Chapter Two

The sun's sweltering heat made the empty eyesocket beneath Ryan Cawdor's black patch itch. He shut his one good eye and listened. Hard.
Crouched in the shade of the stand of scraggy, mutant willow trees, the tall, powerfully built man blocked out the sawing hum of insects, the steady plip-plop-plip of his own sweat dripping into the sand and the footfalls of his companions approaching around the bend in the river channel. Though Ryan strained to pick up sounds of pursuit, he could hear nothing.
Out of sight and earshot, faceless, nameless hunters dogged Ryan and his friends across the floodplain of the dried-up river. More than a mile wide, its thousands of narrow willow islands were separated by winding sandy lanes, which, during the wet season, were interlaced stream braids.
It was an evil place, a maze of nearly identical paths bordered by skinny trees ten feet tall, their lower branches creeping along the ground like vines.
The area was full of patches of quicksand, rad-blasted, suffocating heat and dark-scummed puddles of poisoned watera place made to order for ambush, by both four-legged and two-legged predators. And Ryan and his companions were moving through this no-man's-land at a snail's pacewhen they were moving at all.
The sound of a baby fussing cut through the throbbing insect song. Someone made soft shushing noises as the scrape of boot soles on sand grew louder.
Ryan opened his eye and, leaning on the stock of his Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle, looked over at J. B. Dix, who knelt in a patch of shade on the other side of the wash, his fedora tipped back on his head. Rivulets of perspiration poured around the wire frames of J.B.'s glasses and down the sides of his face. He held his Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 shotgun balanced between pistol grip and pump slide, index finger braced against the outside of the trigger guard, poised and ready for anything.
The two men had traveled Deathlands together for many years. Both had been in the service of the legendary Trader, J.B. as his Armorer, Ryan as his second in command. In the Trader's employ and in the years after, they had survived more pitched battles than either could begin to count. Long ago, words between them had become unnecessary.
J.B. looked back toward the source of the mewling cries and shook his head.
For what had to have been the dozenth time in their two-hour trek, the two men had had to stop and wait for the main file to catch up to them. Another full minute passed before a tall, skinny man dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots rounded the bend in the stream. He carried an ebony walking stick with a silver lion's head for a handle. The cane concealed a steel serpent's tongue a wicked, double-edged short sword.
Though he appeared to be in his midsixties, Ryan knew that chronologically Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was closer to 250 years old. He had been born in the small village of South Strafford, Vermont, in the year 1868. One hundred and thirty years later, the first successful experiment in time trawling, code-named Operation Chronos, had plucked him without his consent from his wife and children, from a simpler, if not kinder and gentler world, and had deposited him in a fop-secret government laboratory. Because of the physiological and psychological shock brought on by the experience, the Oxford doctor of philosophy had proved a less than ideal test subject. His truculence had caused the Operation Chronos researchers considerable frustration and aggravation. In the year 2000, just before skydark, the scientists decided "Doc" was more trouble than he was worth and sent him forward in time to Deathlands.
Seeing that Ryan and J.B. had stopped, Doc slid a massive black-powder revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold engraved LeMat was a relic of the decade of Tanner's birth. Arguably the Civil War's most potent side arm, the LeMat fired nine .44-caliber balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter barrel beneath the first had a much bigger bore, chambered for a single scatter-gun round. The "blue whistler" barrel was currently packed with a mixture of glass and iron fragments. Capable of inflicting devastating damage in close-quarters combat, this particular payload gave new meaning to the phrase "face lift." Doc hand-signaled those walking behind him to slow down and be careful.
Krysty Wroth appeared around the bend, her glorious mane of prehensile red hair cascading around her shoulders, the centers of her cheeks rosy from the riverbed's raging heat. She had tied the arms of her long, shaggy, black fur coat around her waist. In one hand she held a .38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson model 640 revolver; the other hand shielded a girl child of about seven who stood timidly behind her long legs. The girl wore a faded and tattered dress, and her blond hair was hacked off in a bowl shape just below the ears.
