Playfair's Axiom

Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see the spot where a small portion of his leather jacket had been pushed aside a fraction of an inch by the heavy-caliber slug that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into red droplets as it distanced itself from him.

With a roaring in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a young pup, spin and topple into the dust.

For the St. Louis Science Fiction Society
for years of friendship. Your lovely hometown
deserves better than it gets herein.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

—Epicurus
    3rd century BCE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

“We followed!” Jak Lauren stated.

The long-haired albino teen had his pallid lips pressed so close to Ryan Cawdor’s ear that he could smell his funk, even though after days of harsh exertion in close unwashed company his nostrils had become inured to such. The fact that it was nuke hot and swamp humid close to the Sippi River didn’t much help.

“I know.” A canny fighter and consummate survivor, veteran of years of trekking across the hellscape of the Deathlands, Ryan reckoned that a low grunt of acknowledgment was less likely to alert their shadowers that they had been spotted than even the slightest nod of his head.

Picking his way over a mound of dust-covered rubble, Ryan swept the ruins with his lone blue eye. It was morning, bright and hot. They were in the midst of what had been a great city’s downtown. Now it looked as if it had been picked up about two hundred feet and dropped.

They’d left the gutted bunker an hour before and had seemingly made scarcely any progress at all clambering south through the urban devastation. Around them jumbles of busted-up masonry rose in heaps against the sides of mostly intact buildings, some as high as three or four stories. Behind them rose taller buildings, skyscrapers, some canted precariously, with windows blank of glass like blinded staring eyes. Not all of them had fallen the
same way, although it was clear that a nuke-blast some distance to the west had done most of the damage.

To their right rear rose a vast mound, its white surface cracked like a colossal egg. Over everything a single dark skyscraper towered like a nail impaling a pale yellow sky. It dominated the devastated downtown. South of it a solitary flying creature kited on huge wings.

Sweat ran down Ryan’s face from the line of his long black curly hair. His mouth felt as if it had a prickly pear lobe lodged inside it. The long ragged scar that ran down the side of his face throbbed.

He ignored his discomfort. Minor pains meant nothing to Ryan Cawdor. A person could never tell from looking at him that he’d been raised in privilege and comparative luxury in the prosperous eastern barony of Front Royal. He was a creature of the Deathlands; and like the Deathlands everything had been stripped away from his six-two frame but the hard and the tough. He was the ultimate adapter. The ultimate survivor.

Perching on a tilted chunk of concrete with rebar protruding like twisted fangs, he halted to let his small party pass. Jak, taking a quick swig of water from a worn canteen, headed back out in the lead, skipping over the treacherous footing like rocks in a stream. Ryan used his brief halt to grab some relief from his own tearing thirst, swirling a tiny bit of water from his own canteen around his mouth and swallowing. It went down his throat as if it had knives in it.

At least we know where we are, he thought. J.B.’s sextant had identified the anonymous mass of cracked blocks and twisted steel as St. Louis, by the great river most people now called the Sippi.

He tried not to react to the furtive flickers of movement, visible through gaps in standing walls or past man-
high heaps of debris that stank of concrete dust and rotting flesh. He waited until their rear guard, a short man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a fedora he used to cover the steady retreat of his hairline, came up to him.

“So you saw our little shadows,” John Barrymore Dix said as he approached. He carried his heavy 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun easily in front of his hips. There was a lot more strength in his wiry little frame than there looked to be.

Of course, that could be said for all of them. The truth was, no one looked tough enough to live through what they had.

“Jak’s got them,” Ryan said quietly.

“What do you reckon they want?”

Ryan’s mouth tensed up. “Hard call,” he said. “Can’t read much ’cause they haven’t hit us yet. May just be looking for the best spot to make their move.”

J.B. showed him a quick thin smile. “Chill or enslave, doesn’t matter much, does it?”

“Sure doesn’t,” Ryan said, lengthening his step to move up through the rest of the group.

He made no move for the P-226 blaster holstered on his right hip, or the big-bladed panga scabbarded on his left, or even the scoped, long-barreled bolt-action Steyr sniper rifle strapped on his back alongside his bulky backpack. He didn’t want to alert their shadows that he was onto them. He trusted his cougar-keen senses and rattlesnake reflexes to get a weapon into play in plenty of time when things went south.

