He ran along the corridors of an old mansion in the hills above the Cific Ocean, a hundred miles inland from where the coast had been before skydark, fleeing the flames. He had iron shackles around his ankles, the flesh suppurating beneath the rusted and bloodied metal. The ceiling burned as the bright golden flames flashed overhead, scorching Ryan’s long hair. He could smell his flesh roasting.
Ryan saw the jabbing tusks of a rampaging elephant in the private zoo outside the ghostly ruins of old Sacramento. The animal had trapped the Trader in a corner of its enclosure, trying to knock him down and kneel on him. Ryan and the young John Dix had gone in unarmed against the massive beast, and he felt the pain of broken ribs set against the exultation of winning the combat.
Ryan drew in a screaming gasp of air, filling his tortured lungs as the racing current threw him momentarily to the surface. His right leg was numb, and he guessed it might have been broken. The original gunshot wound was painless against all the other injuries and bruises and cuts. His whole body was solid pain, and he was so weak that he couldn’t even kick to stay on the surface. Once more he was drawn under into the world of singing blackness and desperate memories of hard times gone.
He tried to retain his hold on sanity in the pit filled with cockroaches. He was bound hand and foot, helpless on the slimy floor, in total darkness. And the mutie insects, some of them nine and ten inches long, covered him, countless thousands, scurrying, rustling as their long tendrils brushed Ryan’s naked skin. He kept his eye and mouth closed, but was unable to check them from investigating his nostrils, probing into his ears. He had rolled back and forth ceaselessly, crushing hundreds of the vile insects, feeling their bodies crunch and squirt, mingling with his own blood and sweat.
A baron had tried to put pressure on the Trader by capturing his young one-eyed lieutenant and burying him alive in a mahogany casket with silver handles, the lid screwed tight. Ryan had been drugged, wrapped in a silken shroud, his head placed on a satin pillow. He could hear the earth thudding on the top of the heavy coffin and tried to take shallow, slow breaths to make the small amount of trapped air last that few vital minutes longer, fighting blind panic.
He had still been conscious when the Trader broke in the lid with the butt of his Armalite and dragged him out from the premature burial.
The baron’s death had been long, slow and infinitely, exquisitely painful.
He remembered the twin sisters, each gripping a straight-edged razor. Both of them giggled, slack mouthed, wide-eyed, edging him between them around the huge bedroom. Ryan had been naked and intensely vulnerable, already bleeding from a number of deep gashes across his forearm, with one low across his stomach, the crimson stream matting in his pubic hair, covering his genitals.
He had managed to reach a set of heavy brass fire irons, finally battering them both to death with a long poker.
The memories were fading.
Even Ryan’s great reserves of strength had their limits. He could hardly resist any longer; his head was thrown back, gulping in mouthfuls of water. He hardly felt the buffeting as the river raced over a series of short, savage falls, each of them between ten and twenty feet in height.
Now the remembrances of the bad times past were slipping away along with his mind and his life, blurring, the lines blurring between fact and fiction.
Between dream and memory and nightmare.
Some small part of Ryan was still functioning, and that small part realized with a faint shock that he was dying.
He’d taken a ferocious blow to the back of the head, just behind the ear, and final blackness was folding him gently into itself.
Everything stopped and his eye closed.
Chapter Three
The next morning Krysty was first awake.
She’d also been last to sleep, dropping finally into a restless, disturbed slumber, filled with confused alarms and dark threats. At one point she had tossed and turned, wondering whether the loss of Ryan had actually tipped her brain over the edge. She was racked with a mental puzzle. If she could solve it, then she could sleep and it might mean that all would be well with Ryan. He would be miraculously saved from certain death, and they would be reunited once again.