LITMIR.BIZ

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hoarse laughter crashed against their backs.

      IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Ryan saw it, in the tree break over the dark river. The single point of bright light appeared in the west, above the blackness of the canopy, and swept across the starry field of sky. He and the others watched the satellite arc overhead and vanish in the east.

      “Fireblast!” Ryan’s curse echoed off the surrounding forest.

      “Couldn’t it be something else?” Dean asked him. “Something real old…from before skydark?”

      “It isn’t old, son. All the space junk fell to earth and burned up a long time ago. It has to be new. The fish hag spoke the truth. People from the other Earth had to have put it up there. No one else could have done it.”

      “We should’ve chilled those four bastards,” J.B. said. “Should’ve buried them along with all their fancy chilling gear.”

      Ryan grimaced. J.B. was talking about the turncoats, the members of the first scouting expedition to cross over from the parallel Earth. With success within their grasp, the warrior-whitecoats had decided not just to abandon, but to sabotage their primary mission, which was to lay the groundwork for the invasion and conquest of Deathlands by the armies of FIVE. Instead of firing the guided missile they had trucked with them into the sky, they launched it through the reality portal in the hope of sealing the gateway forever. That done, the alternate world conquistadors went native. They stripped off the segmented black battlesuits that made them immune to blasterfire, and they dumped the tribarreled laser rifles that cut through plate steel like so much tissue paper. Ryan and the others helped them dismantle their gyroplane and they buried it deep in a sandy arroyo along with the rest of their gear.

      “Colonel Gabhart and the others might not have had anything to do with this,” Mildred said.

      “They could’ve changed their minds about bringing the armies across, too,” J.B. countered. “Mebbe they had blood relatives starving to death on the other side. Blood being thicker than water, they decided to reopen the passageway and save them.”

      “However it happened,” Krysty said, “they’re here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

      All eyes turned to Ryan.

      He was the only one who had seen the other world. And though he’d tried to describe its bleakness and horror to his friends, mere words couldn’t do it justice. They stuck in his throat like slivers of glass.

      The nukecaust that had laid waste to Deathlands was an accident, an instantaneous, one-time event, but the alternate end to history that Ryan had witnessed was the final outcome of a civilization that had attacked nature as if it were a sworn enemy. There was nothing left on the parallel Earth but human beings and the avalanche of disasters their science had brought to life. They were indeed like two-legged cockroaches: indomitable breeders, surviving at all costs, consuming and destroying every living thing and every resource within their reach.

      In his mind, Ryan could see gleaming, hard-shelled black armies pouring through the parted lips of the reality corridor. Armies carrying weapons and technology that nothing in Deathlands could match. Armies so vast that even without advanced weapons they could defeat any force the people of Deathlands could field against them.

      Running away only postponed the inevitable. With an eye in the sky endlessly circling and searching their world, there was no safe place to hide. Fate had left Ryan and his companions one choice, and it was bad.

      “We’ve got to go back to Moonboy ville,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to find a way to fight the bastards and drive them out for good.”

      There was silence along the riverbank.

      To enter battle with a slight possibility of victory was one thing; to walk willingly into the spinning blades of a meatgrinder was another. Ryan thought about the village man who had death-marched himself to meet the catfish’s impaling spine. Sirena had told the poor bastard his fate, and he had surrendered to it. Just as they were about to do. There was an important difference, of course.

      Ryan listened to the gurgle of the life-giving river and felt the embrace of the dense forest that loomed on all sides. Overhead, the blanket of stars twinkled as his world slowly turned.

      The difference was, they wouldn’t die for nothing.

      And they wouldn’t die alone.

      Chapter Three

      A rag securely tied over his nose and mouth, Dr. Huth stopped hacking at the hardpan with the blade of his shovel. The sound of a distant car horn faded in and out, intermittently muffled by the gusts of hot wind that scoured the desert plain.

      Abandoning the shovel, Huth climbed the side of Byram ville’s defensive berm for a look. As he scaled the mound of dirt, his feet slipped around inside the oversize jogging shoes he wore despite the plastic bags he’d wadded up in their toe boxes. His polyester pants were as stiff as cardboard. Not because they were new—their rigidity came from the black blood that starched the lap, thighs and shins. The pants were cinched tight around his waist with a length of frayed electrical cord.

      To earn a dead man’s trousers and shoes, Huth had dug latrines barefoot and in his underpants for three days.

      He was still digging latrines.

      A mile away, a wag emerged from the dust devils that spun across the ruined interstate. It continued to honk as it approached the lone opening in the ville’s mounded perimeter wall. The vehicle, originally a small school bus, was painted in garish pink, green, yellow, red, a chaos of spray-can squiggles and overlayed abstract shapes. Even the sides of the tires and wheels were painted.

      Belching black smoke from its exhaust, the wag stopped at the security checkpoint, which consisted of a breach in the berm that was partially blocked by a heap of junked vehicles. The all-volunteer sec force emerged from behind that rusting barrier, shouting instructions as they aimed their handful of centerfire blasters at the driver. The bus’s side door opened at once, and the sec men climbed inside to make sure it didn’t conceal armed killers trying to loot the compound. The ville’s sec men never robbed or extorted wayfarers themselves. Robbery and extortion were left to the twenty-four-hour gaudy house and the seven-days-a-week swap meet.

      The hellpit of Byram ville, whose smoke plume Huth had first seen from atop the red mesa, had grown up around a predark truck stop. At the center of the enclosure were the remains of a service station, restaurant and minimart. The great steel awnings that had once shielded the rows of junked fuel pumps from the sun had been torn off by skydark’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour shock wave. The original roof of the one-story structure had likewise vanished, the plate-glass windows turned to twinkling fairy dust. Roof and windows had been crudely repaired with sheets of metal stripped from the abandoned and overturned semitrailers that littered the huge parking area. These aging artifacts of long-dead interstate commerce were the very heart and soul of the place. Byram ville’s upper crust lived inside the trailers and conducted their businesses out of them. The poorer residents kept house in the rusting hulks of passenger cars. The lowest of the low—Huth, included—slept curled up on the ground like mongrel dogs, in the lee of their economic betters.

      Unless someone had died during the night, there were forty-five full-time residents of Byram ville. The locals survived by trading with travelers, taking whatever the newcomers had of value in exchange for jolt or juice or sex, or food or drinking water, or temporary protection from what lay outside the defensive perimeter. Though Interstate 15 was primarily a walking road, occasionally a wag would pass through, bearing trade goods and news from other parts of Deathlands.

      After clearing the entry checkpoint, the bus driver parked alongside the ville’s central structure and leaned on his horn for a good thirty seconds. Heads poked out of semis and car bodies and the ruined restaurant and minimart. Seeing what had arrived, people came running.

      Carrying his shovel, Huth joined the crowd that surrounded the strangely decorated wag. The driver stood in the bus’s doorway, grinning. He was a

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