Ignoring the increasing sense of unease crawling up his spine, Ryan drew alongside an apparently elderly man who walked with the aid of a gleaming ebony cane. The man resembled a bag of bones held together by a worn frock coat.

“Doc,” Ryan said conversationally, “how’s it swingin’?”

“As well as ever, my youthful friend.” Although he looked a hard-traveled sixty with his pale blue eyes sunk deep in a well-seamed face framed by long straggly silver-hair, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically in his thirties, a couple of years younger than Ryan.

Then again he looked pretty hale and hearty for a man who was well north of two hundred years old. Born in 1868, he had been trawled out of his own time by a late-twentieth-century secret experiment, then heartlessly dumped in a desolate future by the hard-hearted white-coats who had decided he was too difficult to handle.

“I take it you’re aware of our furtive friends?” Doc said, covering the question with a cough and a raised hand.

“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. He touched the old man briefly on the shoulder. He wouldn’t insult Doc or any of his people by telling him to be ready.

They were always ready. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be alive. Ryan was utterly devoted to keeping his companions together and breathing, but they still had to do their parts…none of which was easy.

He moved up, falling into step alongside Mildred, a brown-skinned woman a head shorter than he was, with dark hair swinging and tinkling gently in skinny beaded plaits. She wore baggy cargo trousers, a green T-shirt and an overall sheen of sweat. Despite perpetual trudging on perpetual short rations, her figure remained on the stocky side. She carried a ZKR target pistol in a holster hung from her web belt.

“Got company,” Ryan said softly.

Her eyes got wide. “Really?”

“Easy,” he said. “Don’t let on we know—”

Jak darted to his left. His right arm struck like a snake. It came out holding the scruff of a flailing tangle of long
matted hair and naked limbs turned almost uniform gray with concrete dust stuck to a long accretion of grease and grime. The figure wore a foul-looking loincloth and squalled like an angry bobcat.

Ryan saw sun flash on the blade of a hunting knife in Jak’s chalk-white hand and heard a clash of metal on something hard. The captive had stabbed Jak with a knife whose filth-crusted blade had been ground down to little more than a sliver. It had struck one of the random bits of glass Jak had sewn to his camou jacket.

Jak’s knife hand worked in a blur of speed, stabbing his wildly writhing captive twice in barely a second. Then he tossed the scrawny figure away.

A second creature, larger than the first but still stick-skinny and smeared with grease, launched itself at the albino teen’s unprotected back.

A boom crashed out from behind Ryan’s left shoulder. The noise was like a thumb gouging his eardrum, and the blast wave slapped the side of his head. It was J.B.’s big scattergun going off.

Even with the shot’s aftermath ringing in his ears Ryan heard a soggy, chunking sound as the charge of double-00 buck slammed home. Blood sprayed black in the sunlight. The figure fell short of its target, kicking the grit with bare heels and groaning.

Another sound of impact and a surprised grunt came from behind Ryan. More shots rang out from his right. Drawing his own handblaster, he looked that way.

A big-busted, slim-waisted woman with long slender legs knelt on a pile of busted brick and concrete, firing a snub-nosed hammerless revolver with two hands. Brilliant red hair was curled into a tight cap at her nape. When he’d glanced that way a few moments before it had hung past her shoulders.

J.B. was also on one knee, looking down at his fallen glasses. Nearby, his fedora lay upturned on a round-edge chunk of concrete. Behind him a nearly naked man with hair and beard fringing his face like a brown dandelion was spinning down in reaction to being hit by Krysty Wroth’s .38-caliber slugs. Apparently he’d just hit J.B. from behind with a thrown chunk of pavement.

Another figure reared up from behind a waist-high broken section of wall at the top of a slope of rubble. Ryan snapped a shot at him from his 9 mm Sig Sauer. The man’s head jerked as the bullet smashed the outside of his right cheekbone.

But he shook himself, shedding blood like a wet dog, then resettled his grip on the improvised spear he was about to hurl. Ryan shot him again. He went down out of sight with blood spurting in a red tubelike arc from his throat.

Ryan sprinted back the few paces to where J.B. was still on all fours shaking his head. He held the SIG out ready at arm’s length. Behind him he heard the boom of Doc’s big black-powder blaster, then the louder crash of the short-barreled shotgun mounted beneath the huge LeMat’s barrel. Somebody screamed.

It didn’t sound like anybody Ryan knew.

“Got move!” Jak shouted. “Rad suckers everywhere!”

