remnants of Rachel Tanner fell like rain upon her mother, who had stumbled and landed on her knees, her chest heaving with racking sobs.

  Witnesses saw the mist, heard the sounds, viewed the aftermath. One moment, a family of four was on a stroll.

  The next, a lone woman remained, dressed in a tattered dress and scarf, surrounded by the gore of her murdered children and the stink of voided flesh. Her husband had vanished, spirited away by and into the very air itself.

  As to be expected, Emily Tanner never was quite the same after that dark day.

  "The eye," she whispered over and over. "The eye, the eye, Satan's unblinking eye."

  On the strength of her spouse's estate and reputation, along with her parents' consent, she was in-stitutionalized for a time, sedated, studied and pitied. Outlandish theories abounded about what she'd endured on that Omaha street corner, but there was no explaining the mishap using the science of the late nineteenth century.

  A few suggested sorcery, which had always been the explanation given to advanced science by those who could not begin to understand what they had seen from a limited point of reference or experience. As for Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, he was on his way to a new destination. "An ideal subject," one report said, due to his intellect and where he happened to have fallen in the time stream. "The perfect candidate," read another communique in choosing him as guinea pig. The final decision had termed him "the logical choice, ideally suited in body and spirit and, more importantly, mind."

  Out of all the other men, women and children, the madmen and the brilliant, the young and the old, the weak of mind and strong of spirit, out of all of those alive in the United States of America during that November month of 1896, Tanner had been the one chosen.

  Chosen to make a pilgrimage-a pilgrimage to hell.

  Chapter One

  "Wherever you want to lead, Ryan..." J. B. Dix had said long days ago, and as Ryan Cawdor now regained his senses, grateful this latest mat-trans journey hadn't invoked the nightmares that usually came during the fantastic quantum journeys, he found himself dwelling on the words.

  What had brought the words to mind was the color of the walls surrounding him-armaglass walls of milky, colorless gray.

  "Fireblast," Ryan muttered. Unless his memory was starting to slip, the walls of the chamber he was now resting within were exactly the same as the mat-trans unit beneath that stickie-infested pesthole hospital in Carolina.

  The light in the hexagonal-shaped chamber seemed to be impossibly bright and his head was pounding, as if an unknown assailant had shoved a lighted candle into the open eye socket of his face and twisted down, driving the flame both into the frontal lobe of his brain and the optic nerve of his remaining good eye.

  The white-hot light had begun to slowly fade into a more reasonable wattage. Through the spots dancing in front of his vision, Ryan was able to make out the forms of his companions, all six of them in various prone positions on the polished floor around him.

  "Looks like we're calling North Carolina home again," Mildred Wyeth commented.

  "Not much changed," Jak Lauren agreed.

  Since they knew the area, and not a great deal of time had passed since their last visit to the complex, a quick recce soon found the group out of the chamber and into a small white anteroom located outside the armaglass door. As before, an ordinary desk with a computer and monitor rested directly across from the observation window of the gateway. Everyone kept their hardware ready as they crossed the room to another door, which they knew to be made of painted wood with a simple bronze doorknob. There were no high-tech locking systems or security keypads. No apparent locks of any kind.

  Maintaining a triple red alert, they then entered the mat-trans control room, which was also still intact. Ryan held up a hand and all paused, listening and waiting. Things appeared to be quiet and safe.

  "We got two choices," Ryan stated.

  No one replied. They knew the options: try Carolina's hospitality again or take the risk of another gateway jump. Neither was particularly appealing.

  "Any of you feel strongly about picking one over the other?" he asked.

  "Your call," Jak said with a shrug.

  "Doesn't matter to me," J.B. agreed.

  "For now, let's check the rest of the area. Make sure we don't have any company."

  Ryan, on point, took a moment to glance back. They were good friends, every last one of them.

  No, more than friends. Dean was his biological son and Krysty his soul mate, but the others were just as important in the tangled web that was his life.

  They were family-more so than Ryan's blood kin back in the mountains of West Virginia. Most of the relatives who shared the Cawdor name were long chilled, dead and buried. His murderous brother, Harvey, had cowardly challenged a young Ryan and taken his left eye, leaving the disfigured and maimed boy for dead. His adulteress stepmother, Rachel, who'd seen to the death of Ryan's father, Lord Cawdor, had then, in an act of taboo lust, slept with the insane Harvey. His nephew Jabez had seen the power and station of the Cawdor name as a dkect route to the domination of others and the rape of helpless young women and children.

