Breakthrough. James Axler

      Chapter Two

      Ryan Cawdor stepped over an exposed tree root, slick, dark and as big as a human corpse sprawled across his path. A profusion of bare roots laced the winding trail and made the footing treacherous. The dim light didn’t help matters, either. Though it was high noon, everything was cloaked in shadow, thanks to the dense canopy overhead and the seemingly endless groves of black-barked trees.

      In all his travels, he had never seen this type of rad-mutated oak before. Its wood was like iron; hand axes bounced off of it, hardly making a dent. The bark and leaves were chem-rain resistant, as were the parasitic strangler vines that spiraled up trunks and limbs to reach the sunlight.

      The forest’s canopy had protected Ryan and his companions from the searing downpours they had endured since their last mat-trans jump, several days earlier. The intense storm activity of the past forty-eight hours had forced them to take shelter in a cave. From the safety of its entrance, they had winced at sizzling nearby lightning strikes and watched methane ice hail, as blue as robin’s eggs and just as big, pound the earth. In scattered heaps, the chem ice had steamed for hours before it finally melted away.

      If the local trees and vines had somehow adapted to survive the caustic rains, other types of foliage had not. There was no ground cover to speak of around the trunks, just slippery piles of fallen, blade-shaped leaves that rustled underfoot.

      The passing storm front had left the air extremely hot and punishingly humid—it felt equatorial to Ryan. The weather was the only clue where he and the companions had materialized. The cloud cover and forest canopy had made it impossible for them to orient using the stars.

      As he rounded a tight bend, he saw the group’s pointman frozen like a bird dog fifty feet ahead. Ryan swung to hip height the scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle he carried. Jak Lauren, his pale skin and lank white hair almost luminous in the forest’s half-light, held up a hand, indicating caution. Jak was a man of few words. Fiercely loyal, without an ounce of guile or deceit, he was a true wild child of Deathlands. Jak’s weapon, a battle-scarred .357 Magnum Colt Python, remained in its holster. Whatever he’d found, there was no immediate danger.

      “Cook fire,” Jak said softly as Ryan stepped up, his albino eyes as red as rubies. He raised a hand to point downslope. “There…”

      Ryan caught the faintest smell of woodsmoke, filtering up the winding trail through the forest. It was the first sign of another human presence since the mat-trans jump.

      It smelled delicious.

      For three days Ryan and his companions had been on starvation rations of mutie rattlesnake jerky and tepid water. The forest’s lack of undergrowth meant there was no ground-dwelling large or small game for them to hunt. During the day, they had caught a few glimpses of little creatures darting about high in the branches, but the dense canopy made shooting at them a waste of ammo. And at night it was so black they couldn’t see their own feet.

      Though all their bellies rumbled, no one had complained.

      A tall, skinny man, dressed in a dusty frock coat and tall boots, moved up the trail and closed ranks with Ryan and Jak.

      Leaning on his silver-handled walking stick, Doc Tanner sniffed at the air, and said, “Dear friends, it would seem that Providence has seen fit to smile upon us once more.” He inhaled again, savoring the aroma. “Somewhere below, the groaning board is piled high. Broiled flesh of some sort, I would venture.”

      Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, chronologically he was four times that old. The Harvard-and-Oxford-educated man was the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving embrace of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The twentieth-century scientists quickly tired of Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust that scoured away their civilization. Though Doc sometimes rambled in speech and broke into tears for no apparent reason, a consequence of his life’s overload of trauma and tragedy, this day he was as sharp as the point of the steel blade hidden in his ebony stick.

      A stocky black woman dressed in baggy camo BDU pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt stepped up behind Tanner. Her hair hung down in beaded plaits. “Smells like somebody’s had themselves a hearty breakfast,” she said.

      Dr. Mildred Wyeth had also time-traveled, but in a much different fashion than her Victorian colleague. After a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic, she had been cryogenically preserved just prior to the all-out U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange of January 20, 2001. She had slept in the land of the dead for a century, until revived by Ryan and the companions. Mildred’s weapon of choice was a Czech ZKR 551 target pistol, the same gun she’d used to win a silver medal in the last-ever Olympic Games.

      “Whatever it is, it’s making my mouth water,” said the boy following close on Mildred’s heels. At age twelve, Ryan’s son, Dean, was already growing tall and straight like his father.

      “Dear child, the human nose is by no means an infallible instrument,” Doc cautioned as the last two members of the group—a tall, red-haired woman, and the rear guard, a short, bespectacled man in a fedora—moved up the trail to join them. “What we Homo sapiens take for sweet succulence might well be the effluvium of some wayfarer not unlike ourselves. Someone whose grim misfortune was to be caught out in last night’s chain lightning. That hell-struck sir or madam could be down there somewhere, quietly smoldering.”

      Dean made a disgusted face.

      “Or it could be a trap,” offered the leggy, green-eyed redhead. Because of the sweltering heat, Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover and soul mate, had taken off her long fur coat and tied the arms around her slender waist. The only visible effect of the radiation-induced mutations that skydark had inserted into Krysty’s family tree was the prehensile ability of her long hair, which reacted to stress like a barometer. Her hair now hung in loose coils, indicating concern but not apprehension.

      “Cook smoke could be the bait,” agreed John Barrymore Dix, aka the Armorer. Ryan and J.B. shared a bond of blood that went back many years, to their wild and woolly days with the Trader, the legendary Deathlands entrepreneur and road warrior. J.B. rested the barrel of his well-worn Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump gun on his shoulder and tipped his sweat-stained hat back on his head. “In a place like this,” he said, pausing to thumb his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, “with no game to shoot, nothing growing to eat, a scent trail could draw victims from a long ways off.”

      Though Ryan respected J.B.’s and Krysty’s trail savvy, he didn’t consider an ambush likely. There had been no sign of stickies or cannies. No grisly heaps of red bones and bloody rags strewed about. Stickies and cannies, Deathlands most murderous, subhuman residents, hunted in packs, like wolves, seeking out norms—nonmutated humans—and muties alike, and failing that, they would prey on the weakest of their own kind. The condition of the path told Ryan there wasn’t much foot traffic, certainly not enough to support the appetite of a large predator, or group of predators.

      “Trap or no trap,” he told the companions, “we’ve got to follow the cook smoke, or we’re going to starve in this bastard forest.” He slung the Steyr and unholstered his SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol. “Triple red, everybody,” he said. “Dean, middle of the file.”

      The boy didn’t protest his position in the column, but watched with undisguised envy as Doc drew a massive revolver from the front of his frock coat. The gold-engraved LeMat was a Civil War relic. It fired nine .44-caliber lead balls through a six-and-one-half-inch top barrel. A second, shorter, big-bore barrel