Crossways
Crossways
30 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor lay in the gateway chamber of the matter-transfer unit at the heart of Redoubt 47, in the wilds of what had a hundred years earlier been the state of Louisiana.
“Who could?” he said slowly, his voice distorted, throbbing inside his skull.
Krysty Wroth’s fingers squeezed his hand very hard, painfully. She was telling him something, shouting. But the jump was almost under way.
Almost.
A silhouetted figure stood outside the heavy door, someone tall and skinny, wearing black.
Ryan’s grip on the present had almost gone, and he clung to consciousness by a ragged fingernail. Images floated through his whirling mind.
The massive dark brown armaglass door to the chamber was opening, closing.
Dark figure.
White hair.
Face close against his, with eyes that leaked bright blood. A skin like paper.
Old, immeasurably old.
Hissing words. ” what you did….”
As blackness finally swallowed him up and his eye closed, Ryan’s last sentient thought was that his nostrils were filled with the acrid stench of decay.
Of death.
Chapter Two
As usual, making the jump had plunged Ryan into the singeing deeps of nightmare.
He was in a frontier pesthole, standing in the scorching heat of the noon sun. It took only a moment for him to be aware that the scent of fresh-cut lumber that flooded his nostrils came from the wooden frame that surrounded him, a frame that was clearly a gallows.
Ryan’s hands were tied tightly behind him with rawhide. The knots pulled so hard that he could feel blood dripping from purpled nails.
He wore his usual clothes, except for the long coat and the white silk scarf with the silver dollars sewn into each end. The holster on his right hip was empty of the SIG-Sauer, and the sheath on his left hip lacked the weight and balance of his eighteen-inch panga.
There was a crowd building around him. The sound of music attracted him, and he glanced to his right. A stubby white man and a tall, elegant black man leaned against the side wall of the Golden Eagle saloon. Both held long-necked banjos and were singing a song. The words weren’t quite clear enough for Ryan to hear.
Something about a gun quicker than lightning?
The balcony of the Two Up gaudy was already lined with whores, dressed only in cotton drawers and chemises, with high-buttoned boots. All held parasols to shield them from the ferocity of the sun. One of them, a skinny blonde with sleepy eyes, saw Ryan looking in their direction and touched herself between her thighs, sucked her finger and blew him a kiss.
Ryan looked away.
There were three men on the gallows with him.
One was a stout sheriff with a polished badge who seemed to have eaten beans for his breakfast and kept making the air noisome with his farting.
Next to him stood a priest, sweating heavily in a black suit of good broadcloth. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, with a pale face and spectacles with gold rims that kept slipping down his beaky nose. He was holding a prayer book in both hands, but he had to keep wiping his fingers on the side of his pants to dry them. Ryan was irritated by the priest’s nervous habit of noisily clearing his throat every few seconds.
The third figure was, Ryan guessed, the hangman.
He was immensely tall and skeletally thin, dressed from head to toe in black. On the index finger of his right hand the man wore a silver ring, shaped like a death’s head, with a fire opal set in its brow. He wore a hood that covered his head, with slits for the eyes.
Ryan had glanced twice at the bizarre figure, blinking as he seemed to glimpse the red glow of fiery embers behind the eye slits.
The rough hemp noose tight around Ryan’s throat was prickling at his skin, and he turned his head to one side to try to shift the discomfort of the large knot that the hangman had adjusted just below his left ear.
An urchin in the front of the swelling crowd stopped and picked up a rough pebble, hefting it at Ryan, who swayed to one side so that it missed his head. The child’s mother, a rosy-cheeked matron in a gingham dress and poke bonnet, slapped at the boy, shrugging apologetically at Ryan.