  Ryan had claimed Harvey, and had seen to chilling his mad brother personally, while Doc Tanner's weapon had taken Lady Rachel. Krysty had killed Jabez with her bare hands after he'd attempted to sodomize her. When the bloody combat was over, Ryan had left his nephew Nathan, who'd been sired by his murdered older brother, Morgan, in charge.

  Nathan Freeman dropped the surname Cawdor during his subsequent banishment, a banishment Ryan himself had shared for many long years. Ryan had come home for his reckoning and cleaned house, later finding Nathan and installing him as the new baron of Front Royal.

  The raven-haired savior of Front Royal had no desire to rule a ville. He merely wanted his name cleared and his father's memory respectfully restored. With the diseased darkness of Harvey Cawdor vanquished, both of the one-eyed warrior's wishes were now a reality.

  His fingertips traced the deep scar that lined the right side of his face as he walked through the hallways of the hidden hospital complex. Every time he looked in the mirror at his rugged features, Harvey's handiwork was there, twin disfigurements looking back at him: one stretching from forehead to chee
k, and the other hidden away-a ruin of an eye socket still open and raw, which Ryan kept covered with a scuffed leather patch.

  The final encounter with Harvey and his madness seemed as recent as yesterday, Ryan mused as he shrugged his broad shoulders. The movement made the long white scarf around his neck shift, and he reached up automatically to adjust it. Both ends of the scarf were weighted-a simple measure of extra security that had saved his life numerous times when opponents believed him to be weaponless.

  The last time the companions had been at this particular juncture of the Deathlands, there had been some concern among the group about heading north across land on foot. They were close to the old state-line boundary, and could pass through the forests of Virginia to the state's western cousin to personally check up on the status of the surviving members of the House of Cawdor.

  Ryan had been privy to rumors that the status quo he'd left behind years ago was no longer in place. He honestly wasn't sure why he even cared, since he'd chosen to reject his heritage of wealth and finery to find his own individual path.

  Still, ammunition was at an all-time low for the group's array of blasters, and most of their jack had been previously exhausted in Freedom. While they'd been able to replenish some hardware along the way since then, their scavenging there hadn't been nearly enough. No, a long road trip across two states was the last thing wanted or needed. Front Royal would have to wait until they'd found a secure spot to rest up in, and he already knew this stretch of Carolina with the high mutant population wasn't going to be their safe haven.

  Chapter Two

  The odor came wafting in like a runaway pack of screamwings as the group stepped out in the hall that led to the stairwell. The strong smell of the fire mu-ties had lighted in a previous attack became stronger, along with the rancid smell of the corpses Ryan and his friends had chilled days earlier. The stench of the hallway of death where the dead stickies were scattered was foul, making them all glad they weren't staying in the secret complex.

  As they walked, J.B. took out a small drawstring pouch from one of the many pockets that lined the inside of his well-worn leather jacket. From the denim blue sack came a long thin black cheroot, crudely rolled. The Armorer took a moment to sniff the tobacco stick with a deep sigh.

  "Where in the hell did you get that?" the African-American woman following J.B. demanded.

  "What?"

  Mildred Wyeth gave an exaggerated point with her right index finger at the cheroot J.B. was holding. "That."

  "Had them tucked away. I forgot about picking up a sack at the tobacco shop in the Freedom Mall," the Armorer replied after sticking the cigar into the corner of his mouth. "Kind of funny. Us being back here jogged my memory. North Carolina's tobacco country, remember?"

  "I've tried to forget," she retorted. "Smoking's a filthy habit. Public smoking was banned in many places during the 1990s. One of the few good things to come out of that final era."

  "That was a long time ago. Lot's changed since then," J.B. replied as he took out a silver-plated Zippo lighter and flicked it open with a quick flip of the wrist. He held the bright yellow flame to the tip of the cheroot and sucked in the smoke deeply with a contented moan.

  "Haven't seen you puffing on one of those in a long while," Ryan said, glad the smoke from the cheroot was behind him, blowing in the opposite direction.

  "Want one?" J.B. asked.

  "No, thanks," Ryan replied. "I know of a hundred better ways to kill myself."

  The Armorer shrugged and went back to enjoying his smoke.

  J.B. was Ryan's oldest friend. They had been brought together on the legendary Trader's once-thriving caravan of war wags years earlier, and soon found their personalities and talents to perfectly complement each other. While Ryan was the Trader's designated war captain, J.B. and his love of weapons made him the perfect lieutenant.

