Table Of ContentAxler,_James_-_Deathlands_59_-_Amazon_Gate
It was a hard battle, but the hordes of muties grew less
The Amazons raced forward to gain ground, treading on the corpses of their
chilled foes and driving the remaining stickies back. Surveying the carnage,
Ryan gave a sigh of relief and exhaustion. "Fireblast, I thought they'd never stop
coming."
"They'll need to regroup, too," Gloria stated, "if they're going to attack. So we
should have some time." The Gate queen directed her people to make camp,
clear the chilled and tend to the few minor wounds the warriors had received.
Ryan gathered together his people. Speaking softly, he said, "It's not the stickies
I'm worried about." Doc noticed the puzzled look that Jak gave the one-eyed
man, and spoke. "If I am not mistaken, my dear Ryan, you allude to the fact that
our little mutie friends were genetically altered?"
Ryan nodded. "And if we're approaching the place you've heard of, then…"
"Then the danger may not be from the stickies," Mildred finished.
Amazon Gate
#59 in the Deathland series
James Axler
A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDE
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TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • AMSTERDAM • PARIS •
SYDNEY • HAMBURG • STOCKHOLM • ATHENS• TOKYO • MILAN •
MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is
stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and
neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped
book."
First edition September 2002
ISBN 0-373-62569-3
AMAZON GATE
Copyright © 2002 by Worldwide Library.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization
of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is
forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library,
225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the
author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or
names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or
unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are
registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade
Marks Office and in other countries.
Sometimes I wondered if it was possible that the whole structure of government
wasn't just some sort of absurd joke, and that underneath it all, underpinning the
whole structure and fabric of our society, there was a covert and secret society
that had it all nicely arranged for their own ends. After all, if Adam Weishaupt
had gotten his way, then the Illuminati would be running the world. Maybe they
were. The only consolation is that they'd bomb themselves out of existence,
which isn't much of a consolation, is it?
—Paul Trew The Secrets of Power Swine Press
Printed in U.S.A.
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that
was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the
balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the
hawk and the tiger, true to nature's heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with
betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
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Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville's own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the
strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been
fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan's close ally, he, too, honed
his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896,
Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn't have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is
not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings
twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and
danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan's young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows,
and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity's last hope…
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
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.
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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
rainfall, as the earth on which he had been resting was moist, the loam soil rich
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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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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 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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