Krysty's emerald-green eyes sought out and locked on to Ryan's face. As with J.B., there was a connection between them, a different sort of connection to be sure, but one that also didn't require words. Though Ryan felt something akin to tenderness at the sight of his woman so fiercely protecting the child, his face gave nothing away. Wrong time. Wrong place. Reading her lover's expression, Krysty lowered the blaster, but didn't reholster it as she advanced.
A second or two later, Dr. Mildred Wyeth stepped into view. The stocky black woman was also a time traveler of sorts. Cryogenically frozen after a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic on December 28, 2000, the medical doctor had been reanimated by Ryan and his companions after a century of near-death sleep. Her hair in beaded plaits, Mildred wore baggy, desert camou BDU pants, and her gray, sleeveless T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, front and back. On her right hip, arms locked around her neck, legs gripping her waist, rode another girl child. This one was frail and about six years old. Mildred carried her Czech-built ZKR 551 handblaster with its muzzle pointed skyward. She was a deadly accurate markswoman. Lifetimes ago, when such things still had meaning, she had won a silver medal in the last ever Olympic games.
Right behind Mildred was the source of all the racket an infant in the arms of a young mother. The woman wore a shapeless dress made of sewn-together scraps of colored cloth. A broad-brimmed, crudely woven straw hat shielded both mother and child from the sun.
Abruptly, the insect song stopped, and the baby momentarily ceased its fussing.
In the sudden, oppressive silence Ryan could hear the rasp of his own breathing. He didn't have to explain to his companions what was wrong. Sweaty hands tightened on pistol grips as they searched the tree lines for the slightest flicker of movement. Something was closing in on them from all sides, homing in on the baby's cries.
The woman called Uda moved the weight of her infant to her other arm. "Why are we stopping again?" she asked Ryan.
Not wanting to panic the young mother and the older children, and therefore compound their predicament, Ryan told her only part of the truth. "We're going too slow," he said. "We've got to pick up the pace. We'll wait here a couple of minutes and let Jak and your man, Benjy, catch up. Then we'll shift the loads around. The men will carry the girls from here on. And after that, there'll be no more stops. Everybody double-times it until we're out of this hellpit." The woman nodded. All she wanted was to get her family to someplace safe, and as quickly as possible. Ryan looked away from her worried but hopeful face. He knew the chances were she wasn't going to make it. Maybe none of them would make it. He looked over at his son, Dean, nearly twelve years old and almost the mirror image of himself, and understood her concern.
Uda and Benjy had been driven from their hard-scrabble farm by an outbreak of the bloody flux in nearby Brigham ville. They had abandoned everything they owned in their haste to escape the spreading contagion. Ryan and the companions had learned about the cholera epidemic from some travelers on the road and, accordingly, had given the ville an extra wide berth. On the edge of the desolate floodplain that separated Brigham from the nearest disease-free ville, they had come across the refugee family.
Despite Ryan's warnings about the dangers of traveling through Deathlands, Uda and Benjy had refused to turn back to their homestead, which was understandable. Without antibiotics, the cholera raging through Brigham ville was a death sentence.
At an earlier point in his life, Ryan would have flat-out refused to convoy the young family to safety because of the additional risk to his own crew. In his wild years with the Trader, his first responsibility had always been to himself, to ensure his own survival, and after that, the survival of the people on whom he depended. With age and experience, with his son, Dean, traveling at his side and the steadfast love of Krysty, he had acquired a little bit more compassion for his fellow man. To abandon the young family on the edge of the plain when they had every intention of crossing with or without an armed escort, was no different from murdering them all in cold blood. Though a bullet in the back of each of their heads might have been a quicker, kinder fate, he found he had no stomach for the role of executioner. After a brief discussion in private, Ryan and his friends had agreed to take the family under their wing. None of them liked the idea any more than he did.
Before they'd gone fifty yards along the dry stream channel, they'd come across scattered bundles of fly-swarmed, stiff and bloody rags. It was all that was left of another group of recent refugees from the ville. They'd made easy pickings for the things that lurked in the willows. It had been just the first of half a dozen such unpleasant discoveries.
"How much farther?" Krysty asked Ryan as she shared her purified water with the oldest girl. Mildred moistened a cloth with her canteen and mopped the middle child's heat-flushed face with it.
