Apocalypse Unborn Read Free

arch of sandspit. The rise in sea level after the nuclear holocaust put the spit under water at high tide and submerged the walkway and side railings of the concrete pier. The tide was out, now, and the pier, much foreshortened by wave damage to its seaward end, was high and dry.
    Here and there along the mucky crescent of Morro Bay’s exposed shoreline, amid the tangled metal and plastic refuse, lay stripped human skeletons and lumps of mud and wet cloth in human shape. In the bay, some 150 yards to the north, a three-masted white ship swung at anchor. It couldn’t tie up to what was left of the pier, the water was too shallow. Prospective passengers and cargo waited on the dock to be ferried to the frigate. At the ruined end of the pier, a makeshift crane lowered crates and boxes onto rowboats; beside the crane a rickety stairway led down to a floating platform and a tethered boat. The entrance to the stairs was guarded by four thickly built crewmen with assault rifles. Before passengers were allowed to descend, they were interrogated by a man seated behind a plank-and-sawhorse table who entered information into a logbook.
    The line moved forward very slowly.
    Mildred remembered the last time she’d passed through Morro Bay, more than a century earlier—and a year and a half before the end of the world. In the terminology of Deathlands, Dr. Wyeth was a freezie. On December 28, 2000, an idiosyncratic reaction to anesthetic during abdominal surgery had put her into a coma. In a last-ditch effort to save her life, the operating team had placed her in cryogenic stasis, where she remained until revived by Ryan Cawdor, Krysty Wroth and their companions. Mildred and her liberators had been inseparable ever since.
    If the picturesque, central California coastal town was far enough away from San Francisco and Los Angeles to avoid a stray missile hit on hell day, it hadn’t escaped the nuclear shock and tidal waves produced by saturation hydrogen and earth-shaker warhead strikes both north and south. Most of Morro Bay’s existing structures had been obliterated in the furious aftermath of Armageddon, yet it had hung on and survived as a human outpost, as the southernmost seaport on Deathlands’ Pacific coast.
    What was left of the Los Angeles/San Diego megalopolis was anybody’s guess. It was widely rumored that the lower half of California had vanished into the Cific Ocean, vaporized by overlaid nuclear hits or submerged by cataclysmic slippage along the full length of the San Andreas Fault. Reports about what remained were both sketchy and farfetched. Mildred had never met anybody who claimed to have seen it with their own eyes, only those who had heard about it, third or fourth hand. It was not the kind of place visitors returned from.
    Most Deathlanders she’d met believed that normal life couldn’t exist there, that the air and water were poisoned by high radiation levels and reawakened volcanic processes. Moreover, they were convinced that it was the fountainhead of every manifest evil, the spawning ground of new species of predatory mutants, monsters that spread forth across the ravaged continent like carnivorous weeds.
    As a twentieth century scientist, Mildred was dubious of all this speculation. For one thing, the concepts of “norm” and “mutie” were relative, not either/or. Every living thing in Deathlands had been impacted at a genetic level by the holocaust. Some of these changes were manifested externally; most were not. That a particularly heavily nuked area could generate a high rate of successful mutations did not jibe with pre-Apocalypse genetic research, which showed that the higher the rad dose, the more negative the mutations: the effected embryos rarely made it past the early stages of development. If Southern California was indeed the source of the plague of unheard-of, hostile species, Mildred suspected that something much more complicated, much more directed, had to be going on. One way or