Ryan pulled away from her touch. “What’s that?”
“A lack of oxygen in the blood. You damn near drowned, you know. Good thing I had Dean here to help me with the first aid. At least he learned something in that school.” The stocky black woman stepped back, the ocean breeze causing the beads in her long plaited hair to click together.
Mildred Winona Wyeth was a doctor, a former specialist in cryogenic sciences. Though she was in her midthirties, she was, chronologically, well over a century old. Mildred had entered a hospital in late December of 2000 for minor surgery, but an allergic reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her body being placed in cryonic stasis until a treatment could be found.
It never was. The world was blown apart before she was revived, and she slept, like a fly trapped in amber, for a hundred years. Ryan had found her in a shielded underground cell, her life-support system still functioning. He had brought her back to life, the cryo process miraculously healing her, into a world she could never have dreamed existed.
Other than her skills as a doctor, Mildred had also proved herself invaluable as a tenacious survivalist.
She had won a silver medal for free pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic games. A Czech-made ZKR 551 target revolver was holstered at her waist. The weapon was chambered to take Smith & Wesson .38-caliber rounds, and she had only rarely been known to miss with one of the blaster’s six shots.
“What happened to the sub?” J. B. Dix demanded.
Turning his back, trying to keep the blanket over his shoulders, Ryan stepped into his pants. “It sank.”
” ‘Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea,’ ” Doc Tanner quoted. ” ‘Dressed in his best suit of clothes.’ ”
“What?” Ryan asked irritably.
“An old sea chantey. The authorship of which is attributed, I believe, to one Popeye the Sailor Man.”
Ryan wasn’t sure if the tall, thin, silver-haired man was joking. Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was another refugee from a past time period. Unlike Mildred, who had bobbed unknowingly down the temporal stream, Doc was the only surviving subject of a cold-hearted scientific practice known in pre-dark days as time-trawling.
Since the 1940s, American military scientists, and their counterparts in other countries, had tried to reconcile Einsteinian physics with quantum mechanics. By the 1990s, the reconciliation attempts had spawned the ultra-top-secret experiment known as the Totality Concept. There were several subdivisions of the experiment, such as Overproject Whisper, Project Cerebus and Operation Chronos.
With the use of a complex matter-transfer device, or gateway, the project scientists had tried time and time again to snatch subjects from a past temporal line and trawl them to the present.
Their only success was a man trawled from 1896. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, Ph.D., scientist and scholar, was plucked from the bosom of his beloved family and deposited in a sterile subterranean chamber a century hence.
Though he learned all he could about the twentieth century, Doc never forsook the hope of returning to his wife and two children. His constant attempts to return to his own era so angered the whitecoats that they eventually used him as a trawling subject again. Rather than send him back, they opted to transfer him to a year nearly a century in the future. Like Mildred, he missed the nukecaust by less than a month.
The experiences of being trawled had unbalanced his brain to a degree. Though most of the time Doc’s wit was sharp, and intelligence burned behind his blue eyes like a white-hot bar, his mind would occasionally drift back and forth across the centuries, usually to his home and family, lost in the shadows of time.
However, even with his mind befogged, he was still a deadly shot with his gold-plated commemorative J. E. B. Stuart 9-shot Le Mat blaster, which could be adjusted to fire 18-gauge shotgun shells and .44-caliber rounds. The ebony, lion’s-head swordstick he had tucked under an arm concealed a razor-keen blade of the finest Toledo steel.
Everyone else in the group were the products of late-twenty-first century America, and of the hell-grounds known as Deathlands.