Apocalypse Unborn. James Axler

the number in his log, then tossed Ryan the disk. “From now on you are called 46. Wear that tag around your neck at all times. Don’t lose it. Without it, you won’t be fed or paid. Go down the gangway and wait on the dock. You’ll be told what to do. Make no trouble, and you’ll have no trouble.”

      Ryan nodded, although trouble was exactly what he had in mind. He and his friends had missed the chance to chill Magus before.

      If they missed this time, all of Deathlands would pay the price.

       Chapter Two

      Doc Tanner leaned hard against his oar, putting every ounce of his skinny, six-foot-three-inch frame into the effort. He sat on the right half of the eighteen-foot boat’s middle thwart, facing the stern and the hulking, brown-skinned man at the tiller, a man with heavy brows and squinty, slitted eyes. A wispy black chin-beard hung down his chest, between pendulous bare breasts. Intricate blue-black tattooing, like a filigreed cape, shadowed sloping shoulders.

      “Pull!” the tillerman ordered his conscripted crew as he steered into the steady breeze. A remade AK-47 with a steel skeleton stock lay across the tops of his thighs. An extra 30-round magazine was taped upside down to the weapon’s clip. In the edge of the wooden seat beside him, he had stuck a machete, blade-first, its handle within easy reach. A plastic bailing can floated in the bilge water between his bare feet.

      After some initial clumsiness and disorganization, the ten passengers had their oars moving more or less in sync, and the boat made smooth, gliding progress toward the anchored frigate.

      As Doc dipped his oar, he recalled a more pleasant sea voyage, roughly two centuries ago. It, too, had been a journey via sailing ship. There had been no rowing required. He had been returning home to the United States from Oxford University in England, where he had earned a PhD degree in science. Shortly after his repatriation, he had met and married the lovely Emily Chandler. Their union had been blessed with two children, a girl Rachel, born in 1893, and a son Jolyon, born in 1895. The Tanners began a happy domestic life in Omaha, Nebraska. Their joy was cut short by an unimaginable turn of events. A world stood on its head in a single, terrible instant. One afternoon in November of 1896, blind fate had torn Dr. Theophilus Tanner from the bosom of his young family.

      Blind fate and human cruelty.

      Out for a stroll with his wife and children, he had been time-trawled against his will by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos, vacuumed up and drawn forward to the year 1998. After almost two years of close confinement, constant interrogation, physical and psychological testing, of torture in the name of a twisted, morally bankrupt science, he had been hurled forward in time again, farther still from those he had loved.

      In a strange and terrible world, he had been adopted by a new family. No wife had he. No offspring. But rather, brothers and sisters of battle, fighters bound together by a common thread: survival.

      As the boat drew away from the pier, Doc thought he saw Jak Lauren’s shoulder-length white hair gleaming among the milling crowd. Jak was a red-eyed albino, a wild child of Deathlands, skilled with leaf-bladed throwing knives and his Colt Python handblaster, a young man of few words and great, selfless bravery. The Armorer, also known as John Barrymore Dix, was farther back in the throng, his fedora hat lost behind much taller heads. J.B. brought up the companions’ rear with a 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 pump shotgun. The rest of Doc’s extended family—Ryan, Krysty and Mildred—were already onboard the white ship.

      Doc took in the other rowers around him. A motley crew, to be sure. Some had used strips of black plastic bags and winds of duct tape to repair tears in their boots, jackets and trousers. Their centerfire and black-powder weapons were mostly well-worn, missing handblaster grips replaced with layers of silver tape. Their knuckles were scarred, and their faces grimy and gap-toothed. Even the steady head wind couldn’t blow away the smell of unwashed funk, spilled joy juice and the stink of intense fear. None could predict what they might encounter on the road to promised riches. Or if, in fact, any riches lay ahead. They kept rowing, though, heads down, backs bent. These were men accustomed to big risk and small rewards.

      Only a certain kind of Deathlander would consider signing on with the likes of Magus—someone stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Someone with a taste for chilling and the desire to claw his way upward, over the bodies of others, to the light and air. It required a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to do anything, at any time, to anyone, an amoral mentality that in Tanner’s Victorian Era had been ascribed to “primitive” peoples in distant lands, and to the criminally insane.

      Alone in a small boat in such company, Doc felt considerable unease, himself. His ebony sword stick leaned against the thwart, its silver lion’s-head handle pressing into the side of one of his tall, cracked leather boots. Under his black frock coat hung a massive, holstered black-powder pistol. The LeMat represented a high point in Civil War weapons technology—two sidearms in one. A .63-caliber, single-shot scattergun barrel was married to a 9-shot .44-caliber revolver. Properly angled from the rowboat’s bow, the LeMat’s “blue whistler” barrel could incapacitate the entire crew and tillerman in one horrendous, stem to stern blast.

      Despite the undeniable appeal of that course of action, Doc put it out of his mind. When it came to evil, these were minnows.

      The man rowing on the thwart in front of him had four sections of black PVC pipe strapped to his back. Connected in a crude rope frame, the pipes were two feet long, four inches in diameter, and securely capped at both ends. Air holes had been drilled along the sides every few inches. Leaning over the gunwhale a little, Doc managed to catch sight of the side of his face. It was painted a flat white from forehead to neck, ear to ear. A grizzled short beard stuck through the crusted pigment. Where the paint had flaked off, Tanner could see tiny, scattered whorls of red. It appeared the man had taken a load of birdshot full in the face.

      Looking more closely at the plastic pipes, Doc saw clustered yellowish feet sticking through the air holes.

      Crisp, hairy, insect feet.

      “For lack of a proper name, we call them scagworms,” said the black man rowing beside him. He was the same height as Doc, but the dreadlocks gathered on top of his head, sprouting up like the jutting leaves of a great pineapple, gave him another eighteen inches. He had a hugely muscled back and corded neck. He, too, wore a rack of PVC pipes.

      “With a plethora of appendages, it would seem,” Doc remarked. “Pray tell, precisely how many creatures am I looking at?”

      “One organism per tube,” the black man said.

      “I am unfamiliar with the species,” Doc admitted.

      The face-painted man chimed in over his shoulder, “So is everyone else. That’s why they’re worth large jack.”

      “All we know about scagworms we learned the hard way,” the black man said. “They’re armored, bullet-headed, venomous, ill-tempered, oversize mutie millipedes. When we keep them head down and in the dark, it puts them right to sleep. They don’t seem to need food or water. Just air.”

      “Inversion and light deprivation induces a state of hibernation,” Doc speculated.

      “Logic would so indicate.”

      The old man turned to stare at his seatmate. Logic—or even a pretense to same—rarely showed its face among the gaudy porch crowd. The black wild man wore a big, friendly smile, which also seemed a bit odd.

      “That isn’t the only reason we carry them butt-up,” said the painted man. “Ugly mothers shit all over the place when they’re the other way around.”

      Doc reached over and tapped one of the tubes.

      And was rewarded by a shrill hiss and the rasp of a thousand clawed feet.

      “That’s not a good idea,” the black man said. “They get testy when you wake them up.”

      “Are they fully grown?” Doc said.

      “We’re pretty sure these are just babies,” the black man said. “We found an untended