Ryan held a hunk of the remaining gauze to his bleeding face. Jak had offered to attach a pad with some of the white adhesive tape, but Ryan told him no. The bleeding was already starting to ease.
“All right. Let’s go on down,” Ryan said.
Deathlands, 2095
Doc TANNER CAME to his senses in the middle of what he believed to be the worst fog he’d ever encountered in his life. And how long was that life? Thirty years or a hundred years? An unruly mass of days and decades and he neither cared to nor could he keep count. He was flat on his stomach in the dirt, now in a world whose floor had been jerked out from beneath his feet.
Somehow, he’d managed to gather up his clothing and dress himself, but having lost track of time long ago, he had no real concept how long he’d been stumbling down the treacherous mountain path. Chunks of his conscious mind, along with his immediate short-term memory, were missing, as if sliced away by a butcher’s blade and discarded in some charnel pit.
Even worse, there were a few times he knew for certain, or at least, as certain as he could be in his addled state, that he’d blacked out while trying to stagger along his chosen path in the damp mist.
The last memory he could pull up from his brain was that of Emily. In the memory, the hour was early, perhaps seven in the morning. He’d dined on poached eggs, crisp bacon and day-old bread recovered from the previous night’s meal that had been toasted to disguise its origins. He and Emily were standing at the front door of his home, and she was nagging at him in a pleasant tone to not be late, as they were expecting her parents for supper.
Emily was still in her nightclothes, covered by a filmy pink robe for modesty’s sake. However, for some reason, the robe wasn’t tied around her middle-her more than ample middle. The belt wasn’t long enough, he supposed, since her frame was normally so petite. In fact, blessed Emily was getting quite the gut on her, but Doc was so happy he didn’t care.
She gave him a kiss on the cheek and he stepped through the front door of the apartment. And everything appeared normal, except he didn’t recall Emily being so overweight.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he said aloud. “Emily was pregnant!”
Pregnant with their first child? Their second? Doc had no clue.
The apartment…they hadn’t lived there in how many years? Before Rachel was born, yes! That much he was sure of, and when her young face appeared in his mind’s eye, Doc felt an almost inconsolable, unbearable tidal wave of wrenching pain and loss inundate his entire being.
All around him, the fog was growing heavier, but
Doc didn’t notice in the slightest, since he was weighted down by an even heavier fog from within. Night and day and another night passed as he stumbled along, sleeping when he was tired, hungry beyond imagining, but he never seemed to black out for very long.
He was found facedown on the broken tarmac of an old highway, his skull coming close to being crushed under the wheel of a small armored transport. The occupants believed the long-haired elder to be a drunk from the nearby town of Mocsin, but none of them could identify the face. The direction he’d apparently been traveling also gave them pause. Behind Doc was nothing but the mysterious Black Hills, a mystery which those above them in the chain of command had expressed an interest in.
Doc was kept alive. There were men who would want to talk to him.
He awakened in a toilet, his long legs bent and hanging over the side of a bathtub. After struggling to gain his footing, Doc looked in the cracked mirror hanging crookedly over the filthy washbasin. He squinted once, twice and closed his pale blue eyes to refbcus before taking another peek.
“What carnival jest is this?” he wondered aloud to himself, for what was looking mutely back at him wasn’t his face, no, couldn’t be his face, since he knew damn well the visage he was seeing was that of his own sainted father.