Chapter One

The shouting had already faded into silence.
Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix, oldest and best of friends, hunkered in their limited shelter, their blasters cocked and ready for the inevitable attack from the natives.
By squinting around the corner of the control console, Ryan could see the first glow of dawn through the open doorway and the shifting wall of bright emerald green of the eternal forest.
"Won't be long," he said grimly.
The one-eyed man heard a faint clicking sound, like hot metal cooling, and glanced back at the pallid green armaglass walls of the gateway chamber. The matter-transfer unit could pluck you from here and send you instantaneously to there. Unfortunately everyone who'd understood the workings of the gateways had died in the worldwide nuclear holocaust of 2001, nearly a century earlier, taking with them the details and secrets of matter transfer.
So, when the chamber door was closed, triggering the "jump" mechanism, you had no way of knowing where "there" might be. It might be anywhere. The most recent jump had left the companions stranded somewhere in Central or South America, in the deeps of a dangerous tropical forest.
After a desperate and lethal adventure, Ryan and his friends had just reached the gateway unit, in a small predark military redoubt, moments ahead of the vengeful villagers.
Ryan's combat reflexes had told him that there was no choice. If they'd all tried to make the mat-trans jump together, they would have been dead meat, trapped in the hexagonal chamber, helpless as a hog on ice.
He'd ordered the others into the unit, while he and J.B., the armorer of the group, stayed behind to secure their safe retreat.
Now it was silent outside.
He wondered where the others had jumped and if they'd made the transfer safely. His thoughts dwelled particularly on his eleven-year-old son, Dean, who was tall for his age, strongly built, with the same curly black hair as his father, with dark brown eyes. Ryan hadn't even known of Dean's existence until a year or so earlier, long after the bleak death of the boy's mother, Sharona.
The other four who'd made the jump were all the closest of friends, though none quite as close as Krysty Wroth.
Easing toward her late twenties, Krysty was five feet eleven in her bare feet, weighing in at 150 pounds. Her eyes were like liquid emeralds, her hair a cascade of living fire. She had come from a ville called Harmony, where she had been taught mystic skills by her mother, Sonya, which included the force of Gaia that would give her unimaginable strength, but at a terrible toll on her health.
She and Ryan had been lovers since they'd begun traveling together through the blighted society that was Deathlands. Both of them hoped that the day would eventually come when they might be able to settle down someplace good and safe.
They hadn't found it yet.
The other woman in the group of companions was Dr. Mildred Winonia Wyeth. Five feet four inches tall and a stocky, powerful 136 pounds, Mildred was a black woman in her middle thirties, with beaded, plaited hair.
She had been born on the seventeenth day of December in 1964.
Less than a year later her Baptist minister father had been slaughtered in a firebombing of his church by a group of anonymous redneck butchers, concealed behind their white sheets and pillowcases.
Mildred had gone on to become a leading expert in the medical science of cryonics and cryogenics. Ironically, eleven days after her thirty-sixth birthday, Mildred had gone into the hospital in her home town of Lincoln, Nebraska, for minor abdominal surgery, which went terribly wrong.
And they had frozen her.
Only a few days later came skydark, the time when the heavens were filled with the shark shadows of nuclear missiles and over ninety-nine percent of the world died.
But the hospital that held her in a dreamless state of frozen suspended animation had its own peaceful nuclear generator, computer controlled, and it had kept Mildred alive until Ryan and his friends came along like latter-day princes and plucked her from the long sleep.
Now she was the partner of John Barrymore Dix, weapons expert and longtime comrade of Ryan Cawdor.
To survive for long in Deathlands it helped to have special skills.
Mildred had been the chairperson of her local pistol club and had represented her country in the free-shooting event in the Olympic Games, where she'd won the silver medal.
Now she carried a Czech-built target revolver. The ZKR 551 was a six-shot blaster designed by the Koucky brothers and manufactured at the Zbrojovka works in Brno. It was a beautiful weapon, with a solid-frame side-rod ejector and a short-fall thumb-cocking hammer, chambered to take a conventional Smith amp; Wesson .38-caliber round.
With it Mildred Wyeth could put a bullet up a gnat's asshole at fifty feet.
There were two men in the group that had made the jump from the forest.
One was a teenager, Jak Lauren, an albino with a shock of snow-white hair and eyes like smoldering rubies. Jak had become a friend of Ryan and the others a little later than Krysty, after a murderous adventure down in the bayous. He was sixteen years old, standing a bare five feet five, weighing in around 120 pounds. Jak was a brilliant athlete and acrobat, better at hand-to-hand combat than anyone Ryan and J.B. had ever seen. Though he carried a satin-finish Colt Python with a six-inch barrel, his weapon of choice was the throwing knife.
