Amazon Gate

303 Pages·2002·0.92 MB·English

by  Axler James

Chapter One
Something was wrong, but for the life of him—and it could mean that—Jak
Lauren was unable to work out exactly what it was.
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The albino hugged the ground, smelling the rich loam as it filled his nostrils with
a heady scent.
The roots and leaves of the plants mixed into a rich aroma that still couldn't hide
the stench of death, the rancid aroma of rotting flesh and dried blood that
permeated his clothes and into his very skin.
He blinked, his red eyes stung by the sweat that trickled into them. Despite the
irritation, he resisted the temptation to reach up and wipe the liquid away, loath
to move his arm and disturb the foliage around him. Until he was sure what was
happening, even the slightest movement was a danger. Even the merest whisper
of a rustle could bring death down on him.
Jak's long white hair was lank and loose around his face, strands of it plastered to
his skin while other loose hairs tickled and poked at the corners of his nose and
mouth. Like the sweat, he ignored the irritation.
Instead, he focused on what was around, straining every nerve end,
concentrating his senses so hard that he could almost hear the blood pounding in
his veins, the hissing of his own central nervous system.
None of that did anything to waylay the gnawing at the pit of his stomach. Jak
knew fear; despite his always seeming calm in the middle of a firefight, his
stillness when hunting and stalking, his almost stoic acceptance of every
stillness when hunting and stalking, his almost stoic acceptance of every
dangerous situation he had faced in his journeys across the Deathlands, Jak knew
fear, recognized and embraced it. Embraced it, and yielded to it rather than fight
it and set his body at war with itself. It was only by knowing fear and accepting
it that he could gain the calm to find space in which to act rather than react, to
take control and win.
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Jak knew fear, and this wasn't fear. The nagging, insistent feeling was more akin
to anxiety, to a fear of the future, to a knowledge that there was something awful
and awe-filled around the corner. Something large and unknown that would
leave him with no indication of how to defeat it.
It was then that he realized what the gnawing was. It wasn't fear; it was the
terrible knowledge that he couldn't win. The inevitability of the great chill.
His breathing stilled until it had almost stopped. He returned the center of his
attention to the immediate surroundings. It was still and calm, with no life or
movement around him. The smell of death was now old, no longer immediate.
Jak knew it was time to move. With an infinite degree of care, he moved his
sinuous muscles, bringing his limbs to a position where he was able to lift his
prone body in one swift and flowing movement, rising to his feet in a fraction of
a second, hair and skin like the white tip of a suddenly peaking wave. At the
apex of his rise, he shot a glance around before dropping to his haunches. There
had been nothing in view, no movement of any kind. Unusual for that alone—no
sign of bird or animal life, no predators or scavengers moving in on the chilled
corpses. Now, hunkered in the grass and foliage, partially sheltered but still able
to keep a clear view for a full 360 degrees, Jak took stock of his thoughts and
tried to remember what had happened.
He frowned, the scarred and pitted white skin of his face puckering in
displeasure. He had no memory of anything before this point. He had never
blacked out and lost his memory in a firefight before, so it was something that
disturbed him. Almost as an automatic gesture, he drew the .357 Magnum Colt
Python that was his preferred blaster. He sniffed; it hadn't been fired recently.
Python that was his preferred blaster. He sniffed; it hadn't been fired recently.
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There was a shell in the chamber, and it was fully loaded. Reaching into the
pockets and concealed holes of his patched camou jacket, moving probing
fingers gently past the small shards of metal and glass that were also sewn onto
the fabric, he could feel that he still had a full complement of ammo, and all of
his leaf-bladed throwing knives were still in their concealed positions.
Puzzled, he realized that whatever had happened in this place, he had taken no
personal part in the firefight.
So what had happened? How had he ended up here, and who were the chilled he
could smell so strongly around him, their stench drowning the surrounding
scents?
Jak's frown deepened. There was one possibility that he didn't want to consider.
Fighting the rising tide of horror that choked his throat with bile, Jak rose slowly
to his feet and took a long, slow survey of the land around him, certain now that
he was alone for the immediate vicinity.
He was in the middle of a veld that stretched for at least a mile in each direction.
There were distant stands of trees, stunted and blackened with leaves that hung
as heavy as drops of blood in the clear, bright sun. The sky was a deep blue,
tinged with just the faintest hint of chem-cloud purple. Traces of wispy cumulus
broke the unrelenting block of color, the sun hazy behind the chem-addled
atmosphere. The sun was orange, beating down with a heat that was oppressive,
causing the smell of the charnel house to hang still in the air.
