Before he even realized what was happening, Ryan had opened the armaglass door an eighth time.
It was Doc’s voice, rising above all the others, like a chain saw hacking through plate glass, that gave him the warning. “It’s working, Ryan! By the Three Kennedys, but I swear that the jump is beginning.”
There was an instant, heart-stopping silence.
“Dark night!” J.B. breathed. “He’s right. I can feel it in my head.”
“Close the door, Ryan, quickly!” Krysty urged. “Gaia! Quickly!”
“It won’t.” Ryan panted with the effort and could feel his heart racing, the breath dying in his throat.
The door seemed to have jammed, open by about eight inches, immovable either way.
And Doc was right. The jump had begun.
Ryan could feel it-fingers ghosting into his brain, probing inside the moist pink-gray tissues, bringing the usual deep-seated nausea.
The circular silvery metal plates set into the floor and ceiling of the hexagonal chamber were already beginning to glow, and the usual tendrils of fragile white mist were appearing near the top of the gateway.
“Everyone sit down and hang on to each other.”
It was the best he could come up with. But Ryan wasn’t sure if the others heard him. His voice was frail, echoing, the words jumbled and distorted.
The anteroom and the control area beyond were blurring, as if he were looking through a heat haze. Ryan closed his eye and opened it again, using the last of his failing strength to try one more time to close the door.
But it was too late.
Ryan felt himself slipping to his knees, one arm falling near the gap, sliding onto his face, sensing all the colors of darkness.
“Cold,” he said.
IT WAS A TANGLED, confused mixture of half memory and new experience.
There was the vague thought that the original incident might have happened somewhere on the southern edge of the Darks. Or out on the Idaho panhandle?
The war wags had come rumbling into the township, expecting to find it a bustling frontier ville. But the stores were all boarded up, the drinkers closed, the gaudies deserted. Tumbleweed piled against the picket fences.
Trader had asked Ryan to go outside and look around. “Single man recce’s the best for this,” he said. “I can’t smell danger.”
As soon as the main rear armasteel hatch opened up on War Wag One, Ryan guessed that his chief was right. There was no smell of danger.
But there was the sweet, sour, prickling scent of death.
The breath came feathering whitely from his open mouth as he stepped down onto the weed-laden tarmac, looking from side to side. He wore a Browning A-50012-gauge scattergun slung across one shoulder, the walnut stock of the Belgian-made blaster nudging at the small of his back. There was a double-action revolver-the Llama Super Comanche II, taking a big.38 round tucked in its holster on the right side of his hip.
Ryan almost knew the name of the pesthole ville. Almost, but not quite.
It kept slithering from the back of his brain, reaching the tip of his tongue, then whispering back into the darkness.
All he could remember was that it had been the center of two violently opposed religious factions.
Now, looking around the small town plaza, he could see the graffiti, bringing it all back home-Albigensians drink Satan’s piss, Reformed Pentecostals will burn forever, Dung-devouring heretics, Speaking with tongues is speaking to the devil.
The electric-glowing colors flared so brightly it made Ryan screw up his good right eye against the drizzle.
His hand dropped to the butt of the revolver as he sensed movement behind him. He spun and looked to the side of the main drag, seeing a scrawny, piebald mongrel go scampering clumsily across the mouth of a narrow alley, gripping a severed human arm in its stained jaws, the stiff fingers scraping through the frosted pebbles.
Beyond the main plaza was a small square surrounded by buildings, with the twin churches on opposing sides, the squat concrete buildings glowering at each other.
Though Ryan still couldn’t remember where the town was, or its name, he could visualize the open space, with an iron-railed fence along two sides and a tumbledown cupola where brass bands might have played on those long-gone, sunny predark Sunday afternoons.