“Aged bones, my ass,” Mildred said. “You’ll outlive us all, Doc.”
“A fate I do not relish, Dr. Wyethalthough in your case, I must make an exception.”
“All right, then. Let’s do it,” Ryan said, and pulled the chamber door closed, feeling the heavy steel panel click shut, an action that would result in the activation of the mat-trans unit.
A second passed, then two.
Ryan felt sweat begin to bead under his armpits.
And then, as it always did, the unit’s security lock caught true, and the metallic clunk of magnetic bolts being thrown into the place was followed in turn by the spectral tendrils of the sinister pale mist that signaled the beginning of a jump.
“Hot pipe!” Dean said excitedly.
Despite his tension, Ryan grinned at his son’s sense of adventure. “They don’t make ’em any hotter,” he acknowledged.
The white fog continued to gather, thickening around the unearthly shimmering disks in the floor and ceiling, and an almost inaudible hum from within the bowels of the chamber began to make itself heard deep inside the very core of their individual beings, a hum that increased slowly in pitch, making their skulls vibrate. For a few fleeting seconds of sheer agony and discomfort, it always felt as though the flesh were being flayed back from the bone.
“I could use a bottle of extra strength headache pills,” Mildred mused. “I used to eat them like candy back when I was in med school. Pulled many an all-nighter with them and the radio as company, and got to where I’d bite down and chew them up one by one without water. I actually developed a taste for the flavor. And I thought I had bad headaches then!” She paused, then went on. “Now I also feel as if a whole hive of electricity generating ants were running all over my bodyand I want to talk and talk so I won’t notice as much.”
“Any of the stuff we grabbed out of here good for headaches?” J.B. asked. “I got a pocketful of drugs and syringes.”
Mildred shook her head. “What you’re carrying are just broad-spectrum antibiotics. Good for infection, but they’re not painkillers in the sense I’m needing.”
“Too bad. Bad enough taking a mat-trans jump when you’re feeling good. Triple bad when your head’s already hurting.”
“I know,” Mildred replied, snuggling in closer to J.B.’s lean body. “I’d have to wait and take them after the jump anyway. Otherwise, I’d probably just vomit them up once we got to where we’re going wherever in the hell that might be.”
John Barrymore Dixbetter known as J.B.was Ryan Cawdor’s longtime companion, best friend and his own personal walking and talking cache of knowledge of all forms of weaponry and how they could most effectively be used. J.B. wore the title of Armorer with quiet pride, a title given to him by the legendary Trader in the days when J.B. and Ryan rode with the grizzled old master of survival before fate stepped in and set them on their own path.
Trader had respected Dix and made him his head weapons master and booby-trap expert. J.B.’s encyclopedic mastery of blasters and their specs was invaluable to anyone attempting to traverse the Deathlands. From simple black-powder muskets to rumbling war wags equipped with high-tech lasers, J. B. Dix had obsessively spent his childhood and young adult life studying and memorizing how to use and repair any kind of offensive weapon.
He was still learning, but it was the rare weapon indeed he hadn’t read about or seen.
With J.B. was his companion and lover, Dr. Mildred Wyeth, a “survivor” from the period before the nukecaust that ended the civilized world. Like J.B., Mildred was also a rare find for the Deathlands, since she was a trained physician and pioneer in the field of cryonics and cryogenics, a talented woman whose abilities had saved more than one member of the group.
Ironically, due to an illness near the end of the year 2000, she had been frozen by the very same cryonic process she had helped to develop, and had remained that way until Ryan and the others had found and managed to restore her to life, not knowing she was a physician.