Despite the heat and lack of cloud, he figured that the area had to have a good
Despite the heat and lack of cloud, he figured that the area had to have a good
rainfall, as the earth on which he had been resting was moist, the loam soil rich
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate smelling. And furthermore,
the grass was a lush green, not dry and spiky. The flowering plants were still in
bloom, their thick and twisting green stems looking healthy and not starved of
water. They grew to a height of between two and a half and three feet, thick
enough in places to form small banks of color that showed the indents of fallen
bodies even though the corpses themselves were hidden from view.
In other places, Jak could see the signs of violent struggle more clearly. There
were glimpses of fallen fighters, blood smearing the grass and earth around, the
stained clothing and ragged and torn flesh clearly visible.
With a sense of terrible inevitability, Jak counted the number of corpses.
There were six.
He moved across the veld, his light and instinctive footing leaving no trace of his
passing, the barely disturbed grass and plant stems rising as the pressure of his
tread was released.
The first corpse was a woman. A black woman. She had no face anymore, the
exposed bone and pulped flesh a mass broken only by the distorted position of
her unseeing eyes. The braids that still hung limply around her head identified
her as surely as the Czech-manufactured ZKR pistol that hung from her lifeless
grasp. Dr. Mildred Wyeth, the freezie who had defied skydark by being
cryogenically frozen after a reaction to anesthetic and who had been revived into
the post holocaust world her generation had engendered, had finally come up
against one too many odds. As if the injury to her head hadn't been enough to
buy the farm, she also had a large gash across her chest, cutting through the
layers of clothing to tear clean through to the rib cage, exposing it to the air.
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Just a few yards away lay J.B. Dix, the Armorer. His eyes stared sightlessly from
behind his wire-framed spectacles. His beloved fedora lay a few feet from his
chilled corpse. His close cropped hair was soaked with blood from a deep gash
across his forehead. But it wasn't that wound that had killed him. Rather, it was
the fact that his head had been cleanly severed from his body, bloodied veins and
vertebrae still hanging from the remains of his body, which lay only a few inches
from the head. The body was untouched in any other way.
Jak knew that whatever had taken out the Armorer had been swift. J.B. was a
wiry and tough fighter, with lightning reflexes, yet his Uzi was still strapped
across his body, his M-4000 Smith & Wesson scattergun with its deadly load of
barbed metal flechettes still across his back, the stock poking awkwardly from
beneath the fallen corpse. The Tekna knife that he used in close combat was still
sheathed, and the vast amounts of ammunition and grens that he carried about
his person and in the canvas bag that lay to one side of him were untouched.
Moving farther over the veld, Jak came across the third of the chills. A youth on
the cusp of his teenage years, with a strong jawline and a mop of thick, black,
curly hair. His blaster—a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power— was still in an
outstretched hand. Even at this distance, Jak could smell the cordite where the
blaster had been discharged. But not enough to save the boy, who had been hit
eight times across the torso with shells that looked, from the entry wounds, to
have been high caliber. The front of the boy's clothing was soaked in blood.
Jak didn't bother to turn the corpse over, but knew that such a number of entry
wounds, and of such a caliber, would probably have left exit wounds that had
taken away more than half the boy's backbone and flesh. As if this weren't
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate enough, there were two
further entry wounds, one on each knee. It suggested he had been brought down
and then savagely chilled when he had used up all his ammo. The boy was Jak's
and then savagely chilled when he had used up all his ammo. The boy was Jak's
friend, Dean Cawdor.
Moving soundlessly across the veld, Jak came to the next chill. A woman,
voluptuously curved and with a shock of long, Titian hair that had curled around
her skull and neck, hugging close in death to her skin, framing the contorted
agony of her death throes, now frozen on her once-beautiful face. The hair had
been sentient, curling close to her when danger beckoned, a visible sign of her
mutie heritage, fostered in her home ville of Harmony. The warning had
obviously not been quick enough, as her body had been hacked into ribbons by
multiple blade wounds. Fragments of bloodied cloth merged with flayed flesh,
white bone showing through.
The earth around her was stained dark with her blood. Her .38-caliber Smith &
Wesson 640
revolver lay by her side, unfired.
She had once been Krysty Wroth, one of Jak's traveling companions and lover of
Ryan Cawdor, the leader of their group. Now she was nothing more than carrion.
With a dreadful inevitability, Jak trod into the longer grass, where the last two
corpses were concealed, their positions notable only by the gaps they created in
the wall of green.
The first corpse was an older version of Dean: taller, harder, leaner in the sense
of having more finely honed muscles. Over six feet in height, he lay stretched to
his full length, his throat an open wound. One startling blue eye stared
sightlessly to the sky, and where the other eye should be there was a patch
covering an empty socket, the long, puckered scar from that socket running the
length of his cheek, distorting the rugged features. About his person was a SIG-
Sauer blaster, a Steyr rifle and a razor-honed panga that was still sheathed to his
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate thigh. Apart from the gaping
Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate thigh. Apart from the gaping
wound at his throat, there was little sign of a struggle. The chill had come quick
and fast to him.
