Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [1]
The year is now 2162 (or 151, or 32,173, or Six Monkey Slap-Slap, depending on your point of view). It’s been a hundred and fifty years since the Big Mistake, and the ruins of the Ancients (that’s you and me) litter a landscape of radioactive deserts, mutated jungles, and vast, unexplored wildernesses. Strange new creatures roam a world populated by beetles the size of cars and super evolved badgers with Napoleonic complexes. The survivors of humanity gather in primitive tribes or huddle in trade towns that rarely rise above the technology of the Dark Ages. Even the nature of humanity is now different, because generations of exposure to radiation, mutagens, and the debris of other realities have transformed humans into a race of mutants who have major physical alterations and potent mental abilities.
Fluctuating time lines, lingering radiation and toxins, and strange creatures and technology transposed from alternate dimensions have combined to create a world the Ancients would think of as the height of fantasy. But to the inhabitants of Gamma Terra, fantasy is the reality.
GAMMA WORLD™
Welcome to the post-apocalyptic world of Gamma Terra
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
CHAPTER 1
Thunder rolled across the night sky and shivered through Hella as she leaned against the trees on the hillside. Rainwater gurgled as it raced along the ground beside her and joined the swift-moving creek fifty meters down. A hundred meters farther up the hill, in the cold camp in the Buckled Mountains where Hella and Stampede had bedded down the expedition, Daisy snuffled mournfully. The mountain boomer didn’t like storms. She would be tired and miserable in the morning.
Hella smiled as she turned her face up to the sky, though. The thunder and lightning, the pouring rain, all of it combined to make her feel truly alive. She wondered if the storm made the creature stalking them feel the same way. She ran her fingers through her long, red hair and pulled it back.
The thing certainly wasn’t afraid. It hadn’t holed up during the rainstorm as a lot of predators would have.
For three days, the beast had trailed them through the Redblight in what had been western Oklahoma before the collider melted down nearly two hundred years before and changed the world. A creature that big—and it was big, Hella knew from the occasional glimpses she’d gotten of its movements during the night—was dangerous. Only predators stayed focused so long. Nonthreatening creatures would have gotten bored and wandered off. The rain would have been a natural deterrent.
Lightning blazed across the sky, searing the wine-dark clouds that scudded across the quarter moon. For a moment the earth stood out from the shadows, the rocks bare and white like broken bones pushing free from the dark flesh of the earth. The running water looked like streams of silver threading across the uneven landscape.
A flicker of movement below caught Hella’s eyes. Instinctively she shoved her hands away from her sides. Almost instantly her hands morphed, changing from flesh-and-blood into tribarreled pistols at her command. Her body metabolism shifted the nanobots within her to high production, prepared to absorb the lead and chemicals from her backpack and turn it into rounds for her pistols.
When the lightning cut the sky again, she