Dean sat next to his father. He was stirring, mumbling to himself, a thin string of yellow bile dribbling from his lips. His head rocked back and forth, and his fingers kept opening and closing. He was as pale as wind-washed ivory.
J.B. lay on his side, as though he’d tipped forward during the jump. Ryan’s oldest friend, the Armorer, had joined the legendary Trader and his war wags about the same time as the one-eyed warrior. His fedora had rolled across onto the far side of the chamber and lay by the door. Ryan could just see the folded glasses protruding from the top pocket of J.B.’s jacket.
Mildred was next in the circle. She had been born on December 17, 1964, into a politically active Baptist family. She hadn’t even been a year old when the good old boys of the KKK rode out of the night with their burning crosses and murdered her father.
Three days before the end of the year 2000, Mildred had gone into a hospital for minor abdominal surgery. She had been an expert in the field of cryosurgery and cryogenics, and it had been logical, when something went wrong during the operation, to have her traumatized body deep frozen.
Then the nukings of the following month had devastated the entire world, decimating the population.
Millions died during the sky dark, and tens of millions more of the rad sickness during the long winters. Civilization vanished, never to return.
The United States of America reverted to a number of scattered communities, some of them small villages of a few dozen, some of them larger villes with up to four or five hundred souls, run by gun-carrying barons.
It became Deathlands.
For nearly a century, Mildred had slept on, dreamless and dark. Then she had been jerked back to life by Ryan and his companions,
The last of the group was Doctor Theophilus Algernon Tanner. In November of 1896, Doc had awakened to another normal cool, bright morning in Omaha, Nebraska, and kissed his beloved young wife and two children goodbye. Then his world had ended at the whim of blank-faced scientists of 1998. They were working on an ultrasecret time-traveling project, picking victimsor candidates, as they were knownand plucking them from their past into the uncertain present. Operation Chronos.
Now Doc lay on his back, with his chin on his chest. His mouth gaped open, revealing his excellent teeth. His white hair brushed the shoulders of the frock coat, and his cracked leather knee boots were stretched out in front of him. He was snoring with the steady pounding of a steam-powered reciprocating engine.
Krysty opened her eyes and groaned, staring at Ryan, her vision out of focus. She licked her lips.
“Gaia! We made it.” She touched the cold armaglass walls with her fingers. “Silver. Been here before?”
“Think so. But I can’t remember where.”
“What’s wrong with Michael?” Memory illuminated her face. “Dorothy? She got out of Did she get out?” Krysty looked around the hexagonal gateway chamber. “Yeah, looks like she got out just in time.”
“Not sure. Last thing I remember was seeing her kind of transparent in the doorway. Guess we’ll never know. Unless we pressed the instant return control.”
In the long blackness that followed the nuking of the planet, most techno-wisdom disappeared, including how to work the matter-transfer units. Ryan had stumbled upon the first of them in a long-buried secret redoubt, and had found that the closing of the chamber door was enough to trigger the operation. You became unconscious for a brief period of time, and when you came around again you were elsewhere.
Doc had worked briefly on the system, during the couple of years he was an unwilling captive of the scientists. But he had become so difficult and emotionally unstable, constantly seeking a stolen opportunity to try to get back to his own time and his lost family, that those who had trawled him from the past used the experiment to push him forward, nearly a hundred years, into what had then become Deathlands.
But even Doc had no idea how to actually set coordinates on the gateway to be able to control where you jumped. All the codes and comp information had vanished in the rad-violent months after the holocaust.
“Silver walls,” J.B. commented, coughing as he struggled to sit up, nearly losing his balance. “Been here before.”
“Michael!” Krysty called out to the teenager. “Michael, come on.”
But there was no response, just the racking sobs that seemed unstoppable.
“Dad, I feel awful.”
“Sit still, Dean, or lie on your back. Sometimes helps. It’ll pass.”
“What’s wrong with Michael?” Dean managed to sit up, staring worriedly at the hunched figure of the teenager.