  Weaponsmith, Armorer, Master Blaster, Gunsmith-he wore the designations with quiet pride and calm efficiency. A living, breathing cache of knowledge of all forms of weaponry and how they could be used most effectively, J.B. used his eidetic memory to keep himself and his companions safe and whole. His mastery of guns and their specs was invaluable to anyone attempting to traverse Death-lands.

  He was still learning, but it was the rare weapon indeed he hadn't read about or held in his own hands. Traveling with the Trader had provided him the opportunity to spend time in every backwater town and ville Deathlands had to offer, and in all of them a new blaster could be traded for or, at the very least, handed over for a closer look in exchange for his own.

  Those had been days of wonder for J.B., instilling in his heart a wanderlust he'd never been able to shake. There was always something new around the corner, and even with no guarantees of it being friend or foe he wanted to see what the world had to offer for himself.

  Under five foot nine, with a slim build that gave no indication of the wiry muscularity beneath his clothes, J.B. was approximately forty years old. His actual age was unknown to his friends, and even to the Armorer himself, since his family hadn't believed in celebrating birthdays. He wore a multipocketed brown leather jacket, dark trousers that were also lined with more pockets, heavy combat boots and a battered, well-traveled fedora.

  Perched on his nose was the new parr of wire- rimmed glasses, obtained back in Freedom, along with darker news concerning his deteriorating vision-news from the mall optician the Armorer had chosen to share with no one until he became a potential liability.

  The doctor had called the disease glaucoma, and the current sad state of what passed for eye care in the ruin of Deathlands offered no cure or treatment. "A matter of time," he told J.B. with a sigh. "Only a matter of time."

  When that day came, when his pale gray eyes no longer could be trusted, J.B. had already decided he would take care of cutting his own losses.

  But for now, his vision was clear, even if the new frames pinched like a vise. He groaned, and removed them to temporarily relieve the aching pressure.

  At a first glance, J.B. looked like a runty man, unhealthy and malnourished. His complexion was sallow and dank, and from close-up faint acne scars from his teen years could be seen on his cheeks and forehead.

  In another time, J.B. Dix would have been seen as a man of no consequence.

  J_x>oks could be deceiving.

  The compact man was a walking arsenal, capable of massive amounts of carnage when he chose to unleash his full capacity. The obvious signs were in the mini-Uzi hung low over one shoulder, the trigger at waist level for easy use, or hi the Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun he carried in his left hand, an extremely deadly weapon that didn't fire ordinary rounds, but instead held eight Remington 12-gauge cartridges, each with twenty flechettes, or even in the fighting knife sheathed at his hip. But his clothing and boots also contained a wealth of hidden equipment: fuses of varying lengths and a tight ball of plas-ex, coils of wire and packets of shiny lock picks, an invaluable folding minisextant, and spare ammo and blades.

  J.B. took another puff from his concise cigar. "Yeah, I don't come across these as often as I'd like. Nothing like a good smoke."

  "Or a good case of lung cancer," Mildred muttered.

  The woman behind J.B. was his companion and lover, Dr. Mildred Wyeth, a time traveler from the period before the nukecaust that ended the civilized world. Like the Armorer, Mildred was a prized companion. Intelligent, compassionate and an astute judge of character, she was a trained physician and former pioneer in the field of cryonics and cryogenics.

  The woman had suffered an adverse reaction to anesthesia during a minor operation and had been preserved using the very same cryonic processes she had helped to develop. Mildred had remained on ice until Ryan and the others had found her sleeping in her silver coffin. In a series of tense hours, they had managed to restore her to life successfully.

  A doctor of another kind entirely followed Mildred Wyeth.

  Peering from behind the stocky black woman was the weathered face of Doc
Tanner. A lifetime of hard sights was etched into his skin-and his eyes. Doc gripped his ebony walking cane tightly. The silver lion-head handle of the stick was serene, impassively keeping the secret of the honed blade of Toledo steel housed hidden inside the body of the cane.

  A most unusual handblaster was holstered at the man's hip. In the holster was an ornately tooled Le Mat, a unique weapon dating back to the early days of the Civil War. Engraved in flowing script and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the great Confederate solider James Ewell Brown Stuart-or Jeb Stuart, as his friends and folks in Virginia referred to him-the massive hand-cannon weighed in at over three and a half pounds.

  The blaster was a quick way to check how weary Doc was getting. After a long day or particularly intense event, the heavy gun added a noticeable lurch to his step.

  At the moment, Doc Tanner was lurching like a drunken barmaid, but he gave no complaint.