“We’re here, and we’re in one piece,” Ryan replied, glancing across again at Dean, who agreed.
“Just about,” the younger Cawdor replied.
Looking about, Dean could see that the other four members of the close knit group that traversed the Deathlands were beginning to come around.
J. B. Dix grunted and stirred, shirting from his slumped position until he was sitting with his back against the wall of the chamber. He reached out for the battered fedora that had slipped from his head and placed it firmly on his crown. Then he reached into one of the capacious pockets of his jacket and withdrew the wire framed spectacles, without which his vision was dangerously poor. He placed them on the bridge of his nose and pushed them up until they were in place, and he looked around at the chamber.
“Mauve?” he muttered, almost to himself. “Haven’t been many chambers with this color. Mebbe this is a new one.”
“Good Lord! Mauve?” muttered a voice beside the Armorer, as Mildred Wyeth began to return to consciousness. J.B., who had replaced his hat and spectacles one-handed, disentangled the fingers of his other hand from Mildred’s and began to replace his weapons in their holsters: the Uzi on his back, the Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun with its deadly load of barbed metal flechettes on one thigh and the Tekna knife in the scabbard at his waist. Ryan, who had a SIG-Sauer pistol and Steyr rifle, as well as a razor-sharp panga, already had his weapons ready. Krysty, like Dean, had checked and holstered her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640 as a reflex, without even thinking about it.
“How you feelin’, Millie?” J.B. asked.
“What sort of an answer you want—the truth, or one where I don’t cuss every word?” Mildred replied, her brown eyes showing the humor coming through the agony of awakening. She stretched, the gray pallor of post jump trauma showing through even on her dark skin. Her long beaded plaits shook as she trembled, stretching every muscle that she could persuade to work. “I swear,” she said, straining through the effort, “even getting thawed was better than this.”
Dr. Mildred Wyeth was one of only two members of the group that had firsthand knowledge of the world before skydark. In the late twentieth century she, as a working doctor herself, had accepted that she would have to have a minor operation. There was no real risk, except that she developed a severe allergic reaction to the anesthetic, and she was cryogenically frozen until the problem could be sorted out. Then there came a bigger problem: the nukecaust. And so Mildred lay frozen for more than a hundred years until she was discovered by Ryan and his companions, who managed to revive her. Waking up into an alien world, Mildred’s mental toughness had enabled her to cope with the sudden change, and her old life had also equipped her to cope with the dangers, as she was a crack shot who had been an Olympic medalist for target shooting before the world had been nuked. She soon found that moving, breathing targets were as easy to hit when your life depended on it, and her Czech-made ZKR pistol had become a part of her persona.
Mildred clambered to her feet, swaying slightly as she adjusted to having all her atoms in one piece once more. The part of her that had been a doctor still wondered what the constant tearing apart and reassembling of their constituent atoms was doing to them, but the part of her that had adjusted to the new world figured it was a problem that had, of necessity, to be low on the list of priorities.
Except when she looked across at the two remaining members of the group, and the two who always had the most problems regaining their consciousness and equilibrium after a jump. For different reasons, Jak Lauren and Dr. Theophilus Tanner were at their most physically vulnerable during the period of a mat-trans jump.
Jak moaned, curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Tendrils of his thin, stringy white hair were caked in vomit as it lay across his face, and when he opened his red, albino eyes they were sightless at first. His whipcord-thin body seemed dwarfed by the camou trousers, heavy boots and patched jacket that appeared to swallow up his small frame.