“Think that nearly having Dorothy come along, and then the way she freaked out and nearly chilled us all, has tipped him over the edge for a while.” Ryan glanced at Michael. “He wasn’t all that well after the last jump. Seemed real depressed. Don’t worry, Dean. He’ll get over it.”
Michael uncoiled like a striking rattler, making all of them jump. His dark eyes were wide and staring, and there were flecks of white froth clinging to the corners of his mouth. Ryan found that his own hand had fallen to the holstered SIG-Sauer, easing it half out and cocking it before he even realized that he’d reacted to the sudden movement.
“Get over it, will I, Ryan?” The voice was harshly mocking.
“Yeah.”
“You’d know about getting over things, wouldn’t you?”
Ryan nodded. “Everyone here’s had loved ones that they’ve lost, Michael.”
“So what the fuck does that mean to me? Why should I be interested in other people losing their loved ones? Why should I, Ryan?”
“Take it easy, young fellow,” Doc said, recovering and sitting up. “Ryan’s correct about us suffering loss. Few more than myself, I daresay.”
Michael stood, staggering to his left, and steadying himself with a fumbling hand. “Damn it!”
Ryan and the others were all up on their feet, ringing the young man.
“She made her choice in the end, Michael.”
“Fuck choice, Ryan.”
“Sure. I’ll drink to that any day of the week. But it won’t change a damned thing. She’s gone back to Quindley and her own people.”
Michael punched at the wall, his knuckles cracking on the armaglass. Then, before anyone could stop him, he deliberately head-butted the silvered wall. There was a sickening damp thud and he staggered, hands going to his face. Blood flowed fast from a gash across his forehead, into his eyes and dripping off his chin onto the floor.
“Michael!” Mildred stepped in close, lifting a hand. “Let me put something on that.”
He waved her away, grinning through the mask of blood, his white teeth smeared with crimson. “No, thanks, Dr. Wyeth. Save your medicining for others. I don’t need it and I don’t fucking well want it.”
Ryan glanced at the woman, who caught his eye. “Surface cut. It’ll bruise up some. Lot of blood near the surface of the skin around the eyes. Nothing serious.”
“Let’s get out of here. Can’t stand being closed in like in a grave.”
“Wait!” Ryan’s voice cracked out like a buggy whip, freezing Michael in his tracks, a half pace from the handle of the massive armaglass door.
J.B. had been polishing his glasses. Now he perched them on the end of his bony nose and peered at Michael. “You want to chill yourself,” he said quietly, “then that’s your right. Everyone’s right. But you don’t take others with you. You understand me, Michael?”
“Yeah, yeah. All right. Guess you’ll probably shoot me if I don’t do like you say, won’t you?”
“Possibly.” The armorer turned to Ryan. “Ready to move out of here?”
“Guess so. Wish I could recall which of the gateways we jumped to that had walls this silvery color.”
“I can remember.”
Everyone looked at Mildred, except Michael, who’d begun to cry again. This time it was far more gently, small pearl tears easing out of his swollen eyes and cutting uneven pink furrows through the fresh blood.
“You can remember which redoubt had this gateway?”
“Sure, Ryan. I’m honestly surprised that you can’t. And surprised at Dean. Didn’t expect old farts like Doc to recall it, but the boy”
Dean scratched the side of his nose, his face a study in concentration. Suddenly he smiled. “Yeah. Course.”
Then it came to Ryan, as well, and to Krysty. “Might not be the same place,” he said. “Could be several gateways with the same color of armaglass.”
Krysty shook her head. “No, lover. Now I remember and I can feel it. I’d stake a bootful of jack we’ve jumped to New Mexico. We can see Jak Lauren again.”
Chapter Three
The redoubt had been extensively damaged during a huge explosion on their first jump to it, blowing away half of the red-baked mountain. The battered, rusted communication dish at the bottom of the slope, where they’d all sheltered to save their lives, still stood there.