Cold Asylum

Cold Asylum

Cold Asylum

20 in the Deathland series James Axler

Prologue

Ryan Cawdor paused, his hand on the heavy door, ready to pull it shut and trigger the mat-trans system that would propel them into elsewhere. “Here we go, friends.”

He sat on the floor beside Krysty Wroth, with his son, Dean, on his left. Doc Tanner was opposite, lying on his side, his knees drawn up to his chin. The rest of the companions had assumed the positions that they knew from previous experience would be the most comfortable for making the jump.

Ryan took Krysty’s hand in his.

The lamps outside the chamber dimmed, and he heard the crackling of a major electrical circuit malfunctioning. The metal disks in floor and ceiling began to glow, and the pale yellow armaglass walls started to pulse with the familiar misty light.

The inside of Ryan’s brain was already beginning to float in the nauseous way that he hated so much. He closed his good eye.

“Something’s wrong.”

The voice was his father’s, but it couldn’t be. The man was long dead at Front Royal in the Shens.

“Something.”

It was an old man’s voice. Doc Tanner. Something felt wrong.

Ryan gripped Krysty’s hand more tightly, seeking some portion of her mystical power, the Earth Mother’s power, trying to hold her.

But they were suddenly wrenched apart with a dreadful force and violence.

Now he could hear the roaring of a mighty water, and his breathing was being choked.

Tidal wave off the Keys.

“Wrong.”

The word sounded flat and unemotional.

Now a profound darkness engulfed Ryan, and he realized with a chilling terror that he was completely alone, alone in a different time and place.

“What’s happening?” His lips formed the words, and his brain could hear them.

Wrong.

“Happening?”

Alone. One.

Chapter One

Ryan opened his eye.

He swallowed, tasting the yellow bitterness of bile at the back of his throat, the inside of his skull still swimming in its own secret sea. His muscles ached as if he’d been on the wrong end of a beating in an alley behind a frontier gaudy.

“Fireblast!” His voice was so quiet it hardly carried as far as his ears.

The mist in the chamber of the gateway was clearing slowly, the metal plates losing their silvery glow. He noticed that the armaglass walls were a rich, deep purple. Coming out of a jump, the brain never functioned all that well, but Ryan couldn’t remember seeing walls of that color before.

He felt more deeply sick and confused than he could remember, and he looked around the six-sided room to check on how the others were feeling.

The others.

There was nobody else there.

He was on his own.

That wasn’t possible. He’d closed the door himself and triggered the jump mechanism in the buried redoubt in Florida, and everyone had been there then.

Ryan took a sudden harsh breath, biting back the desire to vomit. He closed his eye again, battling for self-control and checking in his memory where everyone had been sitting.

Krysty had sat next to him, her brilliantly red hair dark and wet, pasted to her head, her long legs stretched out in front of her, back against the wall, fingers clasped in his. Some incredible force had torn them apart. Ryan remembered that.

She’d been on his right, with his eleven-year-old son, Dean, on the left. The boy had been toying with his beloved turquoise-hilted knife as he sat and waited patiently for the jump to begin. His big 9 mm Browning automatic pistol had been jammed into a holster at his belt. Who’d been next in the circle? “Mildred Wyeth.”

Ryan could see the black doctor in his mind’s eye. A relative latecomer to the group of companions, the thirty-six-year-old woman had been wearing a cotton shirt and quilt-lined denim jacket over reinforced military fatigue pants, tucked into calf-length boots. In December of the year 2000, Mildred, an expert on cryosurgery, had been taken into hospital for minor abdominal surgery. Things had gone wrong, and she’d been placed in cryogenic suspensionfrozena state from which Ryan and the others had eventually freed her nearly a century after her “death.”