Sooner Dead Read online

  The twin trails led down into the wilderness. After the first two hundred meters, the people who had taken the meteorite hadn't bothered to sweep their tracks. Trailing them became easier. Hella could almost jog and track at the same time.

  "Some kind of sled?" Riley paced Stampede, both of them to the left of Daisy.

  Stampede kept his head moving, tracking motion all around them. Shadows danced constantly across the ground, and the moving grasses made spotting anyone lying in wait along the impromptu trail difficult.

  Hella pushed her fear aside and concentrated on her tracking skills. That was one area where her abilities transcended Stampede's.

  "Yeah. A sled." Stampede kept his voice low.

  "Why didn't they use a vehicle?"

  "Because the 'Chine don't frequent trade camps and they're too mobile to Set up stills to make their own fuel."

  "They're primitives?"

  Stampede snorted derisively. "Not like anything you've ever seen before."

  "Then what are they?"

  "Machine people. 'Chines."

  Riley glanced at Hella. "You mean with nanobots?"

  "No. I mean cyborgs. The way the story goes, there was a group of military survivors here or in Texas that tried to hide out after the collider self-destructed. They remained in lockdown for a few generations, till all their stockpiles were gone, before coming back out into the world. By that time they were inbred and physically deformed. They fixed what they could with military prosthetics. One of the military detachments was a medical unit working on next-gen bionics and neural mapping. So maybe things turned out better than they would have otherwise. But the way things turned out was pretty horrifying."

  ALSO BY

  MEL ODOM

  Wrath of the Blue Lady

  Hunters of the Dark Sea

  THREAT FROM THE SEA

  Rising Tide

  Under Fallen Stars

  The Devil's Eye

  QUEST FOR THE TRILOGY

  Bone Slicer

  Seaspray

  Death Whisper

  HELLGATE LONDON

  Exodus

  Goetia

  Covenant

  LEFT BEHIND: APOCALYPSE

  Apocalypse Dawn

  Crucible

  Apocalypse Burning

  Apocalypse Unleashed

  NCIS

  Paid in Blood

  Blood Evidence

  Bloodlines

  Dungeons & Dragons

  Sooner Dead

  ©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC

  Dungeons & Dragons. Gamma World, Wizards of the Coast, and their respective logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries. Other trademarks arc property of their respective owners.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Cover art by Jason Chan

  First Printing: February 2011

  987654321

  ISBN; 978-0-7869-5736-1

  ISBN: 978-0-7869-5886-3 (e-book)

  620-28053000-001-EN

  The sale of this book without its cover has not been authorized by the publisher. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for this "stripped book."

  U.S., CANADA, ASIA. PACIFIC, & LATIN AMERICA

  Wizards of the Coast LLC

  P.O. Box 707 Renton,

  WA 98057-0707

  +1-800-324-6496

  EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS

  Hasbro UK Ltd

  Caswell Way

  Newport, Gwent NP9 0YH

  GREAT BRITAIN

  Save this address for your records.

  Visit our web site at www.wizards.com

  This one is for my Sooner students in the professional

  writing classes. Thanks for sharing your dreams with me.

  IN THE FALL OF 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, embarked on a new series of high-energy experiments. No one knows exactly what they were attempting to do, but a little after 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon came the Big Mistake, and in the blink of an eye, many possible universes all condensed into a single reality.

  In some of these universes, little had changed; it didn't make a big difference, for example, which team won the 2011 World Series. In other universes, there were more important divergences: The Gray Emissary, who was carrying gifts of advanced technology, wasn't shot down at Roswell in 1947; the Black Death didn't devastate Europe in the fourteenth century; the dinosaurs didn't die out; Nikola Tesla conquered the world with a robot army, and so on. The Cold War went nuclear in eighty-three percent of the possible universes, and in three percent the French unloaded their entire nuclear arsenal on the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, because it had to be done. When reality stabilized again, an instant after the Big Mistake, the familiar Earth of the twenty-first century was replaced by one formed from many different realities.

  The year is now 2162 (or 151, or 32,173, or Six Monkey Slap Slap, depending on your point of view). It's been a hundred and fifty years since the Big Mistake, and the ruins of the Ancients (that's you and me) litter a landscape of radioactive deserts, mutated jungles, and vast, unexplored wildernesses. Strange new creatures roam a world populated by beetles the size of cars and super evolved badgers with Napoleonic complexes. The survivors of humanity gather in primitive tribes or huddle in trade towns that rarely rise above the technology of the Dark Ages. Even the nature of humanity is now different, because generations of exposure to radiation, mutagens, and the debris of other realities have transformed humans into a race of mutants who have major physical alterations and potent mental abilities.

  Fluctuating time lines, lingering radiation and toxins, and strange creatures and technology transposed from alternate dimensions have combined to create a world the Ancients would think of as the height of fantasy. But to the inhabitants of Gamma Terra, fantasy is the reality.

