“Pull him off!” It was a woman shrieking out. Even as he slipped back into unconsciousness, Ryan felt that he recognized the voice.
KRYSTY WROTH, lover and friend of Ryan Cawdor, had been sitting in the gateway chamber in the bayous, holding Ryan’s hand, watching the tendrils of white mist gathering near the ceiling, feeling her brain start to whirl as the matter-transfer jump began.
At the last moment Krysty had seen someone blunder into the octagonal chamber after the door had been closed, triggering the automatic mechanism. It had been a tall figure, in black, with a shock of white hair.
But Krysty had been too far along the road to darkness to do anything about the intruder.
Now she had come down, with the bitter taste of bile at the back of her throat, relieved that the nightmares that often haunted a jump hadn’t clutched at her.
The woman had opened her bright emerald eyes, brushed back a wisp of her fiery, sentient hair and saw that all her friends were sprawled on the armaglass floor, unconscious.
Ryan, no longer holding her hand, lay flat on his back, feet moving slightly, heels rasping, and on top of him was Melmoth Cornelius, last survivor of the depraved family of genetically created vampires, the lingering spawn of the Genesis Project. In the last few hours, she, Ryan and the others had succeeded in slaying three of the four bizarre beings, destroying their bodies so that they could no longer rejuvenate themselves.
But Melmoth had been out hunting and had escaped their vengeanceor they had escaped his vengeance.
Now he was in the chamber at the end of the jump. His lean body covered Ryan’s, and his long-nailed fingers were clasped tight around Ryan’s throat.
“Melmoth!” she’d screamed.
But he hadn’t moved, his face pressed into Ryan’s neck as though he were nuzzling at the artery below the ear, sucking lasciviously at his blood.
Ryan’s face was livid, swollen, his mouth open as if he were gasping for breath. His hands lay limp at his side.
“Pull him off!” Krysty shouted, fighting nausea, crawling on hands and knees and placing her hands on the shoulders of the tall vampire.
Someone was moving to help her.
Mildred.
Mildred Winonia Wyeth was an African-American doctor from the far predark past. She had been born in December of 1964 and had become one of the United States’s leading cryonic scientists, specializing in the medical applications of freezing.
Ironically Mildred had been frozen in December of the year 2000, when minor abdominal surgery went awry. Days later the world went nuke mad, and only one person in every ten thousand survived. Europe, Russia and the Americas were totally devastated by the brief war that ended all wars.
Then came the long winters when the planet was pushed back to an almost medieval state, and all science and industry vanished forever. And the death count ran higher.
During the next ninety years or so, Mildred had slept dreamlessly on, sealed in her capsule, maintained in a buried medical fortress by comp-controlled machinery powered by tireless nuke generators.
Then Ryan and the others had come by, like princes in a fairy tale, and awakened her.
Mildred had come around from the jump. She blinked her eyes open and shook her head to try to clear out the cobwebs, the beads in her plaited hair rattling against the glass wallswalls that she noticed had changed color to a delicate shell pink, which meant that the jump had worked and they were elsewhere.
But Krysty was shouting for help.
Mildred looked around, her attention caught by Ryan, who was lying on the floor with someone trying to strangle him.
“Melmoth?” she whispered.
She lunged across to try to help Krysty, who was fighting to drag the vampire away from his victim.
The noise and scuffling woke Dean Cawdor, Ryan’s eleven-year-old son.
The boy felt as if a mule had been dancing a slow shuffle inside his brain. He groaned, wondering whether he was going to throw up. Across the chamber he saw that Doc Tanner had suffered a nosebleed, as the old man often did during a jump.
But his dark eyes were caught by the strange tableau at the center of the gateway. His father lay unconscious, his face swollen and engorged with blood, while one of the vampires was trying to throttle him. Krysty and Mildred were both wrestling with Melmoth to try to drag him off Ryan.