“You all right?” Ryan shouted.

“Oh, yeah,” the Armorer muttered. “Just fine.”

“Then grab it and go!”

Ryan jammed J.B.’s hat onto his head. The man fumbled his glasses onto his face, then seized his fallen shotgun. He may have been dazed, but he had the presence of mind to jack a fresh shell into the chamber as Ryan hauled him to the feet by the collar of the bombardier jacket he never surrendered, even to the sweltering heat.

The sun-baked rubble mounds and wall stumps on all sides seemed to be lined with gibbering oddly shaped people.

A rock glanced off Ryan’s shoulder. On a concrete shelf at the base of a yellow brick wall he saw one of the skulkers bent over as if it had just thrown something.
She,
judging by the pendulous dugs that dangled in front of knobbly knees in her follow-through.

On the run Ryan shot at her twice. She screeched and fell onto her back. He couldn’t tell where he hit her, but she stopped moving at once.

“J.B., rearguard,” he shouted. “Mildred, you cover left.”

Krysty already covered the right, hastily opening the cylinder of her Smith & Wesson and reloading.

Having emptied both the fat cylinder of his big handblaster and the shotgun barrel, Doc had reholstered the antique weapon and drawn his sword from his silver lion-head walking stick. As Ryan glanced his way, sprinting past, he saw Doc fend off a thrown sharpened stick with the sword, then deftly stab an attacker lunging at Krysty’s blind side.

“We gotta keep moving!” Ryan ran for the front to support Jak. The best way to deal with an ambush, he knew, was assault into it and do your best to blast through. Since they were already surrounded, straight ahead looked like as good a way to go as any.

Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python boomed twice from where he stood on a low brick mound in a gap between walls. The painfully loud reports echoed throughout the area. Ryan accelerated his run as Jak smashed an attacker across the face with the ribbed six-inch barrel, hot from the friction of high-velocity 125-grain hollowpoint rounds. The wiry attacker sat down hard on a canted concrete block.

Jak shot him in the face. A saucer-size chunk of skull blew out of the back of his head, to the accompaniment of a bloody spray of gore.

Evidently they were moving through the ruins of some largely fallen building. Since leaving the mat-trans gateway, they had struggled across fields of rubble so random and comprehensive it was largely impossible to tell what had been street and what had been structure before the big nuke. They headed south simply because from Mildred’s recollection of late-twentieth-century St. Louis the densest concentration of big buildings had stood north of where they were. Where, indeed, a few surviving buildings still loomed or leaned against gathering clouds that began to move rapidly and take on an ominous orange tint.

Once they got clear of the rubble they could at least move faster and with less chance of turning an ankle in some hidden pocket of debris. They might even stand a chance of finding shelter against the likely coming of corrosive rains.

If
they got clear. These scrubby, stinking ambushers didn’t seem inclined to let them do so.

Attackers sprang at Jak from either side even as he spun to face a third, whipping out a hunting knife. Ryan snapped a shot first at the right-hand assailant, then the one to his left. The right-hand ambusher went down. The one on the left, though, only went briefly to a bare bony knee. Then she stood up and with a screech attacked again, something slim and glittering jutting from the bottom of the fist she held over her head.

And the slide of Ryan’s SIG had locked back. Its high-capacity magazine was empty. He’d had to fire too many shots to keep attackers’ heads down. And now he had no time for a combat reload. Nor could he risk fumbling a
magazine full of precious 9 mm cartridges away by trying to reload on the run.

Instead he whipped the panga free of its sheath with his left hand. He screamed like an eagle to attract the ambushers’ attention away from the slim white-haired teen.

The woman he’d shot looked his way, then she lunged for him. He saw that she held a simple sliver of broken glass with some kind of hide wrapped around one end to keep it from slicing her hand. It was primitive even by the standards of postdark improvised weapons, and liable to break on any kind of contact with a target. But it could kill you just as dead as a megaton nuke warhead.

Or just wound you badly enough to slow you down, which in an ambush like this was the same thing.

They both swung at the same time. Despite her wound, the woman had triple-crazy speed. But Ryan’s backhand cut was panther-fast and as precise as a needle. The panga hit the inside of the woman’s knife arm just beneath her wrist. Backed by the weapon’s considerable mass, the edge, which Ryan kept honed to razor keenness, parted tendon and bone almost as easily as skin. The hand spun away on a geyser of red, still clutching the crude glass shank.