Desert Kings. James Axler

dog coming out of the rain. “Best batch yet!”

      A true albino, Jak had been born in the swamps of Louisiana. The young hunter was dressed in loose camou clothing. Odd bits of razors, glass and feathers had been sewn into his jacket, making it camou for the new world. When hiding among the ruins of predark cities, Jak could all but disappear among the wreckage. And it would be painful if anyone grabbed him by his jacket. A massive .357 Magnum Colt Python hand-blaster rested on his right hip and countless leaf-bladed throwing knives were secreted upon his person. A knife was sheathed on his belt, and the handle of a small knife peeked from the top of his left boot.

      “Hey, over here,” Ryan said, reaching out.

      Turning, the teen relayed the partially filled container. Ryan took a couple of swigs, then handed the canteen to a tall silver-haired man slumped against the wall. Wordlessly accepting it, Doc Tanner drained the container before giving it back to Mildred.

      “Th-thank you, my dear Ryan,” Doc whispered. “That was needed m-much more than I could p-possibly express.”

      Tall and slim, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dressed as if from another age in a frilly white shirt and a long frock coat. An ebony walking stick lay across his lap, the silver lion’s head peeking out between his strong fingers. A mammoth LeMat percussion pistol was holstered at his side, along with several pouches containing black powder and wadding for the Civil War blaster.

      “Well, jumps always hit you and Jak hardest,” Mildred said, screwing the cap back on the canteen. “Probably from all the…” She paused awkwardly.

      “Indeed, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely.

      Although only in his late thirties, Doc appeared to be in his sixties from an unexpected side effect of being trawled through time. The whitecoats of the twentieth century had performed experiments on Doc for years, trying to solve the mystery of why he was the only time traveler to survive the experience. Exasperated by Doc’s many escape attempts, the whitecoats had hurled him forward in time. Realizing a mistake had been made by doing that, agents of Operation Chronos still hunted for the man. One notable agent was Delphi. Part man, part machine, and all devil, Delphi had laid a devious trap for Ryan, knowing full well that Doc would be traveling with the man. The trick had nearly worked, but Doc escaped at the last moment, leaving Delphi buried alive in a collapsed tunnel. The rest of the companions believed that Delphi had bought the farm, but until Doc saw the cyborg’s lifeless body, he would never stop waiting for the demented monster to return.

      “All right, let’s see where we are,” Ryan said, levering himself off the floor. The companions assumed their usual positions and drew their weapons as the one-eyed man walked to the chamber’s door and pressed the lever. The door opened onto an antechamber.

      Each mat-trans unit had its own unique color, possibly to identify the location to travelers. But that was just a guess. Nobody knew for sure why the armaglass was a different color, or where all of the military personnel disappeared to after the nuke war. Or where they took the megatons of supplies previously stored inside the underground bunkers. The redoubts contained a thousand mysteries, the color codes being only one of them.

      However, one constant in every redoubt was that the antechamber was usually small and always empty, except perhaps for a small table or chair, and was devoid of dust, a sterile void. But this room was large and stuffed to the ceiling with wooden boxes. There had to have been a hundred of them filling the room, each one absolutely identical to the other, aside from a black serial number stenciled on the side.

      “What is all of this stuff?” J.B. demanded curtly.

      “Dunno. Those aren’t predark mil numbers on the sides,” Ryan said slowly.

      “It almost looks like somebody did a run,” Krysty stated. Her long red hair moved as if stirred by secret winds that only she could feel. “They jumped into the redoubt, tossed out the boxes from the mat-trans unit, then jumped out again.”

      “A raiding party?” Doc muttered. “That could very well be, madam. As I recall, we did something similar ourselves once.”

      “Yeah, chill Silas,” Jak growled, clicking back the hammer on his Colt Python. Dr. Silas Jamaisuous had been one of the predark inventors of the mat-trans unit and crazier than a shithouse mutie. “Think might be someone’s private cache?”

      “Perhaps,” Mildred said slowly. “But look there!”

      Squinting slightly, Ryan followed the woman’s finger and saw a crushed flower protruding from the stacks of boxes. A Deathlands daisy. The leaves were still green and the blossom was only starting to wilt.

      “That’s fresh,” Krysty declared, raising her S&W .38 revolver. “Can’t be more than a day old, mebbe two at the most.”

      “Which means that somebody has very recently been inside the redoubt,” Ryan growled, holstering the SIG-Sauer and sliding his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder. He worked the bolt. “All right, triple-red, people. Doc and Jak, Krysty and Mildred, stay inside the mat-trans unit so that nobody else can jump in here with us. J.B., check for traps. I’ll stand guard.”

      With practiced ease, everybody did as they were told without comment.

      Warily going to the nearest stack of crates, J.B. tilted back his battered fedora and carefully examined the boxes without touching anything. There were no trip wires that he could see, pressure switches or anything else dangerous in sight. But that didn’t mean the stack was safe.

      “Well?” Ryan demanded, the deadly Steyr balanced in both hands.

      “Tell you in a sec,” the Armorer replied, pulling out a small compass and waving it over the piles of containers. If there was any kind of a proximity sensor hidden among the boxes then the compass needle would flicker slightly from the magnetic field. However, the needle remained unresponsive and steady.

      “Okay, we’re in the clear,” J.B. announced, tucking the compass away.

      Casting an uneasy glance toward the exit door of the antechamber, Ryan went to the nearest pile of boxes. Choosing one, he briefly inspected it before drawing his panga and using the blade as a lever to force open the lid. The nails squealed in protest, and out puffed excelsior stuffing. Placing aside the lid, Ryan removed a fistful of the soft material and froze motionless.

      Lying nestled in the stuffing was a severed human hand.

      Chapter Two

      Suspecting a trap, Ryan nudged the grisly object with his panga and it shifted, exposing two more hands underneath. All of them were identical, down to the pattern of the hair on the back of the hand and a scar near the thumb.

      “What?” Jak muttered, craning his neck for a better look.

      “Don’t touch them!” Mildred warned, scowling at the hands in frank disgust. “Don’t get anywhere near those things!”

      “Saw hands before.” Jak snorted in wry amusement, then frowned as he noticed the silvery wiring dangling from the wrists.

      “Robotic hands,” Ryan growled, stabbing one with the panga. A drop of clear oily fluid leaked out and was quickly absorbed by the excelsior. “Only seen those once before.”

      “Most assuredly, sir, and I was there!” Doc whispered hoarsely, his face contorting into a feral snarl. Angrily, the man slapped the box and it fell to the floor, a dozen of the hands tumbling into view. Each was absolutely identical to the other.

      Slowly approaching, the rest of the companions gathered around the stacks of boxes, staring in astonishment.

      Prying off the lid of another box, Ryan saw that it was full of white foam peanuts. The foam would dissolve in gasoline, turning it into a crude form of napalm that would stick to almost anything. That doubled the chilling power of a firebomb. Vaguely, Ryan remembered Mildred saying how the foam would last forever and never rot away, and before the Nuke War it had been as common as dirt. But these days it was more rare than an honest baron. Everything made of