Scarlet Dream

Scarlet Dream
James Axler

The poisonous alien race masterminding centuries of calculated chaos and destruction for mankind underestimated the sheer tenacity of the human spirit. Now these technologically superior aggressors must contend with a dedicated group of warriors sworn to reclaim their planet. The odds against the Cerberus rebels are long, but the fight goes on.…In the fetid swamps of Louisiana, the dead rise, commanded by their new queen. Her power lies in death and in its secrets–the sadistic culmination of the insane power unleashed during her fragmented rebirth from dark goddess Lilitu. Facing off against an army of zombies, Kane, Grant and Brigid must somehow kill the undead. If they fail, the crazed voodoo priestess will infect her minions with a pre-dark biological weapon designed to destroy all life on earth. And then the dead will truly rise.…

Ezili Coeur Noir smiled at the noise, enjoying the terrible, familiar song of death reversed. All of the corpses had done this when she had revived them; each had sung a beautiful note of pain. It was so pure, so absolute, she wished to one day make an orchestra of these corpses, killing and reviving them to create the music she heard echoing in her black heart.

Already she was walking down the road, instinctively searching for another dead body, feeling herself drawn to it as she repopulated the Earth with her army of the undead. But soon she would not need to search. Once the Red Weed batch was completed by her lackeys, Ezili Coeur Noir would have an endless supply of the dead to reanimate, a perfect orchestra to scream her beautiful songs of death. And prized among those singers would be the three humans she had found in the underground bunker of the redoubt, the three who had challenged her with the brightness of their living souls.

Scarlet Dream

Outlanders

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)

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