Prologue

      Evening hung dead still and oppressively humid over the shallow, five-acre, seep-fed lake, the lavender dome of sky perfectly reflected in its mercury-smooth surface. Encircling the muddy bank was a fringe of stripped, bleached skeletons of trees. The intense quiet was neither peaceful nor serene; the very air seemed to vibrate in anticipation and dread. Terrible forces of nature were about to make themselves known.

      Swish-swish.

      Swish-swish.

      From the north end of the lake came a rhythmic sound.

      Not a bird, not an insect. Sensing the impending hell show, the birds and insects had gone to ground.

      A tall human figure stood on the bank in hip boots, waving a nine-foot-long, flexible rod back and forth. And as he did so, he sailed a bright-yellow line through the air, forward and back, forward and back, in a tight loop, out over the purple mirror of sky. The man wore a long, pointy, black goatee and his black hair was loosely tied in a ponytail, which hung to the middle of his back. On his head was a tatter-brimmed straw cowboy hat. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.

      What face was visible was long, gaunt, perhaps tragic, certainly suffering, certainly world weary.

      As the man cast, the water in front of him swirled and gurgled. The head of a huge mutie lungfish appeared in the middle of the ripples. The fish looked up at the man, then struggled out of the pool, walking on the bony spikes of its pectoral fins. Greenish-gray on the back with a light cream-colored belly, the mutie was easily five feet long and weighed more than sixty pounds. As it dragged itself from the world of fish into the world of men, its large, rubbery lipped mouth and its gill covers opened and closed, breathing air. Grunting from the effort, the lungfish crawled up beside the man. An odor rose up along with it—the smell of a slaughterhouse in August.

      “You have no fly on the end of your line,” it said in a strange, gravelly voice that was half croak, half belch. “You can’t catch anything that way.”

      “I’m not fishing for anything,” the bearded man said as he continued to cast far out over the smooth water, in the direction of the evening star.

      “You’re fishing for nothing?” the lungfish said.

      “That’s right.”

      “Are you catching any?”

      “I’m catching and releasing nothing,” the man replied.

      As he continued to cast, to his left, a two-wheeled cart drawn by three men appeared over the rim of the slope. The lake sat on a stair-step rise in the land. Above it was mountainside; below it, the ground—mostly bare, eroded limestone—angled three hundred feet down to a broad flat spot between surrounding peaks. There, in a grove of low, scrubby trees, stood the remote ville. Even by Deathlands standards, it was a scab-assed place: dirt-floor shacks and lean-tos built up against the outer wall of the ville’s only permanent structure, a predark concrete blockhouse. Most of these shanties were big enough to house one or two people, and not tall enough to stand in.

      The three men took axes and a heavy-bladed machete from the cart and started hacking away at its contents. They laughed as they sprayed one another with flying gore. After a few minutes of extreme effort, they paused to catch their breath, then started throwing human arms, legs and quartered torsos into the water. The erratic splashes broke the metronomic swish-swish, swish-swish of the fly rod.

      The lungfish turned back from the commotion and asked the bearded man, “Am I real to you?”

      The man let his line fall and settle. He pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose, looked at the talking fish and said, “Nothing is real.”

      As more body parts landed in the pool, swirls appeared in the water near the splashes. Other lungfish were rising to feed.

      “That dinner looks pretty real to me,” the fish said. “Eat my body, become my body…”

      “Yeah, yeah,” the man muttered distractedly.

      As the lungfish slithered back to the water and to its share of the chow, it half turned and said, “Try some bait next time, Baron Kerr.”

      The bearded man remained silent and threw a loop into his floating line that allowed him to sweep the entire length of it back into the air.

      Swish-swish.

      Suddenly the entire surface of pool shivered before him, the lavender mirror shattering into a billion fragments. Like glittering confetti, the first spores of the evening lifted gracefully into the air. It was just the overture. In seconds, dense clouds of the freed genetic material boiled up from the water. Pale-green fingers of fire crackled and sparked from the pool’s undulating surface, making the clouds glow and shimmer from within.

      As the ministorm grew in intensity, the blood-spattered men hurried down the slope with their empty cart, determined to get under cover before spore fall.

      Swish-swish.

      Swish-swish.

      The heat from the electrical discharge made the air temperature jump twenty-five degrees and sent the spore clouds billowing upward. The higher they rose, the more ferocious the strange lightning storm became: blistering, eye-aching bolts fired up from earth to sky, their prodigious thunder rattling the ground.