"Another two hours to the outskirts of Perdition ville, if we're lucky," he said.
Something moved in the brush to his right.
A shadowy form shifted behind the thick screen of branches. Ryan swung the Steyr around, aiming it from the hip. Every other blaster in the arroyo sought and located the target. A mutie deer stood there, frozen for a second before it caught their scent and was gone in a mangy blur. The companions held their fire.
It wasn't a herd of scab-assed deer flanking their every step.
Ryan stared down the riverbed, cursing Jak Lauren for taking so long.

BENJY THUMBED BACK the hammer of his single-shot Stevens 12-gauge. It locked in full-cock position with a butter-soft clicka smoothness that came from age and wear. The weapon was more than 150 years old and had seen much use, passing through many sets of hands before it had reached his. In the shotgun's chamber was a precious, high-brass, three-inch goose load. The red plastic hull represented one-fifth of his ammunition stockpile.
The sound came to him again, a faint moaning, high-pitched, like a woman.
It made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
Benjy quickly looked around. His backup, the other half of the rearguard, was nowhere in sight. The dirt farmer gritted his teeth; he didn't have a clue where Jak was. The albino teenager moved noiselessly through the bush, like a wild animal. Jak was spooky in other ways, too he had that long, stringy, dead-white hair, scarred white skin and those awful, ruby-red eyes. Benjy thought about calling out to him, then thought better of it, realizing he would give away his own position.
The question he faced was whether to investigate the source of the sound or to move quietly on. He had about made up his mind to keep going when he caught sight of something small and white moving on the other side of the screen of willows. He stepped closer to the branches for a better look. Through the breaks in the foliage he could just make out the next stream channel over, and a pair of pale hands, waving at him.
Benjy cautiously edged forward, far enough to see the carnage in the sand. Bloody remnants of clothing lay in a heap, bristling with buzzing black flies more luckless, waylaid refugees from Brigham ville.
"Help me," a weak voice said. "Oh, please, help me"
Benjy poked through the tangle of branches, 12-gauge first. It was a woman. She lay on her back on top of a fallen log ten feet from the pile of bodies. Her arms were tied at the wrists with close turns of heavy rope. The same kind of rope bound her mid-section to the downed tree. Half her face was smeared with blood. It looked as though she'd taken a terrible beatingand worse. The hem of her long dress was pushed way up over her waist, exposing her naked flesh. Apparently, she had been abused, used and left for the stickies to finish off.
Over the bead sight of his shotgun, Benjy scanned the stream channel and the bordering trees. There was no sign of the coldhearts who had committed these atrocities. Though it looked safe to advance, part of him still wanted to withdraw, to slip silently away, while another part of him couldn't help but think what if it had been his Uda bound there, helpless like that? What would he expect from an armed passerby?
Then the woman raised her head slightly and said, "I know you! I know you from Brigham ville."
Benjy didn't recognize her, not with the gore all over her face, but her words made up his mind for him. He could consider turning his back on a total stranger, but not on a neighbor.
The second that Benjy stepped through the wall of willows into the middle of the dry stream channel, he realized something wasn't right. He could feel it, hard and cold, in the pit of his stomach. He started to retreat at once.
"No, don't leave me here," she begged him. He took a good look at the woman as he continued to back up toward the tree line. Her black hair was cropped so short he could see the white skin of her scalp showing through on the sides of her head; she had huge, coal black eyes. Frenzied eyes.
He knew he'd never seen her before in his life.
As Benjy turned to run, the pack of cannies concealed in the willows rushed him from all sides. His legs felt as if fifty-pound rocks were strapped to them, and they seemed to move in slow motion. At his back came a shriek of feminine laughter, then a heavy cudgel crashed down on his head from behind.
At the stunning impact, the fingers of his right hand clenched reflexively. The 12-gauge fired, blowing a smoking crater in the sand at his feet. Benjy was already, mercifully, unconscious as he sagged to his knees. Before he could slump onto his side, a heavy-bladed machete split his skull down the middle, from the back of his head to the bridge of his nose.
The black-haired cannie female who had lured Benjy to his doom wasn't really tied up, and the blood on her mouth wasn't her own. She was first to reach the cleft skull with an eager tongue.