Labyrinth. James Axler

a landscape of pale brown mesa and pancake-flat plain shimmering in 120-degree, midday heat. For as far as he could see in every direction, it was just rocks and sand. Sand and rocks.

      “Dear friends, I fear Judgment Day is upon us at last,” Doc remarked. “Our myriad sins have finally landed us in the pit of hell.”

      “Or on the moon,” Mildred added.

      Krysty knelt in the shade cast by a fallen sandstone block. From a crevice at the base of the rock, she plucked a withered scrap of plant. The delicate white petals broke off in her fingers; the yellow center fell to fine dust on her palm. If Deathlands’s brave little daisy was a testament to adaptability and survival in the most hostile of environments, it was also a canary in a coal mine. “If we stay here long, we’ll die,” Krysty said.

      Jak squinted into the glare. “Go that way,” he said, pointing south across the desolation.

      “Can’t miss the reservoir if we walk in that direction,” J.B. agreed.

      “Too hot to break trail, now,” Ryan said. “We’ll start after sunset. Check your canteens. Whatever water we’ve got, it has to last until we get there.”

      Chapter Two

      Shielding his nose and mouth with his hand, Ewald Starr held the torch at arm’s length. Firelight danced over the corpse’s blackened rib stubs and caved-in breastbone, over a skull cratered from forehead to lower jaw. One leg was missing all the way to the hip. The body cavity had been plundered of its organs; the bones stripped of flesh and left mired in a sticky-looking, yellowish puddle. The fluid had splattered low across the corridor’s concrete wall.

      Whatever the yellow stuff was, it stank, thermonuclear.

      A combination of bearpit, toxic chemical spill and rotting meat.

      In the close quarters of Pueblo Dam’s service hallway, the rank odor hung like an acid fog.

      Ewald listened hard, but all he could hear was the chorus of hissing torches—the greasy black smoke they gave off billowed along the low, pipe-lined ceiling, driven by a steady, gentle breeze.

      Three other men stood with their backs against the opposite wall, faces pale and pained, torches clutched in trembling hands. Paralyzed.

      Ewald scowled at them.

      Fear was the enemy.

      The preamble to defeat.

      Tall and dark-skinned, he wore his waist-long black hair woven into a thick braid and coiled on top of his head. This rat’s nest was held in place with a pin contraption made of twists of bailing wire. A spiral of decorative branding encircled his chin, creating an angry, welted goatee. The scars of healed blade slashes and bullet wounds on his massive forearms, bare chest, and neck were lost amid larger masses of discoloration, signs of his having survived prolonged torture and punishment by burning and whipping.

      Ewald hunkered down next to the body, holding his breath against the caustic fumes. The victim’s clothing was a wadded mass of wet rags at the foot of the wall. Examining the jutting hip bones more carefully, he saw that when the missing right leg had been severed, a corner of the pelvis and the entire hip socket had been cut away. The clean, down-angled slice looked like a sword or ax strike. It took a hell of a sharp blade to do something like that. A hell of a powerful swordsman, too. As to what all the nasty yellow goo was, or where it had come from, he had no clue.

      When he straightened, something glinted at him from the tangled rags. A single, spent, centerfire shell casing.

      “Here, take this,” Ewald said, passing his torch to the closest man. The whip-lean graybeard named Tolliver accepted the burden, his rheumy gaze never shifting from the mess on the floor.

      “Give me your shirt,” Ewald said to the big man standing on Tolliver’s right.

      Though they were the almost same height and weight, where Ewald was all muscle, Dunbar was all flab—a slope-shouldered blob. This morning’s sudden, shocking reversal of fortune had silenced his constant, annoying chatter. Meekly obeying Ewald’s command, he stripped off his tent-sized, desert camo BDU shirt. His pasty white skin hung in loose, floppy rolls around his waist, like a suit of clothes three sizes too big.

      Wrapping his hand in a corner of the garment, Ewald carefully shifted the remains. The skeleton came apart at his touch, ribs and spinal column separating. As he started lifting and tossing the loose bones aside, he saw that they sat in a shallow depression in the concrete, a depression concealed by the elongated puddle that filled it. Under the broken sternum lay a stamped steel prize.

      When Ewald fished out the Uzi subgun, its fixed wooden butt and forestock sloughed off the frame like so much soggy cardboard. The plastic pistol grip seemed undamaged. He shook slime from the barrel, then mopped the weapon clean with Dunbar’s shirt. The blueing had been stripped from the metal, its surface left faintly pitted.

      Ewald pulled back on the cocking knob. The action stuck for a second, then came free, ejecting an unfired, 9 mm cartridge that skittered across the floor. He detached the staggered row, stick mag from the butt of the grip and did a round count. Including the ejected bullet, there were twenty-nine Parabellum bullets left in the clip. He unloaded the mag, wiping down and checking each round for corrosion. Before he slapped the reloaded clip back in place, he locked the action open and looked down the barrel. In the torch light he could see pits but no obstructions or cracks. He dry-fired the Uzi, and the pin snapped crisply.

      The sound startled the man on Tolliver’s left, making his narrow shoulders jerk. Willjay was still in his teens, tall, gangly, with a skanky mop of brown dreadlocks. From his expression, he was on the verge of bawling for his mother. Something that Tolliver and Dunbar, preoccupied with their own self-pity, failed to notice.

      The dimmie trio had been part of a convoy that had tried to cross the great desert from the south. Tried and failed. One after another, their wags had broken down. And when the last wag gave up the ghost, they’d abandoned their possessions and started walking. Two dozen of them. In a few days the food ran out, then the water. After that, the heat quickly took its toll.

      Tolliver, Dunbar and Willjay, the convoy’s sole survivors, thought they’d found the Promised Land when they’d accidently stumbled onto the canyon.

      As had Ewald Starr, when he showed up two days later, fresh from his own ordeal to the northwest.

      Ever the wolf among sheep, Ewald had wide experience in scheming and backstabbing—and in murder for profit. In this case the sheep wore ankle-length, homespun robes the color of scorched porridge. From the moment he saw the triple stupe grins of the canyon’s permanent residents, he figured he’d own the place in a couple of weeks, tops. All he needed was a few like-minded individuals to help with the initial round of wet work. Once he had things well in hand, he’d make sex slaves of the suitable women and men, and field slaves of the rest.

      All hail Baron Ewald Starr.

      Caught up in the potential of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, there was no denying he had let his guard slip. Not that his customary vigilance would have guaranteed a different outcome. Pilgrim Plavik and his flock kept their plans well-concealed. Ewald had seen no weapons, other than hoes and shovels, until that morning. Rudely awakened by his hosts, he stared into their massed gunbarrels, and was relieved of his own. Escape was impossible. When they marched him outside into the street, he saw that the other three travelers had been likewise overwhelmed and disarmed.

      Protests and demands for an explanation fell on deaf ears.

      The entire ville turned out for the procession, men, women, children, all grinning and chanting nonsense while the pilgrim himself led the way to the top of the dam. With blaster muzzles pressed to their heads, Ewald and the others had been forced through an open manhole, and onto a series of rungs set in the wall, rungs leading down into impenetrable gloom. As they clung there for dear life, lit torches were tossed in, then the manhole cover slid shut, and the light from above went out.

      Honored