James Axler – Shadowfall

Ryan looked at Doc. “So?”

“I don’t believe that you can use the Last Destination code twice.”

“Meaning I’d be stranded in Maine?”

The old man nodded. “It is indeed a sorry thing to be lost, so very far away from all your friends and loved ones, Ryan.”

“I know it. But we still got us a date and a place if things go wrong.”

There was nothing more to be said.

With a final glance around, Ryan tugged at the door of the chamber. For a single piercing moment he thought that it wasn’t going to open. The time would quickly elapse for a jump after the boy. Dean would be totally alone and lost.

He tried the door again, and this time the sec lock clicked open. Ryan stepped inside and pulled the heavy armaglass door closed behind him.

The last thing he saw was Krysty Wroth, her emerald eyes brimming with unshed tears.

Ryan sat, laying the rifle at his side and tucking the SIG-Sauer snugly into its holster. He rested his back against the brown-and-white wall and closed his eye.

He struggled to compose himself for the second jump in thirty minutes, knowing from previous experience that this wasn’t going to be a pleasurable experience.

The silvery disks above his head and by his feet began to glow, and the ghostly wraiths of white mist gathered near the top of the gateway.

But Ryan saw none of that. He was preoccupied with the sickening swirl within his brain that told him the jump was irreversibly on its way.

THE WALLS OF THE CHAMBER were a dark gray, the same color of the mat-trans unit up in Acadia National Park that they’d only just left.

Ryan fought against the nausea, swallowing hard, sliding down to lie on his back to try to recover more quickly. He knew that time was now the remorseless enemy, ticking away the speedy seconds and minutes until he would no longer be able to use the Last Destination control on the coded console by the door.

The headache was ferocious, spreading from his nape, erupting like agonizing molten lava over the top of his skull, behind both eyes. Despite the pain and sickness, Ryan was able to make the clinical observation that his missing eye hurt just as much as his good eye.

He could actually smell or taste the rancid bitterness of vomit, but he couldn’t face trying to find out where it was. Or whose it was.

Squinting, Ryan could see that the door of the chamber was closed, which it would have to have been for the mat-trans unit to have functioned at all.

He also saw that the chamber was empty.

Dean wasn’t there.

“Two possibilities,” he whispered, conscious of how dry his mouth was and how wonderful a mouthful of crystal-clear spring water would be.

The first possibility was that Dean had ended up somewhere else. The second was that he’d been there a little earlier but had already left.

A third thought occurred to Ryan; perhaps he’d jumped to a different gateway himself, to one that happened, by grim coincidence, to have the same color of armaglass walls as the redoubt in Maine.

Three possibilities, but only one possible course of actionto get up on his feet and go and see if he could find his son outside the unit.

Standing up was a major accomplishment.

Ryan managed it only with the aid of the Steyr SSG-70, climbing up it, leaning his shoulder against the cold armaglass.

Only when he was finally upright did he dare risk a glance at his wrist chron.

“Fireblast!” To his horror he saw that fourteen minutes had already elapsed since he had commenced the jump from the other redoubt.

If Dean wasn’t close by outside, then it was going to mean tracking him down, then a dangerous trip overland to meet up with the others.

Ryan lurched to the door, pushing at it and nearly falling as it opened easily. He looked at the control panel, as though there might be some clue as to what had happened in the past few minutes. But the numbers and letters, in their recessed boxes, stared blankly back at him.