He carried a number of the leaf-bladed knives, with taped, balanced hilts, concealed about his person, and used them with a deathly accuracy.
Jak had been married for over a year, down on a spread in New Mexico. It had been a serene and happy time, but the long darkness had come grinning to take both his wife, Christina, and his little baby, Jenny.
So now he rode again with Ryan and the others.
A single long hunting arrow hissed into the control room, its barbed point digging a chunk out of the plastered wall, falling to the floor a yard from Ryan.
"Keeping us reminded that they're still out there," he said quietly.
"Good of them," J.B. stated, busily polishing his glasses on the sleeve of his jacket. His Uzi and the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun lay at his side, ready for instant use.
Ryan glanced behind him again, thinking of the last of the vanished companions.
Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a Doctor of Science at Harvard and a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He'd been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on the fourteenth day of February in the year of Our Lord, 1868.
By some calculations, Doc Tanner was around 230 years old. He certainly looked like an old man, with a mane of silvery hair and a gnarled face. And his speech and most of his attire were undeniably Victorian a frock coat that was slowly acquiring a patina of green over the glossy black material; knee breeches; cracked leather boots; and a gun that was originally popular during the War between the States, a beautiful, gold-engraved commemorative "Jeb" Stuart limited edition of the huge Le Mat handgun.
Like Jak, Doc had once been married, and there had been great happiness for Doc and his young bride, happiness compounded by the arrival of two adorable children, Rachel and Jolyon.
But life was holding snake eyes for Doc Tanner.
In the late 1990s the whitecoat scientists had been working under conditions of great secrecy on Operation Chronos, which was a part of the Totality Concept.
Time travel.
Their successes were infinitely small, and their hideous disasters enough to keep a special crematorium burning through the day and night.
However, they got Doc Tanner, plucking him from a crisp fall morning in November of 1896.
They brought him forward to a secret laboratory in Virginia in 1998. But the time jump had seriously and permanently affected Doc's mind, and he refused to do anything to cooperate, declaring his intention to do anything that he could to sabotage the evil whitecoats and their foul experimentation. He also made several determined efforts to reverse the "trawling" procedure and travel back once more to Victorian times, to rejoin his lost wife and his dear little children.
Eventually tiring of the recalcitrant old man, the leaders of Operation Chronos decided that Doc Tanner was more trouble than he was worth. In December of 2000, days before skydark and the beginnings of the long winters, they cut their losses and pushed him into the future.
Into Deathlands.
And there he had eventually met up with Ryan Cawdor and his companions.
Ryan sat cradling his Steyr rifle, wondering when the natives would gather their courage and rush the place.
He was crouched behind a computer control console with a polished black plastic surface, and his reflection glowered back at him, showing him to be a powerfully built man with thick, curly black hair.
A dark patch covered his left eye, the right gleaming with a vivid, cold blue. A scar ran from its corner down to his mouth, both injuries dating from his childhood.
The reflection revealed that he wore a long coat, trimmed with white fur, and a white silk scarf was tucked around his neck.
As well as the powerful rifle, Ryan carried a trusty SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster, a 9 mm automatic with a built-in baffle silencer that had seen better days. Balancing it on the opposite hip was a long panga with a honed eighteen-inch blade that ended in a needle point.
"You come up with part two of the plan, Ryan?" J.B. asked.
"Part two?"
"Part one was getting the others to make a safe jump so we didn't all get butchered in the gateway. I didn't quite catch you telling me about part two, which is where you and me also get to jump safely."
Ryan grinned. "Fair question. Guess I never got much beyond part one."
There was a sudden burst of yelling from outside the open sec door, guttural words in an alien language that neither Ryan nor J.B. had heard before they arrived in the emerald jungle.
Ryan risked a quick glance over the top of the console, but there was nothing to be seen. "Best I can come up with is that you cover me and I run for the door, throw the handle and hope that the bastard thing drops quick enough to keep them out. How's that sound to you for part two?"
"Like shit, Ryan." J.B. adjusted his dusty, stained fedora. "Then again, I don't have anything better. Real chance they'll pick you off from outside."
Ryan nodded. "Yeah."
He narrowed his good eye, sniffing. "You smell anything? It smells like"
"Gasoline," J.B. concluded. "Looks like part two just got obsolete."