Fury’s Pilgrims
Fury’s Pilgrims
17 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
Ryan could feel his brain starting to scramble. The last thing he heard was Krysty whispering gently to him, her breath soft against his cheek.
“Good time the last few weeks, lover. I envy Christina what she’s got. Husband and baby. Nice home. Be good” The words started to fragment. “One day you and real good us lover.”
The rest vanished into the blackness.
RYAN OPENED HIS EYE, realizing that something had gone appallingly, hideously wrong.
The silver armaglass walls of the gateway chamber were gone. Now they were a rich, deep, glowing purple. The metal disks in the floor and the ceiling were fading quickly, and the mist that often filled the mat-trans chamber during a jump was almost gone.
Ryan’s muddled mind was battling to try to come to terms with the odd color of the walls, seeking a hold on a memory that he’d seen something like that before.
“Where?” he croaked, his voice as dry as the sands of the Mohave Desert.
He shifted his position, closing his eye and opening it again, trying to work out just what was so terribly wrong.
Two things, he concluded.
Air and gravity.
And that also rang a feeble bell in the dusty west wing of his memory.
Ryan drew a long slow breath that somehow didn’t seem to satisfy his need, then drew another and another. But still he felt a faint and disturbing echo of suffocation. His heart was pounding in his chest as if he’d just run a mile up a sand dune in combat boots, and the blood coursed through his ears like the tide along the gulf shore.
“Altitude,” Ryan whispered.
That was the only possible explanation.
He remembered his hard-riding days with the Trader. They’d been moving westward across the rolling plains of what had once been Missouri and Kansas, making good time, driving at top speed for twenty-four hours solid.
They traveled past the haunted, hag-ridden ruins of Denver, straight up into the mountains, stopping at a trading post in a place called
“Leadville?”
The Baby Doe Trading Post.
“Why am I”
His mind was reeling out of control, staggering down side trails when he should be concentrating with all of his energy on what was happening right here and now.
But it had felt a bit like this, that first night in Leadville. The heart and the breath and the ears. Several of the crews of the two war wags had suffered from headaches, sickness and nosebleeds. And that had been caused by altitude.
Ryan lifted a hand to brush a strand of black hair off his forehead.
“Fireblast!”
This was something else, not like it had been in Leadville.
Ryan’s hand felt as though it were floating in soft water. He moved it, experimentally, above his head, then cautiously around in a slow circle.
“What the fuck is going on?” he asked.
But the others all seemed to be still locked away into the dark coma that a jump often produced.
The six bodies were scattered around the chamber, like the discarded toys of a petulant child.
Krysty lay on one side of him, her hair curled tightly around her head protectively. Blood and watery mucus trickled from the corner of her mouth.
Doc Tanner was sitting, oddly, bolt upright, his sliver-headed sword stick gripped firmly between both hands, his leonine head resting on the gnarled backs of his wrists.
Abe lay one side, knees tucked up, hands thrust between his thighs like a sleeping child seeking security.
Mildred and J B. Dix were lying together, fingers tangled. J.B. was bleeding from the nose, a steady trickle of crimson that dripped across the floor of the chamber.
Ryan’s young son, Dean Cawdor, was on his other side. The boy had been sick, with threads of golden vomit trailing onto his jacket. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was gripping the turquoise hilt of his favorite knife in his right fist. There definitely wasn’t enough air. Ryan knew from bitter experience that panic could be a very effective killer in its own right. With a positive effort of will he tried to take slower, shallower breaths, not allowing fear to control and overwhelm him.