Apocalypse Unborn. James Axler

coated with protective grease, were a variety of conventional, combustion-fired weapons: M-16 assault rifles, some equipped with over-under grenade launchers, 12-gauge SPAS assault shotguns, 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistols, extra magazines, ammo canisters. Body armor and night-vision goggles had their own cases, as did the M-60, .308-caliber machine guns, and the heavy-barreled, bolt-action, night-scoped Remington sniper rifles.

      Purely rational, scientific exploration had devolved to this.

      Bell, far better than most, understood that leaping before looking was fundamental to human nature, and to discovery. It was both his species finest feature and its tragic flaw.

      He switched screens to monitor the LED countdown to heart restart. As the final seconds ticked away, he prayed for Kirby’s successful reanimation. He prayed that he would not have to face the coming trials alone. Then the cryotank lid popped up, compressed air valves opened, and from inside the cylinder came a terrible frantic thudding.

      Antoine Kirby awoke with a thundering bellow. Bell had never heard him angry before, not in the five years they had worked together. Adrenaline jolt mixed with a wave of profound relief. Bell wasn’t in the hunt by himself, after all.

      He and Kirby believed they could undo the nuclear holocaust. They believed they could reverse the erasure of human history. Whether they had sacrificed themselves for nothing, only time would tell. Earth was vast, and remade primeval by the fires of hell. To locate, capture and retrieve one man could take decades. The one man who was the locus of Armageddon. The seed of destruction. The dropped stitch.

      For the world to right itself, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had to die when and where he was supposed to die.

       Chapter One

      “What gaudy you sluts from?”

      The man standing in line behind Dr. Mildred Wyeth smelled like pan-fried shit—the cologne of a mass grave robber or a mutie skinner. He was leaning so close to her that she could feel his breath between the beaded plaits of her hair, on the base of her neck. Mildred didn’t turn. She had already sized him up.

      A large sheath knife rode in a scabbard on his hip. A Remington 12-gauge autoloader hung from a worn leather shoulder sling. Both barrel and buttstock had been crudely sawn off; the former at the end of the tubular magazine, the latter behind the black tape-wrapped pistol grip. He was tall and lean, between twenty and thirty years of age, with a weather-seamed, dirt-encrusted face. His pupils were dilated, his sandy-brown mustache and whiskers blackened by a tarry substance, which she recognized as the residue from smoking powdered mindburst mushroom. According to its devotees, it made live skinning and grave robbing even more fun.

      Krysty Wroth faced Mildred, but she was looking beyond her, over her shoulder at the skinner. Although Krysty’s eyes were emotionless pools of emerald-green, her forehead smooth as glass, her red mutant hair had coiled into tight ringlets of alarm. A chill, steady mist fell from the low-hanging fog bank. Tiny sparkling droplets clung to the tips of Krysty’s prehensile curls and the shaggy black fur of her bearskin coat, which hung open from collar to hem.

      “Didn’t we take turns banging you two over in Byrumville?” said another hoarse male voice from behind.

      Mildred ignored that question, too. The second man was shorter, bare-chested, stump-legged, just as filthy as his running buddy, and wearing the same black sticky ring in the whiskers around his mouth. Tucked into the front of his trouser waistband was a battered 9 mm Astra semiauto blaster. A violent confrontation with these triple-stupe bastards was the last thing Mildred and Krysty wanted. The idea was to blend in with the rest of the ragged queue on the predark pier.

      A light onshore breeze riffled the surface of Morro Bay. The massive, 570-foot-tall rock that marked the entrance from the Pacific Ocean played peek-a-boo in the gray swirls of fog. Heavy surf broke over the bay’s three-mile arch of sandspit. The rise in sea level after the nuclear holocaust put the spit under water at high tide and submerged the walkway and side railings of the concrete pier. The tide was out, now, and the pier, much foreshortened by wave damage to its seaward end, was high and dry.

      Here and there along the mucky crescent of Morro Bay’s exposed shoreline, amid the tangled metal and plastic refuse, lay stripped human skeletons and lumps of mud and wet cloth in human shape. In the bay, some 150 yards to the north, a three-masted white ship swung at anchor. It couldn’t tie up to what was left of the pier, the water was too shallow. Prospective passengers and cargo waited on the dock to be ferried to the frigate. At the ruined end of the pier, a makeshift crane lowered crates and boxes onto rowboats; beside the crane a rickety stairway led down to a floating platform and a tethered boat. The entrance to the stairs was guarded by four thickly built crewmen with assault rifles. Before passengers were allowed to descend, they were interrogated by a man seated behind a plank-and-sawhorse table who entered information into a logbook.

      The line moved forward very slowly.

      Mildred remembered the last time she’d passed through Morro Bay, more than a century earlier—and a year and a half before the end of the world. In the terminology of Deathlands, Dr. Wyeth was a freezie. On December 28, 2000, an idiosyncratic reaction to anesthetic during abdominal surgery had put her into a coma. In a last-ditch effort to save her life, the operating team had placed her in cryogenic stasis, where she remained until revived by Ryan Cawdor, Krysty Wroth and their companions. Mildred and her liberators had been inseparable ever since.

      If the picturesque, central California coastal town was far enough away from San Francisco and Los Angeles to avoid a stray missile hit on hell day, it hadn’t escaped the nuclear shock and tidal waves produced by saturation hydrogen and earth-shaker warhead strikes both north and south. Most of Morro Bay’s existing structures had been obliterated in the furious aftermath of Armageddon, yet it had hung on and survived as a human outpost, as the southernmost seaport on Deathlands’ Pacific coast.

      What was left of the Los Angeles/San Diego megalopolis was anybody’s guess. It was widely rumored that the lower half of California had vanished into the Cific Ocean, vaporized by overlaid nuclear hits or submerged by cataclysmic slippage along the full length of the San Andreas Fault. Reports about what remained were both sketchy and farfetched. Mildred had never met anybody who claimed to have seen it with their own eyes, only those who had heard about it, third or fourth hand. It was not the kind of place visitors returned from.

      Most Deathlanders she’d met believed that normal life couldn’t exist there, that the air and water were poisoned by high radiation levels and reawakened volcanic processes. Moreover, they were convinced that it was the fountainhead of every manifest evil, the spawning ground of new species of predatory mutants, monsters that spread forth across the ravaged continent like carnivorous weeds.

      As a twentieth century scientist, Mildred was dubious of all this speculation. For one thing, the concepts of “norm” and “mutie” were relative, not either/or. Every living thing in Deathlands had been impacted at a genetic level by the holocaust. Some of these changes were manifested externally; most were not. That a particularly heavily nuked area could generate a high rate of successful mutations did not jibe with pre-Apocalypse genetic research, which showed that the higher the rad dose, the more negative the mutations: the effected embryos rarely made it past the early stages of development. If Southern California was indeed the source of the plague of unheard-of, hostile species, Mildred suspected that something much more complicated, much more directed, had to be going on. One way or another, she and Krysty and the others waiting on the pier were about to discover the truth.

      Post-nukecaust Morro Bay had been rebuilt using recycled materials from the former marina, and from the fleet of commercial fishing boats and private yachts scattered high onto the hillsides by tidal waves and hurricane-force winds. Single-story, ramshackle shacks shared walls and predark concrete block-and-slab foundations—there was not a single right angle in the entire ville. Nor was there much in the way of ground cover, save for the clumps of tiny wild daisies sprouting along the open-trench latrines. It reminded Mildred of movies she’d seen of Calcutta, India: a seething, mounded garbage dump shrouded by acrid wood smoke.

      Ville folk furtively watched the line of newcomers