“This is a cruel and unnatural punishment under the constitution,” Ryan said, but a cloth gag had been thrust into his mouth and he nearly choked on his own words. All of his senses were swamped with the sensation of blood, soaking into his clothes, reeking in the warm air.
If Krysty and the others were going to rush to his rescue, then they were cutting it close.
“Hangman, hangman, slacken the noose,” Ryan whispered to himself.
There came a snapped command and the strange whistling noise that had puzzled him earlier, followed by that same sickening thud as the blade severed his head. His dimming eye took a close-up picture of bloodied straw into eternal darkness.
Chapter Four
Coming around from any jump was unpleasant.
For each of the six friends, this particular interrupted jump had been the worst.
Doc was twitching like someone suffering from an ague, blood trickling from his nose and from both ears, matting in his silver hair.
Jak had been violently sick. The pool of vomit had congealed at his side and streaked his shining white hair. His nails had dug so hard into his ivory palms that they had also drawn half moons of dark blood.
Krysty had been crying, gobbets of tears streaking her pale cheeks. She had bitten the end of her tongue, and blood smeared her chin. As she started to recover consciousness, she was shuddering violently.
Mildred was trembling, the beads in her plaited hair rattling on the armaglass floor of the gateway chamber. Her hands were pressed between her thighs, and she was huddled in the fetal position.
At her side J.B. was on his way back from the blackness. His eyelids were moving rapidly as though he were dreaming, and his fingers kept clenching and opening, as though they were trying to grasp the butt of a blaster. Like Doc, he had suffered from a bleeding nose. The blood trickled down his face, onto the floor, where it was already beginning to clot.
Ryan was the first to manage to open an eye, promptly closing it again as a tidal wave of sickness swept up from his stomach. He clamped his mouth shut and swallowed hard, tasting the iron of blood on his tongue.
He had a pounding headache, and his good eye felt as if someone were holding a red hot dagger behind it, trying to push it from its socket.
The air felt neutral, flat and stale, which generally meant that they were in a redoubt that was still sealed from the days of skydark.
Ryan risked another brief glance, checking the color of the armaglass walls of the six-sided chamber. Back in Japan they had been a vivid orange.
“Purple,” he whispered to himself. “Deep purple.”
It meant that they’d made the jump safely, even though it had taken a toll on everyone’s health.
“Fireblast!” The agony seemed to be slowly abating from his head.
Ryan coughed, feeling the bitterness of bile rising in his gorge. He cleared his throat and spit on the floor in the corner of the gateway, seeing the phlegm was flecked with blood.
He finally felt able to look around to see how the others were doing. It looked as though everyone had either been bleeding or had been sick.
Or both.
J.B. was closest to coming around, his eyes blinking open, showing only the whites. His hands were gently touching his face, as though he were trying to find some unguessable wound.
Doc had rolled on his back and was snoring like a blast furnace.
The others were still deeply unconscious.
Ryan was relieved that his young son, Dean, hadn’t been with them. The boy had often suffered from previous jumps.
He wondered how Dean was getting on in the boarding school up in the high country of Colorado. Nick Brody, owner of the school, had seemed a good and honest enough person, and the place’s reputation was sound.
Ryan had promised that he would visit the boy when it was possible, though Dean had lived long enough and hard enough in Deathlands to know that it might be quite some time before such a visit was practical.
“Dark night! Been rolled and tolled like a bell. Now I’m feeling just like Hell.”