Rider, Reaper
22 in the Deathlands series James Axler
Chapter One
Ryan opened his good eye and blinked up into the early-morning sky, a bright blue band etched between the high sandstone walls of the New Mexico canyon where he lay resting from the glare of the sun.
The bird was a blur for a moment, its large wings flapping lazily. Then his sight cleared and Ryan recognized the creature as a snowy egret, rising from a bunch of cottonwoods a hundred yards to the south.
At his side, Jak Lauren hadn’t stirred.
A light breeze brought the familiar scent of sagebrush from farther down the trail.
A tiny lizard scuttled out from under a frost-riven boulder, looking for a moment toward the two motionless figures. It decided they represented no threat and moved out into the band of sunshine, vanishing into a patch of Indian rice grass.
Ryan glanced at Jak, as the youth stirred in his sleep, his arm flung across his pink, light-sensitive eyes. The familiar mane of snow-white hair was markedly longer than in the old days when they’d ridden and fought together, spilled out over the dusty, cropped grass.
The albino teenager had always been a hardened survivor, but the dreadful events of the past few days had etched fresh lines of pain around his deep-set eyes and thin-lipped mouth.
The bottom of the canyon was cool, barely in the eighties. Out in the open it was way over the hundred-degree mark.
The two men had come alone, drawn by a common purpose. By a remembering and by a sadness.
The rest of the party of friends were camped among a bosk of aspens, by the clear stream that trickled steadily from the higher ground. The stream had become the main water supply for the spread where Jak Lauren had settled with his wife, Christina Ballinger, and where the recent joy of their marriage had been the bright little Jenny.
A gopher snake slithered from its hiding place and coiled itself, its delicate tongue probing at the morning air, tasting the two human beings. It found the vanishing flavor of the small lizard, balancing caution against hunger.
Hunger won and it moved out into the open, following the tiny reptile.
Ryan watched it go.
Time was passing. His wrist chron showed that they’d been away from the others for well over the hour. Krysty would already be worrying. J. B. Dix, the Armorer, would probably be checking his own chron every now and again.
Mildred Wyeth, the black doctor they’d thawed in a cryocenter, would be resting, maximizing her strength for the ordeal that they all knew would be starting very soon.
Dean Cawdor, Ryan’s eleven-year-old son, might be throwing pebbles into the fast-flowing stream, or sleeping, or hunting for snakes to chill.
Doc Tanner, the oldest of the group of companions, born in 1868 and time-trawled to the bleak postholocaust world of Deathlands, would likely be asleep, flat on his back, his eyes covered with the distinctive swallow’s-eye kerchief he always carried. The massive gold-plated commemorative Le Mat pistol would be holstered at his hip, and the ebony sword stick with the silver lion’s-head handle lying at his side.
Jak stirred and sighed, then looked sideways at Ryan. “Time to move?”
“Guess so.”
The young man stood, stretching, showing the feline grace that made him one of the finest hand-to-hand fighters that Ryan had ever known, though he had to admit that Michael Brother had the edge on anyone for sheer combat-reflex speed.
“It’s like time never existed.”
“How do you mean, Jak?”
“Like I’m still with you. Like quiet months were dream. Like dark’s always with me.”
“Least you had them, Jak. Krysty often talks about us settling down like you and Christina. Says how she wants to stop the running and the fighting.”
Jak nodded. He took a long, slow breath, running a finger around the collar of his denim shirt. His right hand rested easily on the butt of the huge satin-finish ,357 Colt Python Magnum, with its six-inch barrel. Ryan and J.B. had used to tease the white-haired youth about carrying such an enormous cannon, but Jak had shown repeatedly that he was able to handle it.
Christina had never liked the gun, and on their last visit she’d insisted that Jak put it away.
“Never really took to us,” Ryan said.
“Chris?”
“Yeah.”
“She appreciated how you saved her.”
“By chilling her brothers and her father. Sure. Good way to become friends.”
They’d encountered the Ballinger family many months earlierR.G., the father, the triple-stupe, vicious brothers, Jim and Larry, and their sister, limping with a built-up boot on her crippled left foot. Her blue eyes would never look at anyone, in case she got a fist in the face for rudeness. The girl’s brutal world had been low on childhood and love, and high on violence.
“Best say goodbye.” Jak looked around the canyon. “Favorite place.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Others not want to come?”
“Don’t think so, Jak. Not really anything left for any of the others to say.”
“Suppose not.”
The wind fell away, and the steep-walled canyon became totally silent.
They walked together through the hot, deeply crimson sand, toward the three graves. Each of them had a marker, carved from wood, the letters burned neatly into the slab of beech.
The two men stood side by side, silently united in grief.
Two of the graves were large, the middle one much smaller. All three lay in shade, beneath a wall of red rock that rose vertically and vanished into the deep blue of the morning sky.
It was a place of great quiet. Jak and Ryan glanced up as the ghostly egret floated above their heads and vanished away toward the ruins of an Indian cliff dwelling.
None of the markers carried any date or age.
One read Christina Lauren, Beloved Wife of Jak and Mother of Jenny. Murdered.
The small grave bore the legend Jenny Lauren, Dear Daughter of Jak and Christina. Murdered.
The third marker claimed Michael Brother. Good Friend from Another Time.
That was all.
Ryan laid a hand on the slim shoulders of the teenager and stood with him in the stillness while they both remembered everything that had happened in the previous few weeks, since the companions had arrived unexpectedly in New Mexico after the last jump.
Chapter Two
Michael was weeping, which was the first sound that Ryan heard as he started to come around from the jump.
His eye opened, slowly and painfully. It felt like something had been spitting hot sand under the lid. Ryan closed his eye again, aware that he had a ferocious headache, situated behind the empty socket of his missing left eye.
“Fireblast!” He groaned in pain, wishing that Michael would stop crying. The rasping noise was already starting to get on his nerves.
In between the throttled, choking sobs, it seemed like the youth was trying to say a name. It sounded to Ryan like “Dorothy.” The name was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite work out where he’d heard it before.
Ryan risked easing open his right eye again and saw that the walls of light purple armaglass had vanished, which was the last thing he’d seen as they started the matter-transfer jump from the buried military redoubt. Where had it been?
“New England,” Ryan croaked triumphantly. This was good. The scrambling of the brain that was always a consequence of a jump was healing already.
Now the walls were a pale silver. That color also rang a dim and distant bell in the far-off reaches of Ryan’s mind. But too dim and distant for him to claw it out of the shorted memory banks.
The silvered disks in floor and ceiling had all lost their brightness, and the last tendrils of ghostly white mist were disappearing above his head.
Michael was doubled up in a fetal position, tears streaming down his cheeks, still repeating the name Dorothy.
Now Ryan remembered. That was the name of the young woman Michael had fallen in love with and who had been about to join them on the jump and then changed her mind at the final moment.
Correction beyond the final moment. She’d opened the door of the gateway and risked the destruction of the triggering mechanism that could have sent all of them into a whirling, infinite oblivion. There was no way of knowing whether Dorothy had survived, and there never would be.
Ryan wriggled himself into a seated position, his back against the wall. His mouth felt like a stickie had been sick in it, and his stomach still churned. There was a sore place on his neck that he couldn’t recall injuring.
Other than Michael, no one else had recovered from the jump.
Next to Ryan was Krysty, lying on her back, hands neatly folded in her lap, her flaming red sentient hair packed tightly around her nape. The woman’s green eyes were closed, and she was breathing steadily. Her legs were crossed, the cuffs of her pants ridden up to reveal her dark blue leather Western boots, with the chiseled silver points on the toes and the silver spread-wing falcons embroidered on the fronts.