“It doesn’t matter…it just, ah—”
Doc’s ability to speak was taken from him by the rush of pain as the splintered wood bit deeper into his flesh, breaking the skin and tearing the flesh and sinew beneath, the resistance of his ribs making them almost audibly creak before the sharp snapping sounds of bone giving way to a greater force.
Doc looked up into Lori’s face as the periphery of his vision grew dim, the black edges spreading across the whole of his vision.
“It just has to carry on…” he whispered as all darkened, and the pain grew to encompass all.
“DOC LOOKS in a pretty bad way.”
Ryan Cawdor hunkered down beside the older man, whose white, straggling hair matted in sweat-soaked strands to his head. He was stretched out on the floor of the mat-trans chamber. His limbs jerked in spasm, and his open eyes flicked the whites up into his skull.
Doc was always Ryan’s main concern on arriving at a new destination. The mat-trans chambers were located in secret predark U.S. Army redoubts that were dotted across the ruins of America, in the lands now known as the Deathlands. None of the fellow travelers knew how to program the computer-triggered matter-transfer machines that were at the heart of each base; they knew only that closing the door triggered the mechanism and set the old comp tech working that was left in the depopulated bases. Each jump was a gamble. The vast land and weather upheavals that had followed the long night of sky-dark had changed the geography of the old Americas irrevocably, so there was always the risk that they would land in a mat-trans chamber that was crushed beneath tons of rock, or flooded so that they would instantly drown.
So far they had been lucky—either that, or the automatic default settings on the remaining working comps would only transfer at random to redoubts where the chambers were still able to receive. That wasn’t something that Ryan could assume.
But the redoubts offered them a way to move vast distances across the scorched earth. However, everything had its price. Although it gave them an advantage that few, if any, could share, it also carried its own cost. The jumps were a nightmare experience where every atom of their being was torn apart, flung across vast distances and then reassembled. It made them all feel as though they had been ripped slowly apart, each sinew stretched to snapping point, all organs squeezed tightly in an iron grip…and gave them a worse hangover and comedown than the strongest shine or jolt.
Some of the group adapted to the jump better than others, and it seemed to be reliant on something genetic rather than just fitness and strength. Although the fact that Ryan was always the first to stir after a jump could lead to that initial conclusion, for he was the most obviously physically fit specimen in the group. He stood more than six feet tall, with a mane of waving, dark curls that framed a square-jawed and handsome face, that was only somewhat marred by the patch that covered the empty left eye socket. The livid and puckered scar that ran down his cheek bore testimony to the manner in which the eye had been lost. The one-eyed man was a fighting machine, his whipcord musculature developed by years of action.
Hearing a murmur behind him as he crouched over Doc, Ryan turned to find his son, Dean, regaining consciousness and rising to his feet. Just as his father had checked the razor-sharp panga strapped to his thigh and the 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol in its holster when he came to, settling the Steyr SSG-70 across his shoulder, so Dean automatically checked and bolstered the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power that was his preferred blaster. Apart from the fact that he was still in possession of both eyes, Dean could have been a mirror image of his father. Now twelve years old, the boy was developing into a fighting machine that would one day be the equal of his father.
Ryan looked away from his son and back to the prone old man.
“Doc looks bad,” Dean remarked, joining his father.