corning around. She was on her hands and knees, fiercely shaking her head,
forcing the clinging darkness from her mind. She sensed Ryan watching her and
looked up at him, running her hand through her cropped green hair.
“Hurts like a bastard, don’t it, Ryan? Like a fuckin’ bastard.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Okie, the tall, good-looking blaster, heaved herself to her feet in a single,
fluid movement, cradling her M-16A1 autocarbine, its eleven-inch barrel like a
material extension of her own sullen aggression. Ryan noticed that her wounded
shoulder had nearly stopped bleeding.
On the other side of the chamber, J. B. Dix wiped the back of his neck. His eyes
blinked twice behind wire-rimmed glasses, and he coughed, clearing his throat.
“Not so bad, this time.” J.B. was a man of few words.
Next to him, Krysty Wroth stirred. For her, the passage had been worse than
usual, and she was doubled over, coughing and retching dryly. Her long red hair,
brighter than fire, tumbled to the floor, seeming to move with its own sentient
life. Ryan watched her, still prey to his own warring emotions. The girl they’d
rescued from muties only a few short weeks ago had managed to affect him as no
other woman ever had. With her dazzling green eyes and wonderful body, Krysty
had attracted every man on the war wagon. It had seemed utterly logical that she
and Ryan should make love.
But only in the last couple of hours had the realization dawned on him that the
girl was a mutie. Under extreme stress she could produce a burst of violent
muscular energy that was awesome. He still hadn’t sorted out how he felt about
falling in love with a mutie.
“How’s Doc?” he asked, moving unsteadily across the hexagonal room, stooping by
the hunched figure of the old man.
Doc was huddled over, his hands clasped between his legs. His cracked boots were
smeared with drying mud, and dirt was smeared across the shoulders of his faded
frock coat. His battered stovepipe hat was at his side, its crown dented.
Tangled gray hair spilled over narrow shoulders. As Ryan nudged him with the toe
of his boot, Doc stirred and moaned, his mouth sagging open, showing his
peculiarly perfect teeth.
“C’mon, Doc,” Ryan said. “Let’s find out where you’ve taken us this time.”
“Time, my dear sir,” spluttered the old man. “Time is present and also past and,
perhaps, even present in the future. Is that where we’ve jumped?”
“Where?” asked J.B. standing beside Ryan.
“Where what?” replied Doc.
“Leave him be,” said Krysty, pulling herself up, straightening her hair. “Poor
old bastard’s never all here.”
The truth was that Doc was never quite anywhere. They’d rescued him some days
earlier from a tortured thralldom in a township called Mocsin, southeast of the
Darks. The boss of the town had been Jordan Teague, whose corpse now lay
somewhere among the smoldering ruins of Mocsin. Ryan and the others had narrowly
escaped the enmity of Teague’s head sec man, Cort Strasser. Strasser had been
Doc’s prime tormentor and had used his malign ingenuity to constantly fashion
new humiliations for the old-timer.
There was something uncanny about Doc. Despite his frequent ravings and long
silences, he seemed to have arcane knowledge of the past. Even the far past,
before the wars. But his brain had been so addled by Strasser’s cruelty that
coherent thought seemed beyond him. Ryan doubted that Doc would ever return to
what men called normal.
“Everyone ready? Henn, how’s the leg?”
“Not bad, Ryan. I got me another if’n this one buys the farm.”
“One leg less to piss down,” sniggered Finnegan, ducking Henn’s attempt to knock
his head off with a roundhouse right.
“The shoulder, Okie?” Ryan asked.
“Stiffening. Never saw what hit me. Arrow, mebbe? I’m fine. We goin’ out?”
Ryan moved toward the heavy door to the gateway, but J.B. stopped him. “Best
check the weapons. Sooner’s better’n later.”
J.B. had been the armorer to the Trader for more than nine years, joining the
Trader’s group about a year after Ryan Cawdor. Despite his mild, almost
scholarly appearance, J. B. Dix knew more about armaments than anyone alive.