Deathlands – The Twilight Children by James Axler
Chapter One
The cold fingers of fog were drifting away, out of Ryan Cawdor’s brain.
The one constant thing that someone could safely say about making a matter-transfer jump was that there was no constant thing about making a jump. Sometimes there were dreams during the period of unconscious blackness, gibbering nightmares more often than sweet dreams. Sometimes there was no sensation of time passing at all. The mind closed down and then opened up again like a parched flower during a spring rain, with no awareness that anything at all had happened-except the one certainty that the complex machine, dating back nearly a hundred years, to the last days before the nuclear holocaust devastated the Earth, would definitely have taken you somewhere different. It could be a hundred miles away, or it could be ten thousand miles to another of the so-called gateways that had been built and buried in one of the chain of triple-secure military complexes known as redoubts.
The trouble with jumping was that you had no control over the destination. All the instructions had vanished during the nuking and the long winters that followed, and every living person who might once have known was long, long dead.
Most mat-trans jumps left you feeling like someone had sliced the top of your skull off, scrambled the soft tissues inside, then jammed the lid back on. It also churned up your guts like you’d been strapped under a war wag going flat out across forty miles of bad road.
As Ryan lurched back toward waking, he was aware that this particular jump hadn’t been too bad.
“Some you lose and some you draw,” he muttered.
When he’d locked the sec door on the chamber in the redoubt in Kansas, triggering the mechanism, everyone there had been holding hands, and the armaglass walls had been a virulent shade of cherry red.
Now his hands were free.
Several jumps ago something had gone horrifically wrong, and Ryan and his six companions had all ended in different destinations, only getting back together by a mix of judgment and luck.
Ryan opened his good eye.
The walls in this gateway were a dull, indeterminate shade of gray, closer to black than white.
The metallic disks dotted across the floor and the ceiling had resumed their usual color, and the white mist that often flooded the chamber during a jump had vanished.
Everyone was there.
Krysty Wroth, next to him, lay sprawled against a wall, her brilliantly red, sentient hair packed tight across her shoulders, crowding onto her nape as though it were trying to protect her.
His eleven-year-old son, Dean, was halfway across Krysry’s lap, his eyes squeezed shut, moaning softly, looking like he’d be next to recover consciousness.
Nineteen-year-old Michael Brother was doubled over, his knees drawn up in the fetal position, a tiny thread of scarlet blood at the corner of his mouth, as though he might have nipped his tongue during the jump.
J. B. Dix, Ryan’s oldest friend and armorer to the group, was also beginning to stir, muttering in his sleep. His normally sallow face was even more pale than usual. Without his glasses, his eyes looked oddly naked and unprotected. His scattergun was at his side, his Uzi clutched to his chest.
Mildred Wyeth was next. The black doctor was breathing very heavily, her mouth sagging open, her left hand gripping J.B.’s right.
The last of the seven friends was Doctor Theophi-lus Algernon Tanner, who was stretched out next to Ryan, flat on his back, his hands folded across his stomach, holding the gold-plated J. E. B. Stuart Le Mat blaster.
Normally it was Doc who had the biggest problem in using the mat-trans system. Even at the best of times his brain was a touch unreliable, and the pressures of jumping sometimes pushed him a few inches closer to the edge.
On occasion it had even pushed him completely into the abyss of insanity.
Ryan looked at the wrinkled face, the silvery stubble showing through the leathery skin.
It wasn’t that surprising that Doc often found h’fe in the last part of the twenty-first century hard to bear.