James Axler – Deathlands

Deathlands

Deathlands

28 in the Deathlands series James Axler

Chapter One

The sick darkness was passing.

Ryan Cawdor steadied his breathing, conscious that the jump had been one of the easiest that he could remember. There had been none of the hideous gibbering dreams that sometimes swam out of the black horror of a bad jump.

He felt slightly sick, there was a throbbing pressure behind his eye and his stomach felt as though it had gone ten rounds with a rabid mule.

“Fireblast,” he whispered to himself, still not risking opening his eye.

Ryan was conscious that his hand was still being gripped by Krysty Wroth. That in itself was a sign that the mat-trans unit had functioned well.

All he needed to know now was whether everyone was all right and where the jump had taken them.

He breathed in slowly, aware that the air felt very hot and moist. And green.

Ryan opened his eye.

Chapter Two

When civilization was blown apart in the massive nuclear holocaust of 2001, the world had been geared for all kinds of military action, most of it supposed to be top secret at the highest level. But many people had heard about the Totality Concept, the cover-all policy that ranged from time travel to self-supporting space stations packed with laser-guided hardware.

One of the subsections of the Concept was called Overproject Whisper, and one small part of that was Operation Chronos, which was concentrating on the largely doomed research into time traveling, or “trawling,” as it had become known. The idea of pulling targets from the past or pushing them into the future was interesting. But in practice there were less than a handful of successes.

One of them, Dr. Theophilus Tanner, was recovering in the mat-trans chamber across from Ryan Cawdor.

The matter transmitter had been developed in a laboratory complex in Maryland and was one of the limited successes of the Totality Concept. The mat-trans units were often an integral part of the secret military complexesknown as redoubtshastily and secretly built all across the United States, with a few elsewhere in the world. These “gateways,” as they were called, were developed in those shadowed, paranoid days that closed the twentieth century, and made it possible for people to be sent instantly from one location to another.

“How’re you feeling, Doc?” Ryan’s voice sounded flat and hollow in the hexagonal chamber. The color of the armaglass walls varied from place to place. This time they were an odd shade of pallid green.

The old man ran a hand across his face, smiling and showing his oddly perfect set of gleaming teeth. His light blue eyes twinkled at Ryan.

“Upon my soul, dear friend! Relative to a rare good day, then this is still some way less than adequacy. However, compared to an average mat-trans jump, I feel as frolicsome as a dog with two tails. Or a monkey with six paws. Or an elephant with three trunks. Or a”

“I get the picture, Doc. Not a bad jump, was it?”

The silver-haired old man fumbled in one of the capacious pockets of his frock coat, so ancient that the black material had a strange greenish patina that Doc swore stoutly wasn’t mold. He pulled out a blue swallow’s-eye kerchief and mopped his brow.

“By the Three Kennedys! The jump was passing fair, but the heat here puts me much in mind of the botanical gardens in London, at Kew. There was some verse, but I confess that its remembrance seems to have dodged away from my poor corroded old brain.”

Doc had been a leading academic back in Omaha, Nebraska, in November of 1896, living a happy and contented life with his beautiful young wife, Emily, and his two beloved children, Rachel, who had been three years old, and Jolyon, barely past his first birthday.

The white-coated scientists, whom he had come to detest with a bitter loathing, had plucked him from the past and drawn him forward to 1998, as part of Operation Chronos. It was then discovered that their success with Doc had been a freakish event, with virtually all of their other experiments failing horribly.

Doc himself was such a stubborn and recalcitrant time traveler that the scientists, in December of 2000, propelled him many years into the futureinto the post holocaust United States, which had become known as Deathlands. Most of the time his mind functioned reasonably well, but stress sometimes sent him spinning off onto some alternative thought beam that was all his own.