Not so to the last member of the party, whom Jak found a few yards to his left.
Doc Tanner was a thin, scrawny man. He looked old and weather beaten, with a
mane of gray-white hair that framed a lined face. Yet Doc was only somewhere
in his mid-thirties, his apparent age the result of an incredible experience. Tanner
was the only successful subject of a predark project known as Operation
Chronos, part of the Totality Concept with which the old U.S.A. had prepared
itself for the all out nukecaust that had led to the formation of the Deathlands.
Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been a family man and academic, snatched at
random from his own time period in the 1880s, and pulled through the 1990s by
the whitecoat scientists of Chronos. He had been so obstreperous that the
whitecoats, tiring of him, had catapulted him forward in time, thus inadvertently
saving his life, albeit plunging him into what was a living hell until he was
rescued by Ryan Cawdor.
The immense stresses on the man's body and mind had aged him physically and
made his grasp on sanity fragile. And yet Doc managed to keep himself together
at crucial moments and made it through the dangers. Until now. Doc's death was
the worst of all. He had put up a fight, as there was still the smell of burned
powder about the ancient LeMat percussion pistol he favored, and both the shot
and ball barrels had been discharged. The LeMat lay a few feet to his left, and
his left hand still clutched the unsheathed swordstick with the silver lion's head
that also supported him as a walking stick in his weaker moments. Dried blood
coated the glinting blade. Whatever else, Doc had fought the fight of his life, for
his life.
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But still he had been unsuccessful. His tongue and eyes bulged vilely from his
purpled face, the color distorted like his features by the length of chain that was
around his neck. Rusted metal with small links, it was double wrapped and had
around his neck. Rusted metal with small links, it was double wrapped and had
been pulled tight…so tight that it had cut into the skin of his throat and left him
with some of the links lodged under his flesh. From the shape of his neck, it
seemed obvious that the vertebrae had been crushed, and his head had been
pulled to a grotesque angle by the tension on the chain. Blood seeped from
between the links.
The final indignity was that his body had been cleaved at the waist, so that Doc's
torso had been detached from his legs, the two halves lying within inches of each
other. The lack of blood told Jak that the butchery had taken place after Doc had
already been chilled, his blood stilled and so only seeping onto the earth.
Jak turned and walked away from the carnage. He didn't look back. He didn't
think about where he was going. He simply began to walk and kept on walking.
He didn't think about his direction.
He just wanted to get away. He didn't understand how he had gotten there or
why he could remember nothing of the fight or how he had arrived at this point.
He didn't care. He just knew that the doomie feeling in his guts wouldn't go
away, despite the fact that he had now faced the inevitable and seen what it
could do and what it could mean.
Distracted from his habitual vigilance, Jak was taken completely off guard.
The albino was pitched forward, head over heels, by a sudden and heavy impact
in the small of his back. Recovering quickly, he relaxed his body into the
momentum of the impact, and turned a sudden fall into a roll that brought him
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Axler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate back onto his feet, crouched
around toward the source of the attack. Part of his mind raced, running a series
of mental checks that were completely instinctive.
He could feel no blood down his back, no sharp internal pain, no uneasy
He could feel no blood down his back, no sharp internal pain, no uneasy
sensation in the areas of his vital organs. He ached like hell in the pit of his back,
but it was purely the force of the blow. There was no damage—of that he was
sure.
He didn't waste time wondering what had attacked him. Instead, he focused
simply on locating the enemy so that he could attack it. This was easy, as his
enemy made no attempt to disguise himself. He couldn't have, not on the open
veld.
As Jak drew his .357 Magnum Colt Python blaster with one hand and palmed a
leaf-bladed knife with the other, he weighed the odds. They weren't pretty. On
his side, he was just over five feet tall, slender and quick, with his blaster and
knives, as well as sinuous strength and a cunning hunting instinct. But his
opponent…
The man in front of him stood about eight feet in height, with broad, heavily
muscled shoulders that rippled under the bright yellow one-piece bodysuit. It
was made of a material that Jak recognized from one place only: the raiding
party they had encountered some time back on the road to the villes of
Samtvogel and Raw, when they had tangled with the cult of the Sunchildren.
The raiding party with the laser blasters had appeared suddenly, indulged in a
brief firefight and then disappeared.
Ryan believed them to be part of the Illuminated
Ones, a secret society from predark times that had somehow survived and might
hold secrets that could lead them to a peaceful, tranquil land of legend.
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"Would" have lead them. Jak had to remind himself that his companions lay
dead on the veld.
And unless he acted swiftly, he would be joining them.