The companions filed into the gateway and stripped off their gear, making themselves as comfortable as they could across the glowing metal disks set into the floor.
“Is this another elevator, Doc?” Albert’s voice held worry now, but he stripped off his blasters and the pack he carried.
“No,” the old man said, stretching himself out prone. “I assure you, this grim piece of business is in nowise nearly as comforting as an elevator ride. Settle down as best you can, friend, because life as you know it—for a time—shall be over.”
Albert glanced back through the jade armaglass walls. “Mebbe we should try to find another way, then.”
“There is no other way,” Mildred snapped.
Krysty knew the woman wasn’t angry with Albert, just nervous about the upcoming jump.
“We came in the only way out,” Krysty said, leaning in close to Ryan. Sometimes it helped if she touched her lover before they went under the mat-trans effects. Even then, she hardly ever woke up next to him.
Albert sat, stretching his legs before him as he put his back to the armaglass wall.
Ryan shut the door to begin the jump, then hurried to Krysty’s side. The metal disks in the floor and ceiling glowed more brightly, and a fine mist descended from the ceiling.
Krysty twined her fingers in Ryan’s. “Hope you have pleasant dreams, lover.”
“Or at least,” Ryan said, “ones that aren’t too bad.”
Nightmares and nausea seemed to be the two most prevalent byproducts brought about by the jumps. Rarely had the companions avoided them.
As she breathed in her first full, deep breath of the mist-laden air, Krysty’s brains seemed to turn into oatmeal, dulling her mutie senses with a sensation of being suffocated.
Doc’s voice singsonged from the corner, filled with a strength and vigor that was surprising. “Here we go, my friends. Can you envision some future when we can look back, and see our alternate possibilities—if we chose this or that option? Could we ever say ‘two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by.’ I think Robert Frost summed up our present state quite well. Don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
And as Doc’s words seemed to hang in the air, growing more and more indistinct with each echo, Krysty knew the jump had begun. There was no saving them from the nightmares now.
Chapter Nineteen
“A man lives long enough and slows down his life,” the Trader was saying, “he’s going to have a lot of regrets.”
In the jump dream, Ryan walked with the older man. The Trader carried his Armalite and hacked and coughed just the way Ryan remembered. Only the one-eyed man knew almost for a fact that the Trader was nowhere around Hazard, and probably nowhere near around where they were jumping to.
He scanned the hostile terrain they were in, all rad-blasted and shooting up twisted trees from a ground that looked like burned glass. He couldn’t say that he’d ever been to such a place, but it didn’t seem too far from reality for Deathlands.
The next couple steps, though, brought them to the edge of a thickly wooded area that looked like something out of a painting Doc had once shown them. The trees stood straight and tall, reaching up into the white fleecy clouds that had taken the place of the rad-dust-filled clouds that had hovered overhead earlier. Those had been purple and cancerous, greenish around the edges.
“I don’t have any regrets,” Ryan said.
The Trader shrugged and came to a stop, looking out over the forest. “I know you don’t think you do now, but you’re getting long in the tooth.”
A boy’s face peered through the branches. Innocence gleamed in his bright, impossibly blue eyes, followed by a shy smile that promised mischief. Ryan figured the boy hadn’t seen ten years yet, and probably hadn’t been past the forest’s edge.
“You’re older than I am, Trader,” Ryan said. “Mebbe you got regrets.”
The man shook his head. “No regrets for me. Did everything in my life that I set out to do. Ain’t the same with you.”
Ryan’s vision misted red as his anger took him. “How do you figure that?”