am! Just get on with it!”
Ryan had faced countless dangers during his life: power-hungry barons holding the lives of countless people in their hands and willing to kill whoever they thought might take that power away; mechanical nightmares, created by long-dead mad whitecoats, that still roamed the land to hunt and kill; monsters of every stripe, from the tiny to the gargantuan, all roaming the hellscape called Deathlands.
He’d lost count of the number of folks he’d chilled during his travels and never even thought about how many muties and other freakish creatures had lost their lives at his hands. But every few months he took his own life in his hands; even worse, each time he did so willingly.
Before him, a gorgeous, flame-haired woman knelt on the dry ground. Only her fingers tapping her thigh revealed any tension. Tall and well built, Krysty Wroth turned heads wherever she went. She was also smart, levelheaded, good with a blaster and a deadly hand-to-hand fighter.
Ryan stepped closer to her, weighing how best to begin. Choosing a thick lock of her long red hair, he pulled it away from the rest with one hand and wasn’t surprised when it trembled and curled around his fingers.
Krysty was also a mutie. She could sense things, such as the life force of nearby people and creatures, and their emotional state. And she also had strange, prehensile hair that reacted to her moods. Getting Krysty drunk was the best—and only—way to cut her hair. Unlike everyone else’s, from Ryan’s thick curly black hair to Jak Lauren’s blindingly bright white mane to J. B. Dix’s close-cropped pate to Doc Tanner’s silver-white tendrils to Mildred Wyeth’s beaded plaits, Krysty’s hair was alive on her head.
Cutting it hurt—a lot. She compared it to taking a blade and dragging it across your skin hard enough to draw blood, then multiplying that pain by a thousand.
They stood on a plateau overlooking what would have been a bucolic river valley a century ago. Skydark had changed all of that in a few terrible hours. Now the landscape looked more like something out of a geologist’s nightmare.
Even since their arrival in this part of the old Midwest—J.B. guessed they were in the middle of the plains state known as Oklahoma—they’d been trying to figure out what had happened here. The more pragmatic members—Ryan, J.B. and Mildred—thought it was left over from the long-ago nuclear bombs that had flown and fallen around the world, irrevocably altering the late-twentieth-century civilization into the twisted remnants that struggled to survive every day.
Doc and Krysty, however, thought that a fault line near what had been the Mississippi River had finally erupted at some point, and that this stark landscape was the result.
Huge shelves of earth rose against one another in massive jagged waves. They weren’t high enough to be mountains, nor solid enough to be hills, and they kept falling and reforming all the time, making the nearby ground tremble as they moved. Even now, a patter of falling earth made Ryan look up to see a dusty brown hillock collapse in a cloud of dirt. The phenomenon appeared to be confined to this one valley, which relieved him—he didn’t want to have to keep looking over his shoulder to make sure the ground wasn’t collapsing behind him when they left this place.
“I’m waiting, lover,” Krysty said through gritted teeth.
“Right.” Ryan gathered the limply sprawling strands of crimson in his hand again and put the razor-sharp scalpel edge under it about four inches up. Although her hair was relaxed, Ryan easily sensed his lover’s tenseness. Without a word of warning, he sliced through the lock in one swift motion.
Krysty hissed with pain. The hair next to the severed strand tried to hide underneath the rest, while two thick tendrils wrapped themselves around Ryan’s wrists, attempting to pinion his hands. Fortunately, although Krysty’s hair could move, it didn’t have a lot of strength, and Ryan was able to complete the rest of his task with relative ease.
Two minutes later it was done. Just in time, too, as Krysty leaped up the instant he severed the final strand. Ryan was careful to take one step back while she paced back and forth, breathing heavily, her red tresses curled up tight at the base of her skull. “You all right?” he asked cautiously.
“I’ll make it....” Krysty said, shuddering as she paced back and forth, calming herself.
Krysty stopped in front of Ryan, then before he knew it, he was falling backward to the ground, with her on top of him.
She leg-swept me, he thought as he crashed to the dry earth, only barely breaking his fall with his arms.
Before he could protest, Krysty was on him, straddling his chest as she kissed him hard, coming up for air after a few seconds. “Want you to take my mind off what just happened, lover. Think you can handle that?”
Ryan’s hands were already moving, caressing her lush curves, barely constrained under her modified sleeveless jumpsuit. The front zipper was lowered a few inches, and he arched up and tugged it lower with his teeth while his hand snaked across the back of her neck and brought her face toward his for another hard, luscious kiss before nipping at her neck. Her hair now quivered with excitement, any memory of the torture inflicted on it a minute earlier fading fast.
Krysty’s moans were now of pleasure rather than pain, and her fingers were doing their own walking as they unbuckled his belt and began sliding inside his fatigue pants. As they did, another tremor shook the ground around them.
Ryan kept going for a second, cupping her breasts before realizing she wasn’t in the moment anymore but was now listening intently to something. And that was when he realized the initial tremor wasn’t stopping.
“Earthquake?” he asked.
She shook her head. “This one’s different.” She rolled off him in a fluid move, crouching and pressing a hand to the ground. Ryan just watched her. He’d known doomies in his time, and the whole group had met empaths more than once, but Krysty’s sensing skill was something else entirely. “Not the earth itself shaking... Something shaking it as it moves through it.”
Ryan propped himself up on his arms. “You mean underground?”
She nodded. “We better get back to the others—”
Before she could finish, the bone-dry soil erupted around them, spraying the two with dirt. Looming before them was an animal neither had ever seen before.
Rising several feet out of the ground, it looked like a cross between a giant ant and a praying mantis. Its carapace was a mottled green, brown and orange, and covered its entire thorax and abdomen in thick chitin. Its head had a pair of bulbous, copper-colored eyes, and large mandibles easily capable of severing a person’s arm that clacked together hungrily. Four arms waved in the air, each one tipped with a serrated, daggerlike claw at the end.
As Ryan went for his blaster, one of those limbs blurred down, aiming right for his crotch!
Ryan was already scooting backward as the needle-sharp claw spiked into the dirt between his legs, missing his family jewels by a hairbreadth. As it landed, he drew his faithful SIG Sauer P226 blaster and snapped a shot off at the monstrosity’s chest.
There was an odd, flat crack, and Ryan’s eye widened to see the creature still up and full of fight. He hadn’t missed—there was no way, not at this range. The 9 mm round wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the chitin.
Still hauling himself backward with his free hand, Ryan aimed more carefully at the big bug’s head, or more specifically, its eye, and fired again. This time the bug’s limbs thrashed around madly, then the creature flopped to the ground a second later.
“Shoot the head!” he shouted over the sharp report of Krysty’s Glock.
“Behind you!” Her answering yell came as another shower of dirt fell on Ryan. He looked up to see one of the nightmares right above him, its daggerlike claws spearing down toward his chest.
He rolled