  Welcome to the post-apocalyptic world of Gamma Terra

  CHAPTER 1

  Thunder rolled across the night sky and shivered through Hella as she leaned against the trees on the hillside. Rainwater gurgled as it raced along the ground beside her and joined the swift-moving creek fifty meters down. A hundred meters farther up the hill, in the cold camp in the Buckled Mountains where Hella and Stampede had bedded down the expedition, Daisy snuffled mournfully. The mountain boomer didn't like storms. She would be tired and miserable in the morning.

  Hella smiled as she turned her face up to the sky, though. The thunder and lightning, the pouring rain, all of it combined to make her feel truly alive. She wondered if the storm made the creature stalking them feel the same way. She ran her fingers through her long, red hair and pulled it back.

  The thing certainly wasn't afraid. It hadn't holed up during the rainstorm as a lot of predators would have.

  For three days, the beast had trailed them through the Redblight in what had been western Oklahoma before the collider melted down nearly two hundred years before and changed the world. A creature that big—and it was big, Hella knew from the occasional glimpses she'd gotten of its movements during the night—was dangerous. Only predators stayed focused so long. Nonthreatening creatures would have gotten bored and wandered off. The rain would have been a natural deterrent.

  Lightning blazed across the sky, searing the wine-dark clouds that scudded across the quart
er moon. For a moment the earth stood out from the shadows, the rocks bare and white like broken bones pushing free from the dark flesh of the earth. The running water looked like streams of silver threading across the uneven landscape.

  A flicker of movement below caught Hella's eyes. Instinctively she shoved her hands away from her sides. Almost instantly her hands morphed, changing from flesh-and-blood into tribarreled pistols at her command. Her body metabolism shifted the nanobots within her to high production, prepared to absorb the lead and chemicals from her backpack and turn it into rounds for her pistols.

  When the lightning cut the sky again, she caught a brief glimpse of the creature less than a hundred meters away. The fur was dark and matted, maybe a mottled gray and black, but the beast looked powerful and not timid. Festering, yellow eyes reflected the lightning; then with a blink, they disappeared.

  Quietly as she could, Hella shifted beneath the microweave camouflage blanket she'd taken with her to keep watch. Daisy snuffled again then bleated mournfully. Hella wondered if the predator thought of Daisy as prey or if the big lizard had been part of the reason the thing had hung back for so long. Daisy was intimidating to many things, including several that were larger than she. The lizard hunted her meals too, and she was deadly in the wilderness.

  Breathing rhythmically, Hella tapped the comm in her ear to wake Stampede. "Wakey, wakey."

  Stampede answered almost immediately. He always came up out of sleep and into full wakefulness in a heartbeat. Despite the fact that she and Stampede had been friends and partners for several years, Hella still had a hard time accepting how quickly he could shift from sleep.

  Lightning blazed across the sky again, and the peal of thunder that followed sounded like a cannon shot. Hella's ears rang.

  "We have company?" Stampede kept his voice low, but it rumbled like the thunder as well.

  "Yeah. And it's getting more curious."

  Stampede snorted and that sound wasn't human at all. "Or hungry."

  "Maybe." Hella let her gaze go loose and didn't focus on anything. Trying to focus in the dark, even without the barrage of light and noise, was foolish. Human eyesight was limited at night, and peripheral vision was strongest. Not looking at something allowed her to see it better.

  "Don't know why it couldn't have waited till a decent hour to fill its belly."

  If the situation hadn't been so tense, Hella would have grinned at that. Stampede groused about everything. And he hated getting out in the rain.

  "Any idea what it is?"

  "Something furry."

  "So am I."

  Hella grinned at that. Stampede took a lot longer to dry than she did, and he stank when he was wet. Even he admitted that. "I don't know if it's people-smart, but it's clever enough. And definitely patient."

  "If I'm going to get out in the rain, I'm ready to hunt it." Stampede growled a curse. "I'm tired of playing cat and mouse with this thing."

  "The night will work against us."

  "It's never around in the day." Stampede blew out a breath.

  "That we can see."

  "I know." Gear clanked as Stampede pulled it on. "I'm going to wake Poole and Smothers. Set them up to watch the camp."

  "All right." Hella agreed with the choice. They'd been in-country with the expedition for five days. During that time she, like Stampede, had taken stock of the security team the New Mexico scientists had brought with them. None of the guards were used to the Redblight, or the harshness of the wilderness for that matter, but those were the two people Hella would have picked.

  "I'll be there in a few. Don't get killed."

  Hella hunkered down as another lightning bolt seared the night. Then the creature exploded out of the darkness to her right.

  The soundless approach caught Hella completely off guard. She'd never faced anything that big that could move so quickly. The appearance was almost like a magician's trick—first she saw it, then she didn't—only in reverse.

  She pulled her head down and threw her arms over her face to protect her eyes because there was no time for her to take aim and fire. She had an immediate impression of bulk and wet fur and ferocity as the thing snapped at her with gleaming jaws made even more fiercely white by the lightning flashes.

