Seedling
Seedling
13 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor opened his eye, then closed it again, hoping to avoid throwing up. He’d lost count of the number of jumps he’d made over the past year or so, but there was one great truth.
They didn’t get any easier.
The first moments weren’t too badthe humming and the lights glowing in floor and ceiling, the fingers of mist appearing in the chamber, hiding the colored armaglass walls.
Then the good part ended.
Ryan had thought about the sensation several times, trying to focus his mind on precisely what happened during a jump from gateway to gateway, from mat-trans chamber to mat-trans chamber.
All he could think was that it was like having a clumsy child disassemble your skull, then run a pointed file around the inside, scraping at the sensitive parts of your brain, stirring things up so that past, present and future got hopelessly scrambled.
There was pain and nausea every time, and a blinding ache in the head as though someone had been trying to remove your eyes, from the inside.
Ryan cautiously opened his good right eye, drawing a slow, whistling breath as he fought for control. He took another breath and felt relieved as he realized he definitely wasn’t going to vomit this time.
“Fireblast,” he muttered.
None of the others had regained consciousness yet, all lying or sitting around the chamber. It was odd not to see Jak Lauren there. The snow-headed albino boy had been with them for For how long?
Ryan couldn’t remember. It seemed like forever, and now the boy was gone.
Another surge from his stomach brought the bitter taste of bile. Ryan swallowed hard and closed his eye again.
Memories twisted in his head, one above allthe narrow face, eyes blazing with a feral hatred, staring at him. And a hand, fingers twisted in agony, vanishing into the sucking slime.
The Trader used to say he didn’t have any enemies, and when someone picked up on it, as was the rule, he’d smile that wise, lopsided smile and say, “None alive.”
But that wasn’t true. In Deathlands there were always new enemies.
A voice jerked him from his reverie.
“Still sleeping, lover?”
“I feel like double-shit.”
“We’re getting too old for all these jumps.”
For the third time Ryan risked opening an eye. Krysty Wroth was sitting next to him, running her fingers through her fiery hair. It tumbled over her shoulders, strangely sentient, seeming to move of its own volition.
“Some are bad,” he admitted.
She smiled. “And some are worse.”
“Yeah.”
“Seems funny without the kid.”
“Hope he and his lady make it.”
Krysty reached across and touched his arm. “That cut doesn’t look too good, lover.”
It was a souvenir of the dizzying fight against Cort Strasser, inflicted by his bone-hilted knife. Blood had run down Ryan’s arm, crusting on the fingers of his left hand, but now the long, shallow wound was dried.
“I look better than Strasser.”
“Anyone looks better than Strasser.” The third voice in the chamber rang off the maroon walls of armaglass.
“Thanks, J.B.,” Ryan said. “Enjoy the trip?”
The slight figure of J. B. Dix, Armorer to the group of friends, straightened. He put his hands into his jacket pocket and retrieved his wire-framed spectacles. “Lost my autorifle and my Tekna knife. Go on like this, Ryan, and I’ll end up naked.”
“You got blood on your mouth,” Krysty told him.
There was a tiny thread of crimson leaking from the corner of J.B.’s lips, and he wiped it away on his sleeve.
Krysty stood, the heels of her western-style boots clattering on the metal disks in the floor. She swayed a little and placed a hand on the wall. “Gaia! That wasn’t the most fun I’ve had.”
“How’s Mildred?” Ryan asked, looking at the fourth member of their quintet.
“Old Mildred’s fine, apart from some son of a bitch banging on the inside of my head with a hammer.”
Mildred Wyeth was a doctor, born in December 1964, well over 130 years earlier. She’d gone into the hospital for a minor operation in the last days of December in the year 2000, just three weeks before the nuke-madness that brought utter ruin to the world. As a result of a medical accident, Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, lying in suspended animation until snatched from her endless sleep by Ryan Cawdor and his comrades.