Shockscape
Shockscape
18 in the Deathland series JAMES AXLER
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor blinked open his good eye and saw that the armaglass walls of the mat-trans chamber were a rich cobalt blue.
He drew a long, cautious breath. The instant, uncontrollable jumps the companions made from place to place generally left them feeling like their heads had exploded, then been reassembled by a team of blind triple-stupe muties.
“Not too bad,” Ryan whispered.
No time seemed to have elapsed since he’d closed the door on an almost identical chamber in what had once been the thriving and bustling metropolis of Chicago. Yet Ryan knew that he and his friends would find themselves thousands of miles from their starting point.
Apart from a faint nausea, the one-eyed man felt fine. Sometimes a jump was accompanied by horrific hallucinations, like a combination of daydreams and nightmares. Images of death would flood through the mind, like eternal chases along endless dusty corridors by faceless, gibbering specters.
This time Ryan could only vaguely remember sunshine and fresh grass on a summer hillside, a crystal stream over smooth boulders streaked with a tracery of silver quartz, and Krysty Wroth at his side, lying on her back in a thin cotton shift, green eyes shaded by her arm, smiling.
Now, in the real world, Krysty was alongside him, opening her emerald eyes, smiling up at him, her hand lifting to brush back an errant strand of her fiery crimson hair.
“Good jump, lover,” she murmured.
“Known worse.”
“Haven’t known many better.” The voice came from the slightly built man, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back against the opposite wall. He reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, polishing them for a moment on his sleeve before putting them on.
“True enough, J.B.,” Ryan agreed.
The black woman who sat next to J. B. Dix was also recovering. Mildred Wyeth was a medical doctor and a brilliant shot with a pistol. She’d been born in 1964, then cryogenically preserved in the year 2000 when minor surgery went wrong.
The nuclear holocaust that destroyed much of the world, and most of the people, had left her frozen, only to be revived generations later by Ryan and his friends. One of Mildred’s biggest problems had been coming to terms with the fact that a hundred years had gone by while she existed through the dreamless sleep. And that everyone she had ever known was now dead.
She stood, steadying herself on the armaglass. “Best jump I’ve been through. Now, if they were all like that I wouldn’t mind doing it more often. No different from a stroll in the park.”
“I want a pee, Dad.”
Ryan’s eleven-year-old son, Dean, had awakened and was investigating something in his right nostril.
“That’s disgusting,” Krysty told him.
“Better out than in.” He grinned at her.
“That boy will undoubtedly go far. And the farther the better.”
The sting of the remark was taken away by the cackle of laughter from the grizzled old man squatting next to J.B.
“How you feeling, Doc?” Ryan’s right hand eased toward the butt of his P-226 SIG-Sauer 9 mm automatic.
Doc Tanner’s mind hadn’t been stable since a time-trawling experiment, focused on November 1896, had plucked him from his home, wife and children, and eventually, brought him forward to the Death-lands present.
It had been only an hour earlier that he’d been trying to return to his own time, so deranged that he’d fired a shot at Ryan from the massive Le Mat he wore on his hip.
Amazingly he now looked and sounded as near normal as he ever had.
The only one of the group of seven companions not yet recovered from the jump was their most recent addition, a youth once known as Brother Michael, from the isolated and enclosed religious order at Nil-Vanity, above Visalia in the California Rockies. Only nineteen years old, he shared with Doc the unique experience of having been successfully brought forward through time. In his case, from shortly before the United States of America ended and Deathlands began.
Being jolted to the new wastes had been difficult for the teenager to handle. But he’d made the adjustments, insisting on changing his name, reversing it to plain Michael Brother.