  Driven by the predator's mass, Hella flew backward. Desperately she tried to keep her feet under her, but the muddy ground made that impossible. Her boots tore through the loose earth and slipped. She caught herself on one knee and one gun hand. She felt the mud pack the barrels of that weapon and knew it would take the nanobots in her body a short time to clear the blockage.

  Twisting, she aimed her other hand at the darkness and the creature. She couldn't see it, so she aimed by instinct. She willed her gun hand to fire, and rounds cycled through her transformed fingers with rapid-fire barks. Muzzle flashes tore holes in the night, but they also played havoc with her night vision.

  Bullets peppered the leaves and branches, causing a flurry of motion. Hella's heart trip-hammered inside her chest when she ceased firing. Another streak of lightning revealed that the creature had ripped away the front of her blouse. The abbreviated chain mail half shirt she wore next to her skin showed fresh scratch marks, and she dimly remembered the bruising second effort the creature had made during the attack. Thin streamers of blood flowed from three scratches beneath the edge of the chain mail. She didn't know if the marks were from teeth or claws. She was certain her attacker had both.

  "Hella!" Stampede's bellow rang in Hella's head.

  "I'm fine." Hella concentrated briefly, focusing on her gun hands and re-forming them into larger-caliber weapons. If she could have willed them into bazookas, she would have done that. As it was, she'd configured her hands into .50-caliber weapons, the largest she could manage. The new rounds offered sheer knockdown power, but they also took away some of her control and recovery, and they'd deplete her ammo backpack faster.

  "Did you get it?"

  "No. It nearly got me. Come ahead slow and make sure I know where you are." Hella stood with her knees bent slightly, her weight low and spread so she could manage the slippery earth better. She tried to listen, but the drumming rain and the aftereffects of the loud detonations ringing in her ears ruined her hearing.

  Branches jerked into motion to her left.

  Immediately Hella pointed her hand at the brush and fired. The heavy recoil jerked her arm and knocked her off balance again as her feet shifted in the mud. She cursed and tried to stare through the rain and the leftover blind spots from the muzzle flashes.

  "Hella!" Stampede sounded hoarse. His voice was so loud that the comm nearly ruptured her eardrum, and she heard the echo of his voice—delayed by the distance—coming from farther up the hillside.

  "I'm all right." Hella swiveled and kept breathing, making herself use her peripheral vision instead of her direct sight. The creature was still out there. She felt certain about that. It wouldn't die quietly, not something that big and that fierce.

  She moved quickly through the brush, dodging behind trees as she went but still maintaining a small area. Standing still did her no go. The creature had found her. At least motion meant her hunter had to move as well.

  A branch cracked behind and to her left. Hella swiveled and brought up both hands. The barrels were once more open. A huge form vaulted at her, raking at her with its claws. The chain-mail shirt took another hit, but the claws slid down far enough to slice into her flesh as well. She bit back a cry of pain, thinking that it would be her luck that the creature carried poison on its talons.

  She threw herself to one side and fired again, cycling rounds through her hand. No cartridges spilled out. Her body manufactured caseless ammo. There was only the repeated detonations as she unleashed a cascade of death.

  A pained yelp rewarded her attention. The predator crashed through the brush without its usual surefooted grace. When she thought back over the image her mind had conjured, she knew the creature stood almost up to her hip.

  "T
he thing's big." Hella stayed in motion, depending on that sixth sense she'd honed in the Redblight and the wilderness to keep her safe. With increasing frequency, the lightning flashes lifted the darkness again and again. Everything looked surreal, and the falling rain painted jagged edges on the world.

  "How big?"

  "Not as big as a bear, but it reminded me of a coyote. Doglike. Only a lot thicker."

  "The coyotes in the Redblight don't grow that big."

  "I know." Hella sank in to a large elm tree. She liked the sense of protection the massive tree gave her, but she knew it was false. The thickness of the tree and the density of the brush blinded her as well. She pushed away and kept moving. If it were light, she was certain she could have found the blood trail the creature left.

  "Something new, you think?"

  "If it was, we'd have heard about it at the trade camps." News and gossip flew like quail at the trade camps. "Something like this, everybody would have been talking about it."

  "Maybe it's too new."

  Hella considered that. Genetic abominations still cropped up all around the world after the collider exploded. Strange animal life—new creatures as well as hybridized old ones—were the norm. Plant life and climatic conditions had lists of their own. She'd seen examples of all of them.

  Something large stepped in behind her, and the presence washed over her. She whirled and brought her gun hands up, aiming for the center mass.

  "Don't shoot." Stampede spoke softly but his voice filled the space around them. He stood almost eight feet tall, dwarfing Hella's five foot three. Massive shoulders and a thick neck supported a huge, bovine head. Like his forebears, the buffalo, Stampede had short, curved horns. A gold nose ring gleamed against his muzzle, and gold studs gleamed in his short, tufted ears.