James Axler – Cold Asylum

For a few moments the shock robbed him of his senses. But when he opened his eyes he realized that the lamp was, amazingly, still lighted at his side. And that the body from the bunk now lay above him, pinning him to the floor in its dry embrace.

The skull face was inches from his.

The mane of long brittle golden hair that caressed J.B.’s cheeks told him the corpse had been female. The eyes had long vanished into the smeared sockets, and the skin of the cheeks had shrunk and tightened across the planes of bone. The lipless mouth was wide open, the irregular yellowed teeth actually nipping at his own skin, below his left eye.

J.B. had started to scream then, screamed for so long that his throat became raw and the sound of his voice faded away to a croaking whisper in the echoing stillness.

His arms and legs were pinned by the tumbled hut and the heaped rocks, the skeletal figure in the torn shreds of a plaid shirt hugging him in a ghastly parody of a lover’s embrace.

It took perhaps the greatest effort of will for J.B. to ever reassert self-control. Faced with this ultimate horror, the lamp beginning to gutter and die, virtually anyoneman, woman or childwould have given in to insanity and despair.

Not John Barrymore Dix.

He closed his eyes and breathed slow and thought about the rolling mountains and the sunlight, and fresh snow and crystal streams and live oaks in the spring, and shivering aspens in the fall. He also mentally rehearsed some of the encyclopedia of arcane blaster knowledge that he already possessed, gleaned from some old gun books he’d found.

“At two hundred yards a five-seventy-seven rifled musket ball with standard charge will penetrate seasoned white pine to a depth of eleven inches. A .69-caliber smoothbore to half an inch less. A .58 rifle to just over nine inches. And a .58 pistol-carbine to below six inches.”

Gradually the boy’s heart stopped pounding like a miniature trip-hammer in his scrawny chest. He was able to consider his position with a careful objectivity, trying to move first each foot and then each hand, working out what was holding him down and precisely where his best option for escape lay.

The light was close to being done, and he knew that he had to get free before that happened. The idea of being held forever under the leering skull in total darkness was so appalling that J.B. consciously thrust it away from him.

His left leg moved most, and the boy concentrated all of his attention on that, wriggling and pulling, trying to ignore the suspicion that the whole mountain was poised above him, ready to tumble and blur him into infinity.

Something slid away and the leg was free. J.B. brought it up and used it to push at the part of the bed frame that was trapping his left arm. He was caught near the wrist and he tugged, feeling skin tear and warm blood flowing over his fingers.

But it was moving. By turning half on his side he could lever his right arm out, finally flailing away at the brittle corpse, a moment of panic returning as the jagged teeth clamped on a fold of skin at the front of his throat.

He could never quite remember how he got his other leg free, or how he made his way in the utter velvet blackness, after the tiny flame died, to fresh air and safety.

And ever after J. B. Dix had been unhappy in confined spaces. Spaces like the cage of the waiting elevator.

But he did eventually manage to get a good handful of jack from the sour-faced storekeeper in Cripple Creek for the chromed Colt Cobra.

DEAN CAWDOR WAS PARCHMENT pale, and threads of vomit dappled the front of his black denim jacket. He looked at the gateway, where Krysty Wroth stood staring at the labeling on the piled boxes.

“Yeah. I think that means we could he somewhere farther west than we were in the Keys.”

Krysty’s hair was almost dry, but it still clung to her skull like a small fiery animal. She was recovering from the second jump, feeling surprisingly well, though there was a nagging worry at the back of her mind. Something wasn’t right about this gateway, but she couldn’t put her finger on what that was. The air smelled strange.