Nightmare Passage

by James Axler

  "More like 'How's that for showing off,' " Mil­dred retorted darkly.

  As the cruiser bobbed in the shallows, Ryan and J.B. climbed out and secured it with a hawser, snug­ging the craft fast. They stood watch as the rest of the companions disembarked.

  "Usual red alert," Ryan said, holding the scattergun ready at waist level. "Lock and load."

  Doc drew his Le Mat, Jak his .357 Colt Python, Mildred her ZKR revolver and Dean unholstered his Browning Hi-Power blaster. He brought up the rear, behind the weaponless Krysty.

  Ryan took the point, since he was the most fa­miliar with the layout. They moved alertly between the twisting columns of acrid smoke. All of them repressed coughs and sneezes and frequently wiped their stinging eyes. However, Ryan saw the devastation wasn't quite as total as he had initially figured. Only a few of the buildings in the sprawling com­pound were completely consumed by fire, though almost all of them were soot blackened with win­dows shattered by the explosive charges set by Mil­dred and J.B.

  The vapors suddenly cleared, diminishing to a misty pall. Ryan saw the rambling, flat-roofed con­crete-block building that housed the mat-trans unit beneath it. It appeared intact, and he breathed a sigh of relief. On the far side of it lay the submarine pens, where the undersea craft of the predark Navy had once been berthed.

  Motioning the people behind him to stop, Ryan went to one knee, taking a slow, visual recce of the structure and the surrounding area. He considered circling the building, approaching it from a concrete slipway that ran from the rear down to the sea. How­ever, he saw no signs of movement anywhere. He hoped the sec men on the launch were the last to have fled the base.

  Standing, he gestured for his companions to come forward.

  "Standard deployment," he said to them quietly. "We're going in by the front door. Triple red."

  The seven people fanned out in a half circle as they moved toward the front of the building. Krysty's green eyes blazed, her hair tightly knotted at her nape.

  Mildred held her ZKR 551 in a two-fisted grip, the barrel as steady as stone. Next to her, J.B. crouched to make himself a smaller target, the Uzi braced at his hip, finger on the trigger.

  Doc stood sideways like an eighteenth-century dandy practicing the code duello, the Le Mat at the end of his extended arm.

  Dean and Jak held their blasters in both hands, barrels pointing up.

  As Ryan expected, the chrome-and-glass-paneled door was unlocked. The building had been an ad­ministrative center before the nukecaust and there­fore didn't possess the security measures of high-clearance areas.

  As he shouldered open the door, the fluorescent tubes glowing on the ceiling showed him that the reception room and the corridor beyond were de­serted. He moved in fast, shifting the barrel of the scattergun back and forth. The others came in be­hind him.

  Stealthily, the companions crept along the corri­dor, but not as quietly as Ryan would have liked. Doc kept trying to stifle a smoke-induced coughing fit and was doing a poor job of it.

  Most of the doors lining either side of the long hallway were open. Glancing into the first four of­fices, Ryan saw they were jumbled, ransacked. Ev­idently, Poseidon's sec men had looted everything of value from the building before leaving. A fear that their remaining blasters and other possessions had been boosted gnawed at him.

  They followed the corridor along two turns, first to the left, then to the right, before it dead-ended at the set of double doors Ryan wanted. They hung open, and the big room beyond was full of desks and chairs. A bank of monitor screens was still linked to the security vid net, and they flickered with images. Ryan swept a glance over them, saw they showed essentially the same smoke-clouded pix from different perspectives and turned away.

  "Hey, Dad," Dean called. "Look at this."

  Turning, Ryan saw his son standing before a tall row of six gray lockers, the hasps secured by round combination locks.

  Fingering a lock, Dean said, "They're not rusty. People here must have been using them."

  Ryan joined him, tugged on a lock experimentally and declared, "Our blasters might be inside of them. We'll have to shoot off the locks. Mildred?"

  The woman stepped forward, hefting her revolver. "Precision is my middle name. Everybody take cover."

  As her friends hunkered down behind desks, Mil­dred dragged a table over the end of the locker row, arranging it so she would have a parallel angle of fire. Half lying across the tabletop, she brought the lock on the far end into target acquisition and squeezed the ZKR's trigger.

  The room echoed with the door-slamming bang of the blaster, followed a microsecond later by the high-pitched whine of a ricochet.

  Ryan rose and pulled the shattered metal away from the hasp. Hanging inside the locker was a dress uniform of one of the Kings Point enlisted men. Frustrated, he slammed the door shut and returned to his position behind a desk.

  He and Mildred repeated the procedure with the next four lockers. Each one contained uniforms or personal bric-a-brac.

  Aligning the sixth and last lock with the sights of her blaster, she muttered, "After burning this many rounds, I don't know if I'll feel better if our stuff is in there or not."

  The revolver bracked, the lock jumped, flew apart and Ryan checked the container's contents. He re­leased a slow, relieved breath and removed his Steyr rifle, his eighteen-inch panga, his SIG-Sauer and Krysty's Smith & Wesson.

  Sourly, Mildred said, "It would have to be the last locker."

  "Depends on how you look at it," Dean said with a grin. "It could have been the first locker. You just started on the wrong end."

  Mildred feigned a backhand slap at the boy. "Ryan, this kid of yours is entering the smart-ass stage."

  "Then he is in the proper company," Doc ob­served sagely.

  After Ryan buckled on his gun belt and slung the rifle over a shoulder, he felt about ten times better. Chambering a round into his handblaster, he said, "Time to go down."

