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      Call no man happy till he is dead.

      —Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C.

      The Road to Outlands— From Secret Government Files to the Future

      Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

      Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

      What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

      Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

      In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

      Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

      But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

      Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

      Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

      For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

      After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

      With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

      “Call no man happy till he is dead.”

      —Aeschylus, 525-456 BC

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Epilogue

      Chapter 1

      She had surrounded herself with dead things, for she found their company more agreeable now than that of the living.

      Her name was Ezili Coeur Noir and she was the queen of all things dead, the flower of carnage. She stood over six feet tall and her limbs were bird-thin sticks, like the tools of some perverse surgeon. Her skin clung so tightly to those limbs that it seemed as if it would crush the stick-thin bones that were visible beneath. That skin was the rippled leather of a lizard, discolored and rotten with oozing wounds, as if in sympathy with the dead things she had elected to surround herself by. She stood upon two spindly, emaciated legs at an odd angle, as if no longer able to hold herself straight, which left her looking like some hideous mannequin discarded by its satanic puppeteer.

      Along her torso, beneath her taut skin, her pronounced ribs showed like the keys of a piano, before finally disappearing beneath two misshapen breasts that hung like deflated balloons. Her elbows and knees were jagged points, like shards of broken glass, and her fingers curled arthritically in on themselves, their thick, jagged nails a sickly yellow.

      Ezili Coeur Noir’s yellow eyes showed the intolerance of a lizard, twin black slits like the eyes of an alligator, watching inscrutably above a hideous smile that, like the eyes, was more reptile than human. The yellow of those eyes almost seemed to glow within the darkness of her skin, weathered and aged to a leathery mahogany brown.

      Her clothes, like her body, had rotted, their dust-caked remnants clinging to her dark flesh in tattered rags. Death and entropy were all her body understood now, and thus nothing that came into contact with Ezili Coeur Noir could remain intact.

      She stood knee-deep in the swampland of Louisiana, where the plant life was so thick that it almost blotted out the rays of the rising sun. The plants nearest to Ezili Coeur Noir were dying as she stood and breathed in their proximity, wilting their life away in supplication to the queen of all things dead, who now stood gloriously among them.

      Ezili