Genesis Echo (Deathlands 25) by James Axler

“No. I’m an outlander. Just visiting the institute with my friends.”

The chorus of laughter was perfectly synchronized. “Visiting? We were all visitors here, you know.”

The small head tried to push in front of its larger twin. “If you can run, then run as far and fast as ever you can. And your friends. This is a bad place of wicked, wicked godless evil.”

Mildred suddenly felt a hand grip her shoulder, the muzzle of a blaster dig into her ribs and beard a man’s voice, whispering in her ear.

“Well, well, admiring our freak show, lady?”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Don’t work so hard,” Ryan said, patiently cutting with his cleaver at the fifteen-foot-high wall of drifted snow. “Take it easy.”

“But it’s nearly dark and the temperature’s dropping. We’ll all die.” Professor Dorothea Gibson was on the ragged edge of mental and physical exhaustion. Using her bare hands, she worked alongside Ryan and Trader.

“I’m not going to fucking die, just because of a little snap of cold and dark.” Trader laughed. “Fact is, lady, I’m not ever intending to catch that last train to the coast. No, not ever.”

Ryan paused and straightened. “If you work too hard, you get in a sweat. You get in a sweat and your clothes’ll get wet. Make you colder when you settle for the night. So just go slow and easy, all right?”

They had been working on making a snow hole for the past half hour.

Trader had gone to collect some fallen branches from a nearby grove of spruces, spreading them across the snow to form a binding layer for the roof of their shelter.

Now there was a hollow about six feet across and four feet deep, floored with some more green branches that Ryan had hacked down.

“Help to insulate us,” be said. “Cold can get you from all directions. When you crawl in, try to avoid getting loose snow on your clothes. It could easy turn to ice in the night. Keep dry and keep warm.”

“What about a fire?”

Ryan looked at the scientist. “Still snowing hard. If we had some pyrotabs we could mebbe get something going hot enough to stand against the weather. But we don’t. Everything’s soaking wet and frozen.”

Professor Gibson looked mistrustfully at the crude hole in the snow, squinting sideways at him. “You think it’ll save our lives, Ryan?”

“Yeah, Thea, I do.”

“WHOEVER THAT is, keep your hands to yourself.”

In the total darkness, nobody spoke for a moment until Trader sniggered. “Sorry, lady.”

“Now, how did I guess that it was you?”

“Because I’m the only real, red-blooded man here. Ryan always preferred sheep and young men.”

Ryan didn’t rise to the teasing bait. He’d managed to snatch a few minutes of comforting sleep, secure in the certain knowledge that their snow shelter would keep all of them alive until the morning, when they could set off again on the trail back to the institute.

They had left a small hole clear, about three inches in diameter, at the front of the snow wall, for ventilation. With the three of them bundled so tightly together, they generated enough heat to keep the temperature inside the hole only a degree or two below freezing. “What about frostbite?” Thea Gibson asked.

Trader laughed. “No danger of that. We’re all warm enough. Fact is, we’d be even warmer if we all took off our clothes and got busy.”

“Is that right, Trader? Sexual congress is the last thing on my mind.”

“You sure? How about if I wriggled around a bit and you sat on my face?”

She laughed. “I suppose that it would, at the least, shut you up for a while.”

Some time around two in the morning, Ryan slipped out of sleep to find a hand reaching under his clothes, trying to get his fly open. He kept very still, guessing that conditions were too cramped. In a few minutes the effort stopped and everyone got back to sleep.

TRADER GOT UP very early in the morning to relieve himself, breaking through the frozen crust of snow, letting in the first filtered light of the false dawn. Ryan woke immediately but Thea Gibson sighed and pressed her face harder into his shoulder, staying locked into sleep.