Navigating another area of loose rock, she concentrated for a moment, trying to feel her lover’s presence. Besides the sentient hair, her mutie heritage bequeathed her other things. The limited prescience she sometimes experienced had been working overtime of late, mostly about Dean. And maybe only then because the boy was so much a part of Ryan.
Mildred nearly slipped, and Krysty watched as the woman righted herself and pressed against the stone face of the mountain. Her coat whipped around her.
“Damn wind,” the black woman said. “Caught me by surprise. I’m not as aerodynamically correct as you are.”
Of medium height, Mildred was stocky. Her face was almost covered by the hood she wore, but a few of the beaded plaits of her hair hung out on either side of her chin. A Czech-made ZKR 551 .38 target revolver was in one of her gloved hands. She’d learned to shoot more than a hundred years ago, and her skills had been good enough to win her a few medals.
Born on December 17, 1964, Mildred was still in her thirties. Three days before 2001 had been rung in, she’d gone to a hospital in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. The operation was supposed to be somewhat boring to those in the medical field exploratory abdominal surgery, nothing life-threatening at all.
Instead, she’d had a reaction to the anesthetic and gone into a coma. In order to save her, the surgeons had placed her in cryogenic sleep. She’d slept on for a hundred years, through the death of the world and of everyone she knew. Ryan Cawdor and his companions had rescued her.
“Usually I rather enjoy a brisk walk in cool weather. And mayhap a little adventure, as well. However, as we come to the end of this injurious little excursion, I shall be vexed to end up without a cup of tea to cap off a rather exciting evening.”
“Doc,” Mildred said, “as long as you’re flapping your lips the way you are, I know you aren’t too put out.”
“My dear Dr. Wyeth,” Theophilus Algernon Tanner said, “your erudition is beyond reproach. However, the skill you exhibit in expressing yourself can be a tad bit lacking for one of the medical calling.”
Mildred had been a medical doctor in her day, specializingironicallyin cryogenic research and development.
Like her, Doc Tanner had been displaced in time, though his removal from the century he’d been born into had been achieved by means Krysty understood even less than cryogenics.
Doc was tall and thin, which gave his long arms and legs even greater reach. His silver hair normally fell to his shoulders, but was now whipped into a frenzy by the wind. He’d thrust his ebony walking stick through his belt, the silver lion’s-head handle protruding through the part in his coat. The collar of his stained and faded frock coat was visible above the collar of the thermal jacket he wore over it.
Born in a small hamlet in Vermont in 1868, Doc had been hauled into the twentieth century by the white coats of Operation Chronos. He had proved ungracious and difficult by his own reckoning, and had been dead set on returning to his beloved wife and children. As a result of his rebellious actions on several occasions, the powers behind Operation Chronos had shoved him a hundred years into the future, into the sprawl of savagery that had become Deathlands.
“Blow it out your ass, Doc,” Mildred said.
“Indeed,” the old man replied. “Your words ill become you, dear lady.”
Krysty ignored the bantering. Camaraderie took many forms. Some were more noisy than others.
The ledge turned right at nearly ninety degrees. She took it gingerly, keeping her weight toward the stone face.
The snow flurries swirled into her face now, making it hard to see. She blinked stinging tears from her eyes. Her hands felt numb, and she had to wonder how much longer she could trust them.
“Are you sure about the pass, Doc?” she called back over her shoulder.
“My dear Krysty,” Doc said, a smile framing the shocking white perfection of his teeth, “my certitude is based wholly on the fact that I trust John Barrymore’s skills with that minisextant of his, even though we’re operating on knowledge gleaned from an exercise in cartography that is only a modest hundred or so years old and did not enjoy the opportunity of conforming to a vastly violated topography in this region.”