And to his horror saw the dead face of Krysty Wroth.
Her pale white cheeks, which his touch had cleared of slime, were smeared with streaks of green-black. Trickles of the same color oozed from her nostrils, and out from between her bloodless parted lips. Her prehensile red hair lay dark, matted and still.
His beautiful Krysty was wrapped in a living shroud.
Ryan coughed and the pain, like an icy dagger, twisted deep in his lungs. Overcome by the lack of oxygen, by the wet weight of the spores already blooming inside of him, he felt the urge to lie down beside his lover, to close his good right eye and join her in death. As powerful as the urge was, he couldn’t make himself do it.
With a groan, Ryan hurled himself away from her corpse. The instinct for survival was something he’d been born with, something that the intense violence of his life had only served to hone. It wouldn’t be denied. As he ran, he slogged knee deep through heaps of the out of control agricultural bacteria. A maze of hanging folds blocked his view on all sides, heavy, membranous curtains that fell upon his head and shoulders as he furiously batted them out of his path. Ryan didn’t know which way was out. He didn’t know if there was an out. With no landmarks to guide him, he could only choose a likely direction and try to stay on course.
He had thrashed and slogged no more than twenty feet when his boot heel hit something buried and he lost his balance. He went down on his hands and knees, plunging into the slunk up to his armpits. Somehow he held onto the flashlight. As he jerked himself out, a thick coating of slime fell away from yet another face, directly in front of him. It was Dean.
It can’t be, Ryan told himself, reaching out and gently touching the cold forehead with his fingertips. It can’t be… But it was.
Ryan shoved off the encasing slime and drew the limp body into his arms. He dropped the flashlight and it rolled away. He let it go. It didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing mattered anymore. The future was gone.
Rocking back and forth, Ryan cradled his dead son. Each breath was more difficult than the last. After two or three minutes, he began coughing up dark, bitter fluid and little clots of fibrous matter. Pain skewered his chest, and the spreading chill in his hands and feet matched the cold that squeezed around his failing heart.
RYAN JERKED as he suddenly regained consciousness. Waves of nausea slammed him, his throat opened, and it was all he could do not to splatter himself as he projectile vomited. Minutes later, when the sickness finally passed, he found himself curled on the floor of a mat-trans chamber. Its armaglass walls were bright yellow with gold flecks, and cottony wisps of jump mist still clung to the ceiling. Krysty, Dean and Mildred were out cold on the floor beside him. They hadn’t even begun to stir. He checked Dean’s breathing to make sure the boy was all right. Jak, J.B., and Doc were awake, but not yet recovered from the ordeal of rematerialization. In separate corners of the chamber, they retched on all fours, like dogs.
His head swimming, Ryan struggled to his feet.
Traveling via the mat-trans gateways was never pleasant, but it was the only quick way for the companions to move from place to place. More than a century ago, the nukecaust had destroyed the rail lines and the shipping and airline fleets. They had never been rebuilt. Without constant repair, the interstate highway system had mostly turned to sand. The network of secret mat-trans gateways, high-tech artifacts of the military industrial complex, was blast protected, self-powered, computer controlled and automatic—you got in, you closed the door and you were transported to another gateway chamber somewhere else.
No one knew what the long term health consequences of using the system might be. But short term, there was both physical and psychological discomfort, and they were directly connected. As Doc had explained it once, the gateways reduced human consciousness and physicality to a stream of electrical charges. During the mat-trans deconstruction process, all the buffers, the self protective partitions of the brain fell away.