Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [0]
“Some kind of sled?” Riley paced Stampede, both of them to the left of Daisy.
Stampede kept his head moving, tracking motion all around them. Shadows danced constantly across the ground, and the moving grasses made spotting anyone lying in wait along the impromptu trail difficult.
Hella pushed her fear aside and concentrated on her tracking skills. That was one area where her abilities transcended Stampede’s.
“Yeah. A sled.” Stampede kept his voice low.
“Why didn’t they use a vehicle?”
“Because the ’Chine don’t frequent trade camps and they’re too mobile to set up stills to make their own fuel.”
“They’re primitives?”
Stampede snorted derisively. “Not like anything you’ve ever seen before.”
“Then what are they?”
“Machine people. ’Chines.”
Riley glanced at Hella. “You mean with nanobots?”
“No. I mean cyborgs. The way the story goes, there was a group of military survivors here or in Texas that tried to hide out after the collider self-destructed. They remained in lockdown for a few generations, till all their stockpiles were gone, before coming back out into the world. By that time they were inbred and physically deformed. They fixed what they could with military prosthetics. One of the military detachments was a medical unit working on next-gen bionics and neural mapping. So maybe things turned out better than they would have otherwise. But the way things turned out was pretty horrifying.”
ALSO BY
MEL ODOM
Wrath of the Blue Lady
Hunters of the Dark Sea
THREAT FROM THE SEA
Rising Tide
Under Fallen Stars
The Devil’s Eye
QUEST FOR THE TRILOGY
Bone Slicer
Seaspray
Death Whisper
HELLGATE LONDON
Exodus
Goetia
Covenant
LEFT BEHIND: APOCALYPSE
Apocalypse Dawn
Crucible
Apocalypse Burning
Apocalypse Unleashed
NCIS
Paid in Blood
Blood Evidence
Bloodlines
Dungeons & Dragons
Sooner Dead
©2011 Wizards of the Coast LLC
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eISBN: 978-0-7869-5886-3
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v3.1
This one is for my Sooner students in the professional writing classes. Thanks for sharing your dreams with me.
IN THE FALL OF 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, embarked on a new series of high-energy experiments. No one knows exactly what they were attempting to do, but a little after 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon came the Big Mistake, and in the blink of an eye, many possible universes all condensed into a single reality.
In some of these universes, little had changed; it didn’t make a big difference, for example, which team won the 2011 World Series. In other universes, there were more important divergences: The Gray Emissary, who was carrying gifts of advanced technology, wasn’t shot down at Roswell in 1947; the Black Death didn’t devastate Europe in the fourteenth century; the dinosaurs didn’t die out; Nikola Tesla conquered the world with a robot army, and so on. The Cold War went nuclear in eighty-three percent of the possible