James Axler Deathlands 019 Deep Empire

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game with a John went wrong. She swore that she saw every single second of her
thirteen years as the rope tightened inexorably around her throat.
Hun had suggested that she was overloaded on jolt at the time.
Ryan had been surprised that almost all of the crew had some story or other.
About hearing their long-dead mother speak to them as they were about to set
their foot on an implode gren, or seeing themselves as little babies in a
dream and the next day they were nearly fragged in a mutie raid.
Ryan himself had been finger-width close to death on a number of occasions.
One fine summer's day, when he'd been just eighteen, he'd been walking across
a flower-decked meadow in New England, without a care in the world. He'd spent
a few days working for a farmer, and enjoying the farmer's daughter in the
dark of night. Now he was on his way, seeking fresh fields and adventures new,
chewing on a tender stalk of green grass.
The very next splinter of recorded time saw him flat on his back in the dirt,
staring up at the sky, with no sense at all of what could have happened. There
had been no sound and no feeling of any impact.
The bullet had struck him just above the right ear, glancing off at an angle
into a shrub oak by a nearby stream. His luck was that the murderous farmer
owned only an antique smoothbore black-powder musket, and was using it at
extreme range, actually firing from the bedroom window of his weeping
thirty-year-old daughter.
But Ryan was definitely certain that nothing in his past life had flashed
before him at that moment.
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ALL HE REMEMBERED as he was sucked deep under the surface, was the foul stink
of chemicals and the intolerable heat of the Lantic Ocean. His hand had
reached out for balance, toward Krysty and their fingers had brushed.
Now it was dark.
Despite the monstrous horror of his predicament, Ryan managed to hang on to
some shreds of sense. He realized that there must have been a gigantic
underwater explosion, probably volcanic in origin: the pale yellow cloud in
the distance, the clogging stink of sulfur, the fleeing shoal of striped
mullet, the unnatural stillness of the moment, then the heat and the bubbling.
Knowing what was killing him didn't seem that much of a consolation.
His legs kicked and his fingers clawed at the water. The eruption had brought
up so much primeval mud from the bottom of the ocean that it had turned day
into pitchy night, making it almost impossible to distinguish up from down.
Ryan's ears were filled with a dull roaring, like being directly inside a
revving war wag engine. And there was enormous pressure all around him,
mocking his feeble efforts to try to swim to safety. It was a similar
sensation to being tumbled over some roaring rapids.
Ryan had the illusion that the temperature of the sea was slightly cooler. But
the buffeting was worse, and the rumbling seemed louder. All his senses were
starting to slip uncontrollably away from him.
His skin was tender, feeling loose on his body, and both his good eye and the
raw puckered socket were stinging, as if someone had sprayed acid in them. And
his breath was rapidly vanishing from his lungs.
Ryan probably slipped from consciousness, though he had no sentient awareness
of any change. The darkness and the suffocating oppression didn't alter at
all.
But suddenly he was breathing, air that was as thick as oatmeal and flavored
with a rich gruel of ancient stenches.
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The one-eyed man drew a great roaring gasp of it into his chest, arms flung
high toward the ochre sky.
Though he'd just hovered on the brink of the drowning abyss, his fighting
reflexes quickly reasserted themselves. He sank again for a moment, swallowing
a sickening gulp of foul salt water. Then his legs kicked and his arms flailed
and he was swimming once more, trying to direct himself away from what seemed
the core of a massive undersea explosion.
The ocean was in turmoil.
The eruption had somehow affected the weather, and the fine morning had gone,
replaced by leaden clouds and crackling bolts of purple lightning that tore
the sky apart. The waves all around him were massive, gray-green mountains
that fell roiling into the next swell, white-topped and menacing.
Ryan kept finding himself in the trough, unable to see more than a few yards
in any direction, unable to see what had happened to the two boats. Worse,
unable to see in what direction the land might be.
He could make out where the center of the disturbance lay about a hundred
yards ahead of him, where a column of steam, smoke and liquid mud was hurled
into the air, tinted a dark yellow-orange color.
Ryan's luck lay in the eruption hurling him away from its murderous center,
where he would have either drowned or been boiled alive. But his predicament
was still extremely hazardous, seemingly alone in the lethal wilderness of
ocean.
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The weight of his clothes, boots and the SIG-Sauer on his hip were all uniting
to try to drag him down. But he knew enough about survival in Deathlands to
shrink from abandoning anything until he absolutely had to.
The first priority for Ryan was to try to establish his bearings.
He had drifted a little farther from the danger zone, with the water around
him
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