Leaning on his silver-handled walking stick, Doc Tanner sniffed at the air, and said, “Dear friends, it would seem that Providence has seen fit to smile upon us once more.” He inhaled again, savoring the aroma. “Somewhere below, the groaning board is piled high. Broiled flesh of some sort, I would venture.”
Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well-preserved sixty, chronologically he was four times that old. The Harvard and Oxford educated man was the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving embrace of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. The twentieth century scientists quickly tired of Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust that scoured away their civilization. Though Doc sometimes rambled in speech and broke into tears for no apparent reason, a consequence of his life’s overload of trauma and tragedy, this day he was as sharp as the point of the steel blade hidden in his ebony stick.
A stocky black woman dressed in baggy camo BDU pants and a sleeveless gray T-shirt stepped up behind Tanner. Her hair hung down in beaded plaits. “Smells like somebody’s had themselves a hearty breakfast,” she said.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth had also time traveled, but in a much different fashion than her Victorian colleague. After a life-threatening reaction to anesthetic, she had been cryogenically preserved just prior to the all out U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange of January 20, 2001. She had slept in the land of the dead for a century, until revived by Ryan and the companions. Mildred’s weapon of choice was a Czech ZKR 551 target pistol, the same gun she’d used to win a silver medal in the last ever Olympic Games.
“Whatever it is, it’s making my mouth water,” said the boy following close on Mildred’s heels. At age twelve, Ryan’s son, Dean, was already growing tall and straight like his father.
“Dear child, the human nose is by no means an infallible instrument,” Doc cautioned as the last two members of the group—a tall, red-haired woman, and the rear guard, a short, bespectacled man in a fedora—moved up the trail to join them. “What we Homo sapiens take for sweet succulence might well be the effluvium of some wayfarer not unlike ourselves. Someone whose grim misfortune was to be caught out in last night’s chain lightning. That hell struck sir or madam, could be down there somewhere, quietly smoldering.”
Dean made a disgusted face.
“Or it could be a trap,” offered the leggy, green eyed redhead. Because of the sweltering heat, Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover and soul mate, had taken off her long fur coat and tied the arms around her slender waist. The only visible effect of the radiation induced mutations that skydark had inserted into Krysty’s family tree was the prehensile ability of her long hair, which reacted to stress like a barometer. Her hair now hung in loose coils, indicating concern but not apprehension.
“Cook smoke could be the bait,” agreed John Barrymore Dix, aka the Armorer. Ryan and J.B. shared a bond of blood that went back many years, to their wild and woolly days with the Trader, the legendary Deathlands entrepreneur and road warrior. J.B. rested the barrel of his well worn Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge pump gun on his shoulder and tipped his sweat stained hat back on his head. “In a place like this,” he said, pausing to thumb his wire rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, “with no game to shoot, nothing growing to eat, a scent trail could draw victims from a long ways off.”
Though Ryan respected J.B.’s and Krysty’s trail savvy, he didn’t consider an ambush likely. There had been no sign of stickies or cannies. No grisly heaps of red bones and bloody rags strewed about. Stickies and cannies, Deathlands most murderous, subhuman residents, hunted in packs, like wolves, seeking out norms—nonmutated humans—and muties alike, and failing that, they would prey on the weakest of their own kind. The condition of the path told Ryan there wasn’t much foot traffic, certainly not enough to support the appetite of a large predator, or group of predators.