Chapter One
Pistol in hand, Dr. Mildred Wyeth leaped through swirling, acrid smoke. Blistering heat seared through the back of her gray T-shirt and desert camouflage BDU pants. The junked Winnebago RV behind her was swallowed up in a thirty-foot-high pillar of flame. Over the roar of the blaze and the mad crackle of blasterfire, she heard children screaming as they were dragged away.
Cannies—as cannibals were called in Deathlands—loved babies.
And cannies were everywhere.
Dark, furtive shapes darted between the bonfires they had made of shanties, lean-tos, and wheelless, rusting RVs. Gunfire boomed from all sides of the ramshackle ville. Ricochets whined overhead. Somewhere in the maze of torched structures, the black woman’s five companions fought shoulder to shoulder with the ville folk, dealing death to the invaders.
Mildred blinked her streaming eyes, every nerve straining. When the children screamed again, she zeroed in on the sound. For a split second she had a clear view of three cannies as they raced past the burning hulk of a station wagon. The two in front carried a squirming child under each arm. The cannie covering the hasty retreat clutched a remade Ruger Mini 14 rifle in both hands. Mildred snap-fired her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, taking the only shot she had. She dropped the tailgunner with a single .38-caliber slug in the base of his spine. As she ran toward him, she got a last glimpse of the children’s kicking legs and bare feet, then they and their captors vanished through a break in the log-and-earth defensive berm.
Mildred could no more wait for help from Ryan Cawdor and the others than she could will her own heart to stop beating. Unless she closed on the cannies quickly, unless she chilled them, they would escape into the night with their innocent prey.
Howling, the flesheater she had wounded dragged himself after his fellows, clawing the dirt with both hands, trailing his paralyzed limbs behind him. Mildred jumped over his prostrate body. She didn’t bother shooting him in the head.
A cannie wasn’t worth a second bullet.
At the edge of the berm, she struggled to pick up their direction of flight. Squinting hard, she could see perhaps sixty feet in front of her. The starlit world was a dim monochrome, varied shades of gray blotched with black. When she heard the faint sound of children mewling, she holstered her handblaster and broke into a run. The cannies were heading east, across the wide valley of the Grande Ronde river, probably making for a hidey-hole in the densely forested Wallowa Mountains whose craggy peaks loomed in front of her, blocking out the stars on the horizon.
In daylight, the high desert valley was a fairly easy traverse. On a moonless night, it was like crossing a vast carpet-bombed battlefield. The depressions were deeper and the rises were higher than they looked. The impact of repeated, misjudged footfalls racked Mildred’s knee and hip joints. The sound of her own breathing roared in her ears. A burning pain stabbed her lungs, but she kept on running, full-tilt. She couldn’t see the cannies, but she could hear them ahead, crashing through the stands of brush. Burdened by their struggling prizes, the flesheaters were gradually losing their lead.
From the darkness beyond the limit of her vision came nearly simultaneous thuds and yelps. Mildred’s fingers closed around her holstered gun butt.
A moment later a pair of terrified little boys blundered into her path. As she reached out for them, they took to their heels, scattering to either side into the night. At least they had a chance now.
“Run and hide!” Mildred shouted over her shoulder as she raced on.
The fleeing cannies had each jettisoned a child to lighten the load and make better time. Carrying one small victim each, they quickly pulled away from her, their footfalls growing fainter and fainter. They weren’t circling or splitting up, trying to throw her off the trail or to catch her in an ambush. Afraid of losing their way in the dark, they were beelining for the foothills. The only signposts were the stars overhead. Mildred guessed they had picked a constellation on the horizon and were running toward it. She did the same, determined to play out the hand she had been dealt, but with fast-fading hope. Ahead was a vast maze of potential escape routes.
The extreme northeast corner of Oregon had avoided the leading edge of Armageddon, the all-out U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange of January 21, 2001. There had been no military installations or population centers to attract the nuke-clusters of Russian MIRVs. Since the mountainous, heavily forested area was three hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, it had also dodged the great tsunamis, spawned by worldwide thermonuclear detonations that had devastated the coastline. Northeastern Oregon had drawn a pass for everything but the earthquakes and a terrible firestorm that had swept through mountains and valley, burning out the little towns in its path; and of course the nuke winter that had gripped the entire planet. Even before the end of civilization it had been a rugged place, thinly colonized.
A little farther to the east, the landscape got even tougher.
One hundred miles away was Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, deep enough to hide twenty battleships, stacked one on top of the other. Hells Canyon also hid a predark redoubt, a vast bunker and storage facility, complete with a functional mat-trans unit. The mat-trans network was intended to move people and matériel across vast distances instantaneously. It was thanks to that system that Mildred and her companions had emerged unscathed into the wilds of Oregon.
Most of the predark interstate highways in Deathlands led to uninhabitable ruination: miles-wide, nuke warhead impact craters, skeletonized cities, poisoned water, air and soil. Highway 84, which cut across northeastern Oregon, through the Grande Ronde valley, was an exception. Sections