The woman had suffered an adverse reaction to anesthesia during a minor operation and had been preserved using the very same cryonic processes she had helped to develop. Mildred had remained on ice until Ryan and the others had found her sleeping in her silver coffin. In a series of tense hours, they had managed to restore her to life successfully.
A doctor of another kind entirely followed Mildred Wyeth.
Peering from behind the stocky black woman was the weathered face of Doc Tanner. A lifetime of hard sights was etched into his skin-and his eyes. Doc gripped his ebony walking cane tightly. The silver lion-head handle of the stick was serene, impassively keeping the secret of the honed blade of Toledo steel housed hidden inside the body of the cane.
A most unusual handblaster was holstered at the man’s hip. In the holster was an ornately tooled Le Mat, a unique weapon dating back to the early days of the Civil War. Engraved in flowing script and decorated with twenty-four-carat gold as a commemorative tribute to the great Confederate solider James Ewell Brown Stuart-or Jeb Stuart, as his friends and folks in Virginia referred to him-the massive hand-cannon weighed in at over three and a half pounds.
The blaster was a quick way to check how weary Doc was getting. After a long day or particularly intense event, the heavy gun added a noticeable lurch to his step.
At the moment, Doc Tanner was lurching like a drunken barmaid, but he gave no complaint.
The gun had two barrels and an adjustable hammer, firing a single.63-caliber round like a shotgun, and nine.44-caliber rounds in revolver mode. Finding ammo for the grapefruit scattergun round was extremely difficult, but the old man refused to give up the sometimes clumsy blaster for a more modern weapon.
“Once a man is set in his ways, there is no reason to change unless absolutely, positively necessary,”
Doc often intoned. “And I have no intention of attempting to reinvent myself now.”
Doc was a living link to the past that stretched back even farther than Mildred Wyeth’s. The old man had been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. Twenty-eight years later, he’d been time-trawled via a modified matter-transfer chronal unit to the year 1998, an unwitting subject in an experiment of the future. Two years after that, at the flash point of the millennium in the year 2000, he’d been thrust forward more than a hundred years into the unknown, the future, the after-the-holocaust world of Deathlands.
Doc stumbled, the heavy blaster weighing heavily on his thin frame. He used his swordstick to break his fall, even as a steadying hand came from behind courtesy of Krysty Wroth.
“My thanks, Child,” Doc said absently. “This rubble-strewed hall is hell on two-legged locomotion.”
“Don’t mention it,” she replied easily. She was ready to fall asleep on her feet herself, so she could only imagine how Doc was feeling. Even her usually sentient red hair was drooping, hiding the fact that besides being a stunningly beautiful woman, Krysty was also a mutant. Her abilities were masked, not overt like the sucker-lined hands and tongues of the stickies or the crumbling flesh of the scalies.
Powers of the mind. That’s what the tall redhead possessed, the knack of being able to sense the presence of other intelligent life-forms and also, if said life-forms were friend or foe. She was able to smell trouble when it was coming toward them, able to know good from evil, right from wrong, black from white.
She also had power deep from within. Taught by Mother Sonja, back during her childhood in Harmony to call upon and wield the near-mystic force of Gaia, the Earth Mother, Krysty could channel the very energy of the planet itself using her body as a vessel.
Such an act infused her with incredible strength, along with heightened awareness, but only for a short time. While the world seemed to slow to a crawl to her enhanced eyes, she would move at triple speed. Immersion within Gaia’s forces took a terrific toll on her physical and mental well-being. Remaining in the trance too long, she would ultimately lose her soul, and her earthly shell would literally burn out.