Dark Resurrection. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ nuclear Armageddon was more than a century in the past, Deathlands had not yet recovered in any meaningful way. There was still no manufacturing to speak of, large or small. Its norm population remained primitively agrarian: hand-cultivated crops were supplemented by seasonal hunting and gathering. Vast areas were made uninhabitable by lingering high levels of radiation from overlapping Soviet MIRV strikes. Travel over any distance was risky because of roaming bands of savage chiller-muties. A ruined road system and a lack of surplus goods limited the possibilities for expansion of trade.

      The existing social organization lay in the hands of the barons, self-proclaimed royalty who controlled their fiefdoms with small, relatively well-equipped armies of sec men. The barons’ territories were bounded by easily defensible topographic features: mountains, plateaus, river channels and the like. Because mass communication was nonexistent and individual human settlements so scattered, there was no way to accurately estimate Deathlands survivors, but it was certainly a tiny fraction of the 200 million before skydark. The overall numbers were so reduced and the land area so enormous that wider conquest—or national reunification—by any one of the barons, or an association of same, was simply out of the question.

      For more than a hundred years the barons’ winning strategy had been to hunker down and hold ground.

      J.B. wasn’t incurious or closed-minded about the outside world—like most other born-and-bred Deathlanders he was simply dismissive of it. If the United States of America, the most powerful country to ever exist on the face of the earth, couldn’t rebuild itself after the nukecaust, then how could the considerably less well-off nations to the south?

      A month earlier, while still free, he and his companions had been forced to consider an alternate view.

      Beyond the southeastern edge of the Houston nuke-a-thon, in Port Arthur ville they had joined forces with a seagoing trader of renowned skill and legendary savagery. Harmonica Tom Wolf had opened their eyes to the possibility that the basic assumption—that Deathlands was the sole nexus and the pinnacle of human survival and culture—might be 180-degrees wrong.

      By the skin of his teeth, Harmonica Tom had escaped capture at Padre Island on his forty-foot sloop, Tempest. The companions might have made it to safety, too, if J.B.’s rib injury hadn’t held them back. That he had been the crew’s weak link, that his infirmity had brought them to such a fate, stuck deep in the Armorer’s craw.

      The tug lurched so violently to starboard that J.B.’s knees buckled and he nearly fell headfirst over his bucket. Catching his balance, he looked up and saw Ryan and Mildred sitting side by side, hauling back on the same oar. Ryan’s dark hair was matted with sweat and tangled in a dense black growth of beard. The patch over his left eye was crusted with white salt, as was the long scar that divided brow and cheek. In three weeks Mildred had lost a tremendous amount of weight, the sinews in her caramel-brown forearms and biceps stood out like cables as she rowed. Some of the white beads in her hair had broken, and the carefully woven plaits had come unbraided; they hung in matted puffballs down her back.

      Doc occupied the bench behind them, his lips moving as he muttered to himself nonstop. The Victorian time-traveler looked even more scarecrow and skeletal than usual, his clothes hanging loosely from stooped and shrunken shoulders. Wispy strands of gray beard did nothing to hide hollowed cheeks.

      All three bared their teeth as they leaned hard into unison strokes, struggling to make way against the gathering headwind and jumbled seas.

      J.B. couldn’t count the number of times he and his friends had been taken prisoner, but this time was different. The specific details of being exposed to the elements, starved, beaten, forced to eat, sleep and shit shackled to oars was unimportant. What mattered was, each pull southward took them farther away from everything they knew, from everything they believed in, and brought them that much closer to the truth about their place in the larger scheme of things.

      So far the truth didn’t look all that promising.

      During the companions’ multiday voyage east from Port Arthur ville to Padre Island, Harmonica Tom had passed on rumors about pockets of predark civilization thriving in the southern latitudes nearly untouched by nuke strikes. Were the Matachìn pirates a scouting party from a much more advanced, a much more populous culture? Was it possible that a complex, industrialized society had existed side by side with Deathlands ever since nukeday? If that was indeed the case, then J.B. knew he and his comrades faced an adversary with overwhelming advantages, an adversary that could chew them up like weevils in porridge. And there was no guarantee that any of the success strategies hard-won in the hellscape would save them.

      The Armorer, who had fought on the winning side in dozens of campaigns and a thousand skirmishes, felt both helpless and insignificant. Being short of stature, he found those feelings particularly grating. The lack-of-size business was something he had lived with his entire life, and he’d come to terms with it by making himself extramean and extraquick. He’d been mean enough and fast enough to hold his own alongside Deathlands’s most famous warriors: Trader, Poet and Ryan Cawdor. In fact, Trader had often bragged around the convoy campfire that J.B. was the kind of sawed-off, fearless little bastard who would climb up your chest, stand on your shoulders and beat in your head with his gun butt.

      The idea of being swallowed up by distance, technology and scale, of being truly, unutterably lost was no longer an abstract concept to J.B. Now he knew what Ryan had experienced when he had been singled out and spirited off to Shadow World. The lesson Ryan had learned on that overpopulated parallel Earth was to keep his head down and wait for an opportunity. No matter how bleak and impossible things looked in the present, to trust in fate that the seam would appear.

      The cloud looming before them cast a vast shadow, turning the water beneath it inky-black. Over the coxswain’s drumbeat and the steady creak and splash of the oars, J.B. could hear the shrill hiss of heavy rain falling on the sea. As the sound of the downpour grew louder and louder, the headwind shrieked and the air temperature plummeted. J.B. shivered uncontrollably in his wet clothes, clenching his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering.

      Then it was upon them, roaring.

      An impenetrable curtain of rain swept over the tug’s bow. The volume of water was astounding, as was its power. It came down like a waterfall, hammering the metal awnings, flash-flooding the scuppers.

      The tug wallowed through steep troughs, pressing deeper into the darkness and the din. Cold rain in a wave slammed down on J.B.’s fedora and shoulders, and again his knees almost gave way, this time from the sheer weight of the torrent. As he struggled to keep his feet, the deck lights above him snapped on.

      At least it wasn’t chem rain, he thought.

      This was drinkable water.

      The five-gallon buckets filled in no time. The deck-watch forced the slaves to pass them hand to hand down the file and dump them into the stern’s freshwater holding tank. Again and again, the process was repeated, buckets allowed to fill to the brim and handed down the line. When the tank was finally topped off, the Matachìn sealed the hatch shut, then ducked back under an awning to escape the cascade’s pummeling.

      The conga line had nowhere to go.

      The tug didn’t immediately turn out from under the cloud and let her two sister ships have a go at filling their tanks. Its course and speed held it stationary beneath the downpour, leaving the linked slaves to flounder and slide, gasping from the concentration of water vapor in the air. J.B. groaned as his feet went out from under him and he hit the deck hard. Though he had cradled his ribs with his arms, trying to protect them, white-hot pain lanced through his torso.

      On his knees, fighting for breath, J.B. СКАЧАТЬ