James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

Ryan figured the part about accepting fate was a flat-out given; what the rest meant was a mystery to him. He had no idea who or what Doc thought he was saluting,.or if the old man even knew. The experience of

having been time-trawled into the future had done something to the old man’s mind. He didn’t always talk rationally.

A swirling gray mist appeared near the chamber’s ceiling. Tendrils of the mist drifted down, obscuring everything.

A curious person caught in the same situation might have wondered if the fog really existed or if it was an illusion, a figment of a mind already being systematically deconstructed, cell by cell. Ryan Cawdor wasn’t a man to linger over questions that served no immediate purpose. He was a stone-hard pragmatist, a bottom liner, which was why he and his friends used the mat-trans units. Having journeyed across post-Armageddon America on foot and in the Trader’s war wags for many years, he knew how dangerous Chose alternate modes of transportation were. The odds were heavily stacked against the long-term survival of conventional travelers, no matter how well armed they were. Of the many thousands of human fatalities he had seen in Deathlands, few had been quick and painless.

Ryan fell through the space where the floor should have been, spiral ing downward, faster and faster through black emptiness. Somewhere in the middle of his wind milling fall, he completely lost consciousness. Mercifully everything went blank. But not for long. The mind dreamed in transit, and the dreams were always bad.

The instant of deathlike oblivion was shattered by a

surge of color, sound and the full range of physical sensations; the jump dream had begun.

It was night.

He hit the ground running. His bare feet slapped against moist soil as he raced toward a distant tower of flames. And as he ran, he knew it wasn’t his own body that carried him. It was too light, too quick, too strong for its size. The differences-the raw speed and the agility-amazed him.

Effortlessly he closed the gap between himself and a crude defensive wall of skinny, unpeeled logs seated in heaped, tamped earth. A narrow section of the tree-trunk barrier was smoking, the ax-sharpened tops of its logs shattered into fans of splinters as if by a lightning strike. He slipped through a break in the wall and into the midst of a tiny, triple-poor ville. Ryan knew he had never been there before, but he had seen many outposts just like it, clinging for life at the edges of Deathlands. The nameless ville’s packed-dirt courtyard was surrounded by a jumble of thatched-roof shanties. Most of its two dozen mud-and-stick huts were already burning. Beyond their steeply peaked roofs, at the rear of the compound, he could just make out the sawtooth top of the log wall.

All around him the humid darkness echoed with animal shrieks of pleasure and cries of pain. The air hung heavy with a maddening perfume: the metallic scent of freshly spilled blood and the sour smell of wood smoke. He caught the dim shapes of white limbs moving frantically at the edges of the firelight-the arms

and legs of others like him, gleefully killing with bare hands and feet

His kin had already found their prey.

He caught himself gasping, not from the exertion of the full-out run, but from the intensity of the excitement he felt. Heat radiated from his very core, surging through his limbs and his face. It was the heat of desire, of an unquenchable hunger. Not a hunger for sex; this lust wasn’t focused in his loins, but in the center of his torso, between heart and stomach. Even as the heat billowed outward, it seemed to compress his lungs in hoops of steel, forcing him to sip greedily for air. And from his own throat came a strange mewling sound, liquid, plaintive, sinuous. The vibrations of the soft cry cascaded over his chest like a caress.

He turned slowly, taking in every detail of the grim scene: the fires, the brutal murders of the ville’s people and their livestock, the wanton destruction. Everything he saw as he turned, everything he felt was new-and fascinating.