Cold Asylum

Almost all of his nineteen years had been spent in a closed community among the tall, snow-tipped mountains, a world away from the world.

He had been a complete innocent about life around the turn of the millennium and had found the brutality of Deathlands difficult to handle. Only recently had Ryan been able to persuade him to carry a gun, a Texas Longhorn Border Special that held six rounds of centerfire .38s.

But the bizarre jumps remained a blank mystery to him. The way that one could go into a small glass-walled room and just close the door, fall unconscious, wake up feeling like a rabid wolf had shit in your mouth, then discover that you’d arrived somewhere completely different. It had bewildered Michael Brother from the very start.

Now that it had obviously gone totally awry, he wasn’t in the least surprised.

“Knew it,” he croaked.

He stood and leaned for a few moments against the olive-green walls. Ryan had also told him that he couldn’t go around Deathlands in bare feet and a knotted robe, insisting he dress more sensibly. He’d acquired a black denim shirt and quilted vest, and an ancient pair of black jeans with silver thread along the seams and small copper rivets. A pair of good quality knee-high lace-up hiking boots completed his ensemble.

During his time with the small group of friends, Michael had seen enough to know that they wouldn’t have walked off and abandoned him. That wasn’t their way.

They must have jumped to somewhere else. Back at Nil-Vanity, there hadn’t been many opportunities to master technical devices. Life was deliberately very simple and basic.

Though Michael hadn’t taken too much interest in the few jumps that he’d already made, he had a vague memory that you could trigger a matter transfer by simply closing the door. He also knew that you didn’t have any control over how the system worked or where you might end up.

All that had been lost during the endless nuke winters and the time of dark nights.

“Nobody moves by standing still,” he said, unaware that he was echoing one of the Trader’s sayings, which he’d picked up from J. B. Dix.

Michael forgot to draw his blaster, simply reaching out to open the door.

J.B. PICKED UP his worn fedora and jammed it on his head. He took his spectacles from a secure pocket and held them up to the overhead lights, then polished a smear from one of the lenses before placing them on his nose.

He’d been aware at the beginning of the fateful jump that something seemed to be going wrong. The feeling of spinning and disorientation had been worse than usual, and he’d detected the brief smell of overheating circuitry.

It had been absolutely no surprise to find that he was alone in a chamber with walls of orange arma-glass, one of which was cracked from top to bottom.

Nor did he waste any time on speculating where the others might be. Mildred’s face swam into his mind, but he resolutely pushed it away.

He quickly itemized the possessions in his jacket, then glanced over his weapons. The powerful Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 12-gauge with pistol grip and folding butt. He slung it over one of his narrow shoulders. J.B. also carried an Uzi machine pistol, with several mags that held twenty rounds of 9 mm full-metal-jacket ammunition. A priority would be to fieldstrip and check and oil his blasters, after their immersion in saltwater.

He sniffed at the air, catching the flavor of pine trees and fresh-turned earth. That meant that some part of the redoubt was probably open to the outside. That, in turn, probably meant there could be people around.

J.B. decided that the first and safest option was to open the door of the mat-trans chamber, then close it again immediately. His calculation was that this wouldn’t return him to Florida, which he guessed probably no longer existed. But it might possibly link him up with some, or all, of the others.

Life was all possibilities that weren’t very safe. Or probabilities that weren’t that good, either.

“Don’t believe much in certainties,” Trader used to say. “Not unless you count death.”