He went up the stairs, followed by the albino.
“Smell outside,” Jak said in a low voice. “Forest. Flowers. Animal, mebbe.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, “I smell it, too.” He edged over the lip of the entrance cautiously, relying on his hearing to warn him of any threatening movement.
It was dark topside. The wet chill clung to Ryan as he explored around the hole with his free hand, managing the ladder with just his legs. He kept the blaster in close, so it couldn’t be easily knocked from his grip.
Pale light, too washed-out to be daylight, poured in to his left from around a corner and a distance away. He couldn’t tell how far because there were no reference points.
Finding a dirt clod, he heaved it in the direction of the light. It smashed against a wall and fell down in pieces, nothing moved in response.
“J.B.,” Ryan called, “let me have that lantern up here.”
The Armorer passed it along.
Holding it high, Ryan glanced around the inside of the cave. It was maybe ten feet across, less than five feet high.
The roof was irregular limestone, patterned by the moving water that had shaped it centuries ago.
“I’m going on,” Ryan said. “Jak’s with me. J.B., you hold the back door open.”
“Done,” the Armorer said.
Ryan climbed out of the hole, stepping onto the cave floor, with Jak a pale shadow at his side.
Chapter Nine
“Springtime,” Jak said. “But look winter.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed.
The cave was narrow and twisted around a major bend, opening onto a mouth they had to squat to see through. A valley fell away below them, filled with short trees, a brook that meandered through the heart of it and boulders that stood up from the landscape like mushrooms.
There were no lights, no signs of civilization. A layer of white frost overlaid everything, brightening up the weak efforts of the quarter-moon in the dark heaven overhead. When the wind blew across the mouth, it made a mild whistling sound that gave an added emphasis to the chill circling Ryan.
“J.B.,” he called.
“Yeah.”
“Come ahead.” Ryan turned down the wick on the lantern, almost extinguishing the light so it wouldn’t be seen at a distance. He took a deep breath, and the chill cut through him like a knife. But it was cleansing, too, and took away many of the desert memories and the stink of death.
J.B. joined them there on the lip of the valley. He peered intently at the landscape, then up at the moon. “Night.”
Ryan nodded.
“These jumps don’t take that long,” the Armorer said.
“I know,” Ryan agreed.
“Dark night, but we must have come a long way.”
“It was the middle of the afternoon in New Mexico,” the one-eyed man said. “Where’d that put us in the dark hours?”
“Could be north,” Jak ventured. “Alaska. Plenty cold there anyway. Like this. Dark earlier, too.”
Under the thin layer of frost, Ryan could make out the verdant growth breaking free. “Farther north,” he said, “there’d be a bunch of fir trees. More than we’re seeing here. There’s birch, like there would be in northern Deathlands, but there’s more, too. Beech. A lot of oak.”
“Safe jack’s that we’re in the Northern Hemisphere,” J.B. said. “Going by the kind of weather we’re seeing before us. Say we went west, following the sun and getting there before morning arrived, that’d put us in China or Russia, or mebbe even Japan.”
“No.”
“Then Europe,” the Armorer said. “France.”
Ryan looked out over the midnight landscape and shook his head, not wanting to believe. But they’d been to Japan. The gateways could take you anywhere.
“No find other mat-trans,” Jak said, “gonna be long walk back.”
Ryan didn’t have anything to say about that.
“TOOK A LOOK around outside,” Ryan told Krysty and the others when they returned to the redoubt. He patted the side of the wag. “There’s no way to get this rig outside.”
“I found one,” Krysty said.
Mildred had gotten the generator running, though the screech the bearings made after being idle for possibly a hundred years wasn’t pleasant. The high pitched scream was almost but not quite above the range of human hearing.