“No,” the boy yelled, his voice cracking, as he scrambled on hands and knees to try to help.
He crawled across the legs of the armorer to the group, John Barrymore Dix, one of the greatest experts on weaponry in the whole of Deathlands. He and Ryan had been friends for close to twenty years, both of them having ridden the powerful war wags with the legendary Trader.
Dean’s jostling brought J.B. slowly out of the seeping blackness and he fumbled immediately for his spectacles, putting them on the bridge of his narrow nose. His right hand felt for his blasters, the 9 mm Uzi and the unusual Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun.
There was a fight going on in the chamber, with Krysty, Mildred and Dean battling to drag Melmoth off Ryan.
Doc slept on, undisturbed by the clumsy, ugly brawl that was taking place only a yard away from him.
Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born in a small village in Vermont on a bitterly cold February day in 1868. In November of 1896, while a happily married man with two little children, he was a hapless victim of Operation Chronos, the time-trawling wing of the Totality Concept. A highly secret section of government,
Chronos had been trying to grab people from the past and bring them forward in time. There had been many hideously disgusting failures, and only one success Doc Tanner, who proved to be such a difficult specimen that the whitecoats eventually pushed him nearly a hundred years into the future, into the heart of Deathlands.
The double experience of time travel had tipped Doc’s mind a little off its gyro centers and he sometimes functioned as if he were missing a few cards from a full deck.
Now he lay there, still tipped into darkness by the swirling horrors of jumping from place to place, where your molecules, atoms and neurons were scattered through the ether and reassembled someplace else.
At his side, the albino teenager, Jak Lauren, also lay unconscious. Mat-trans jumps affected different people in different ways, and he lay deathly still, hands folded across his breast, a smudge of blood trickling from his left ear.
The young man and the old-timer, side by side, were oblivious to the fight that had suddenly developed.
A fight that stopped just as suddenly.
Krysty had grabbed one of Melmoth’s slender wrists, trying to break the death grip that the vampire had on Ryan’s throat. But it was as hard and cold as marble and didn’t give a fraction of an inch. In desperation, the woman slid her hands down to the fingers with their curved horn nails. She levered her hand under the little finger of his left hand and jerked it back with all her power. There was a fragile little cracking sound, like a dry twig, and the finger snapped, dangling back and loose.
But Melmoth showed no reaction, not even moving when Krysty broke two more fingers of his left hand.
Mildred had locked her arms around Melmoth’s white neck, trying to force him away from Ryan. Her fingers clutched at the side of the vampire’s throat, probing for the carotid artery, intending to try to cut off the blood flow to the brain and render the white-haired butcher unconscious.
” He’s dead,” Mildred stated.
“Ryan? Can’t be. We’ve got”
“Not Ryan. Melmoth.”
“What?”
“Dead.”
J.B. had been trying to loosen the grip of the creature’s right hand, also breaking a couple of fingers. “Yeah, he’s already cold,” he told them.
“Get him away from Ryan,” Krysty said, half standing and pulling at the vampire, bracing herself as she dragged the stiffening corpse to one side of the chamber.
Ryan still didn’t move, the skin of his throat marred by the bruises from Melmoth’s iron fingers.
Mildred had knelt by him, her head on his chest, her hand on his wrist, checking respiration and pulse.
“Slow but steady,” she pronounced. “Think he’ll be okay.”
Jak came around at that moment, jumping as the first thing he saw was the distorted face of Melmoth Cornelius, inches from his own face, the bloodied eyes staring into his.
“What’s he? Dead?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “Nearly did for Dad.”