James Axler – Circle Thrice

“Good day, John Dix,” Ryan said. “Sounds like you feel about as well as you look.”

“If I look as well as you look, Ryan, then I’m looking twice as well as I feel.”

Krysty’s voice was as weak as a newborn kitten’s. “Gaia! I can tell you that I feel twice as bad as both of you put together. That was a mean mother of a jump.”

In the corner Jak struggled to his knees and then puked again, bringing up a watery, yellow grue, shaking his head and moaning. “Anyone get number of wag?” he asked. “Or was it mule kicked me in balls?”

Ryan had managed to drag himself onto his feet, fighting a wave of vertigo that threatened to send him back to his hands and knees. He closed his eye again and took several long, slow breaths. “If there’s any day-old rabbits looking to kick my ass, tell them from me that I surrender right now.”

Krysty was sitting now, running her fingers through the tight coils of her bright red hair. “Think that Doc and Mildred are all right?”

The black woman answered for herself, without opening her eyes. “Don’t know about that stringy old buzzard, but I think I’m still the right side of the dark river.” She paused. “Though the way I feel, I might prefer it if I was dead and free from suffering. That was just about the worst jump I’ve known.”

“Must’ve been because of the quake just as we started the matter transfer,” J.B. said, carefully removing his glasses from his pocket and wiping them before placing them back on his narrow nose.

Doc groaned, sounding like a man in the last stages of some fearsome terminal disease. He wiped his hand across his face, peering myopically at the smear of blood.

“By the Three Kennedys! Holy Mary, pray for me now, sinner that I am.”

“Too late for repentance, Doc,” Mildred said, sitting up and pressing her hands together.

“Not too late for penalties, though, madam. I fear that I must be the most wicked of sinners. The punishments of Damien are as nothing compared to what I am suffering. All that happened to him was that he had all the joints of his body cut through and hot lead poured into them while he was being ripped apart by a team of horses. A mere bagatelle to the agonies that I am barely managing to endure here.”

On the opposite side of the chamber, Jak was noisily sick again.

“I had a horrible dream,” Krysty said. “Makes a bad jump worse.”

“Me too, lover,” Ryan agreed.

There was a general nodding and muttering of agreement about the nightmares, though nobody was prepared to tell the others what his or her own particular horror had been.

“Think we’ve landed in Tennessee?” J.B. asked, replacing the fedora and brushing down his thinning hair.

“Didn’t catch the Japanese out in any lies over stuff like that.” Ryan sniffed. “Air feels right for an old redoubt.” He looked at the others. “Be nice if we found a place where we could all clean up some.”

“I’ll second that,” Mildred said, leaning on the purple wall of the chamber.

Behind her, Jak was throwing up again.

“REMEMBER WE’RE ON RED, everyone,” Ryan cautioned, easing open the heavy, opaque, armaglass door of the mat-trans unit, hearing the lock click.

They stepped out of the chamber, everyone holding a blaster cocked and ready, and faced a small anteroom. There was no door on their side of it, and the frame was scarred and chipped, with splinters of wood hanging off.

“Looks like there was violence,” Krysty observed.

“Bullet holes,” Jak said, pointing with his Python at pockmarks in the far wall.

“Semiautomatic, 9 mm,” the Armorer stated. “Way I read it so far, it seems like there was a firefight down here, likely in the last day or so of the nukecaust.”

“Last hours,” Ryan suggested. “Minutes?”

“Hours. Door’s missing, so there was time for someone to do some tidying.”

“Something written there,” Mildred said, indicating a neat line of graffiti in the otherwise empty room.

“‘James Burton will live forever,'” read Krysty. “One of the soldiers here?”