Apocalypse Unborn PDF
Preview Apocalypse Unborn
There was no guarantee It was possible that they wouldn’t find Steel Eyes at the journey’s end. Yet there had been no arguments over the course of action. And no second thoughts once they had begun. Magus was a plague on all their houses. It was said that his artificially prolonged life had allowed him to master everything there was to master. That he knew everything there was to know. That this mastery and knowledge had elevated him to a higher level of existence. To a kind of junkyard godhood. He had become his own creation, a malevolent deity whose dark schemes and willing become his own creation, a malevolent deity whose dark schemes and willing soldiers victimized and degraded a desperate world. The companions had taken on the mission because they all knew some things were worth dying for, even when the odds were slim. And ridding the Deathlands of Magus was one of those things. Other titles in the Deathlands saga: Northstar Rising Crucible of Time Time Nomads Starfall Latitude Zero Encounter: Seedling Collector’s Edition Dark Carnival Gemini Rising Chill Factor Gaia’s Demise Moon Fate Dark Reckoning Fury’s Pilgrims Shadow World Shockscape Pandora’s Redoubt Deep Empire Rat King Cold Asylum Zero City Twilight Children Savage Armada Rider, Reaper Judas Strike Road Wars Shadow Fortress Trader Redux Sunchild Genesis Echo Breakthrough Shadowfall Salvation Road Ground Zero Amazon Gate Emerald Fire Destiny’s Truth Bloodlines Skydark Spawn Crossways Damnation Road Show Keepers of the Sun Devil Riders Circle Thrice Bloodfire Eclipse at Noon Hellbenders Stoneface Separation Bitter Fruit Death Hunt Skydark Shaking Earth Demons of Eden Black Harvest The Mars Arena Vengeance Trail Watersleep Ritual Chill Nightmare Passage Labyrinth Freedom Lost Sky Raider Way of the Wolf Remember Tomorrow Dark Emblem Sunspot Desert Kings JAMES AXLER ® ® A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM ® ® TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves…in comparison. — Heinrich Heine, 1797–1856 THE DEATHLANDS SAGA This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance. There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness. But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination. Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities. Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premoni-tions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja. J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader. Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined. Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare. Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend. Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow. In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.… Prologue Colonel Graydon Bell took his first breath in more than a century. Compressed air rushed down the plastic tube in his throat, inflating his collapsed lungs. Simultaneously, microbursts of electric current jolted his brain stem, sending his naked body into convulsions, slamming elbows, knees, and forehead into the sides of the narrow, stainless-steel cryotank. His restarted heart pounding in his ears, Colonel Bell clawed at the base of his skull, tearing away the tangle of electrical leads. This ended the violent spasms, but he continued to twitch and shudder; his knees buckled under his weight and he slumped to a squat. The ballooning pressure in his lungs felt like a chain saw splitting him in two. With trembling fingers he pried out the nose plugs and exhaled. Minutes passed while he gasped and gulped canned air, struggling to regain the rhythm of his breathing. As suffocation panic faded, Bell fumbled for the edge of the pliable adhesive that sealed shut his eyes. He peeled the protective material from brow and cheeks, then cautiously raised one eyelid. Not cautiously enough. Light speared into long-dormant nerves with such force that he nearly bit through the oxygen tube. 8 DEATHLANDS Mewling, he made brief forays into that place of impossible hurt. Repeated exposure was the only way to reinitiate his optic nerves. Through streaming tears he could see the cryotank’s vacuum lid had opened, and on the ceiling above it a bank of fluorescent bulbs flickered erratically. Bell yarded the intubation hose from his throat and let it drop, hissing, to his feet. The sickly sweet taste in his mouth was from trehalose, a sugar that was the key to successful reanimation from cryodeath. Prior to his immersion in deep cold, his tissues had been infused with this naturally occurring antifreeze. cold, his tissues had been infused with this naturally occurring antifreeze. Trehalose kept the water in his body from turning to ice crystals, which would have ruptured his every cell, turning him upon defrost into two hundred pounds of slunky garbage. Bracing his arms and back against the wall, Bell used his legs to slowly straighten, fighting the cramps that seized his thighs and buttocks. When he looked down at his corpse-white body, he saw wasted muscles, every rib showing, tendons standing out like load-maxed cables. Red starbursts of exploded capillaries dotted his skin. Galaxies of them. Freezer burn. The first stirrings of memory returned—the jumble of terrifying images and sensations sent Bell’s heart racing. Lurching stiffly forward, he grabbed one of the rungs in the wall and started pulling himself out of the cylindrical coffin. He moaned as he climbed, panting hard between steps. As Bell straddled the rim of the cryomodule, he was slammed by a wave of vertigo. He shut his eyes while Apocalypse Unborn 9 the deserted laboratory spun around him. He held on with both hands until the dizzyness passed, then crawled onto the attached steel platform. The cryotank on the other side of the access gantry had not opened, yet. Rivulets of condensation peeled down the module’s gleaming sides, and its defrost unit gave off a steady hum. Reanimation in progress. From where Bell lay, he could read the tank’s LED indicators. The internal temperature was 89.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and rising. Heart restart was still fourteen minutes, sixteen seconds away—a delay due to the fact that there was more of Dr. Antoine Kirby to thaw. Fifty-two pounds more, to be exact. Still dazed, Colonel Bell dragged himself down the gantry stairs on his behind, dropping from one tread to the next, until he reached the lab floor. When he tried to get up, a stabbing pain in his gut doubled him over.
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