“Any trouble?” Ryan asked. He knew Krysty had some mutie blood, which gave her an ability to sense danger. More than once, it had saved their lives.
Leaning against a banyan tree, the woman breathed in the strange perfumes of the exotic flowers. “All clear,” Krysty answered. “Not a sound of folks for miles.”
For the first time in a day, the Deathlands warrior allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit. “Good. You’re on guard. Let me know if anything starts coming our way.”
Stepping away from the tree, Krysty nodded.
“So this is the location of our aerial El Dorado, eh?” Dr. Theophilus Tanner rumbled in a deep voice. The silver-haired man placed his walking stick on a tree root so it wouldn’t sink into the soft earth, and leaned heavily on its lion head ferrule. “Well, we are indeed pilgrims in the valley of the shadows. Most appropriate.”
Although only thirty-eight years old, Doc appeared to be more than sixty, with his heavily lined face and a wild shock of silvery hair. The alteration of his features was merely one of the side effects Doc had suffered at the hands of the ruthless scientists from Operation Chronos.
Ripped from the bosom of his family in the late 1880s, Doc was trawled forward in time to the late 1990s as a test subject. However, Doc proved to be an unruly and uncooperative specimen and was sent forward in time to what had become the Deathlands. Unfortunately, the trawling scrambled some portions of his mind, and Doc sometimes drifted away, reliving prior events or just dreaming aloud while wideawake. But in a fight, the gentle scholar from Vermont became a deadly fighter and was a valuable member of the group.
Refusing to relinquish any hold on his past, Doc wore clothes of his day, including pin-striped pants and matching vest, a frilly white shirt with a string bow tie and a long frock coat, now with several bullet holes in the twilled fabric. A U.S. Army backpack was carried effortlessly on his shoulders, and around his waist was a cracked leather belt lined with ammo pouches for his gigantic .44 Civil War blaster.
“Pipe down, you old coot,” Mildred Wyeth muttered, using handfuls of grass to try to wipe the residue of quicksand from her clothes. Once it dried, the stuff came off easily. It was only the high viscosity and depth that made the bog dangerous.
Short and stocky, the physician wore loose Air Force fatigues, with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol bolstered on her left side for the cross draw she favored. Before skydark Mildred had gone into a hospital for a simple operation, but there had been complications, and a hundred years later she awoke in a cryogenic freezer, a new Gulliver trapped in a frightening world forged from atomic nightmares.
“Might as well set off a gren if you’re going to talk that loud,” Mildred stated, tossing away the filthy grass.
“My humble apologies,” Doc muttered in a wry apology, then continued in the same volume.
“So where is our arboreal harbor located, John Barrymore?”
“Straight up,” J.B. said, jerking a thumb at the impenetrable ceiling of the jungle. “From here, we climb.”
“Indeed,” Doc said, studying the dense weaving of vines and creepers. “How antediluvian for us.”
Standing her post, Krysty ignored the conversation, forcing herself to listen to the distant sounds of the forest, the chattering of a distant monkey, a flowing stream, birds in flight and the constant hum of the insects all around them. There were a lot of bugs in this jungle.
“I’ll take the lead and cut us a path,” Ryan stated, tightening the straps on his backpack. “Just remember to put any loose branches or leaves in your pockets. Don’t let anything fall to the ground and mark the spot.”
“Easy,” Jak Lauren grunted, wincing slightly as he accidentally put some weight on his sprained ankle.
The bus crash at the quagmire had almost chilled the lot of them, and it was just chance that a barrel of shine had fallen on his leg. Thankfully, it was empty and he only received a sprain, not a break. Mildred was a good doctor, but there wasn’t really much a person could do for a broken leg.