  He led the way across the room to an alcove barred by a wood-paneled door. Turning the knob, he stepped out onto the concrete landing of a stair­way that pitched downward. Having descended the stairs a few hours earlier, Ryan again took the point.

  The walls were of blue gray concrete, lit by flick­ering fluorescent fixtures. Arrows painted on the walls at each landing pointed down. Small air vents just beneath the low ceilings played a continuous flow of cool, recycled air.

  The stairwell led to a narrow corridor, which ended a hundred feet away at a vanadium steel door recessed into the wall. It was hexagonal in shape and a bright green in color. On the floor a few feet in front it lay the bullet-blasted corpse of one of Poseidon's mercs, a bespectacled man Ryan had dubbed "Specs."

  He stepped over the body and approached the por­tal cautiously, careful not to tread in the wide pool of drying blood spread around it. The torso of a man floated in the crimson lagoon, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. His face was frozen in an open-mouthed rictus of agony. His body was bisected, cut neatly in half at the waist by the multi-ton door.

  Krysty winced at the sight, gingerly circling the dark red puddle, not wanting to bloody the chiseled silver tips of her Western-style boots. Responding to her questioning glance, Ryan said, "Name was Jonesy. He fell down in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "And then he was beside himself," Doc mut­tered.

  Mildred rolled her eyes. "I knew you'd say that."

  Ryan punched in the entrance code on the keypad panel fixed to the door frame. No matter how dif­ferent the layout of the many redoubts they had vis­ited, the one constant was the numerical sequence to release the sec door's lock—3-5-2 opened the door, and 2-5-3 locked it again.

  It was a sequence that had eluded Poseidon for years. He had gone mad in frustration at his inability to access the predark technical secrets that lay on the other side of the vanadium-steel door. In many ways, his obsession with those three digits had been his downfall.

  A combination of hydraulics a
nd pneumatics rum­bled and squeaked, gears meshed and the sec door rose upward swiftly. As it did, it automatically tripped a photoelectric beam, and overhead lights flickered to a dim, yellowish life.

  Ryan entered, stepping over the lower portion of Jonesy's body. The first time he had entered a re­doubt, his mind had reeled with impossible conjec­tures. He had been shocked, stunned, awed. Most of the technology he had seen held no meaning for him, because there had never been anything like it in any of the stockpiles he had uncovered with the Trader.

  The high-ceilinged room beyond the sec door wasn't a redoubt. It was cramped, barely twelve by fifteen. A master control console ran the length of the east wall. Liquid-crystal displays and glass-covered readouts blinked and flashed purposefully. Everything still functioned, all the circuitry still drawing on the nearly eternal power provided by nuclear engines.

  The far wall was dominated by the familiar ar­rangement of armaglass slabs enclosing the mat-trans chamber. The semitranslucent armaglass was tinted a white yellow, the hue of old cream. For a reason he could never fathom, the original engineers of the gateways had decided that color-coding the armaglass enclosures was the simplest method of differentiating the various chambers around the globe. Ryan checked the door to the chamber, pull­ing up on the handle. The counterbalanced weight clicked, and the door swung outward.

  The mat-trans unit, like most of the others they had seen, was a six-sided chamber. The floor con­sisted of an interlocking pattern of raised metal disks, and the same pattern was duplicated on the ceiling. Though both Doc and Mildred had specu­lated on the fundamental operating principles behind the units, it still seemed like magic to Ryan, Jak, J.B., Dean and Krysty.

  Ryan understood, in theory, that the mat-trans units required a dizzying number of maddeningly intricate electronic procedures, all occurring within milliseconds of one another, to minimize the mar­gins for error. The actual conversion process was automated for this reason, sequenced by an array of computers and microprocessors. Though he ac­cepted at face value that the machines worked, he had never grown accustomed to the concept that minds that created such stupendously complicated devices couldn't have found a way to prevent the nukecaust.

  The gateway's destination and coordinate lock codes had long ago vanished. Though a control key­pad was affixed to the chamber door, it responded only to the LD—Last Destination—button. This key would, if pressed within thirty minutes of a suc­cessful jump, reactivate the gateway and return them to their original transmission point.

  Ryan eased the heavy door to the chamber all the way open, allowing the rest of his party to enter. Once inside, everyone knew what to do, sitting on the floor disks in their usual positions. No matter how many times they had done it, the seconds be­fore a gateway jump were always anxious. They sel­dom knew where—or into what situation—they would materialize.

  As was his habit, J.B. took off his fedora and carefully stowed his glasses in an inner pocket of his coat. Mildred took his hand. Doc sat beside her, laying the ebony swordstick at his side. Jak sat cross-legged against the wall with Dean next to him.

  After everyone was ready, Ryan pulled the door shut and triggered the jump mechanism. He sat next to Krysty, putting an arm around her.

  The disks in the floor and ceiling exuded a glow, and a low, almost subsonic hum began, quickly ris­ing in pitch to a whine. The noise changed, sounding like the distant howling of gale-force winds.

  The glow brightened, and a mist, shot through with flashing sparks, formed below the ceiling disks and rose from the floor, thickening to a fog and swirling all about them.

  Ryan closed his eye.

  Chapter Three

  Ryan! Help me! Ryan!

  Ryan opened his eye, galvanized by the terror in Krysty's voice, her words echoing within the walls of his skull. Bounding to his feet, he reached for the door to the gateway chamber. Jerking up the handle, he shouldered it open, realizing distantly that the heavy armaglass weighed no more than a thin layer of cloth.

  The door opened directly into a long, broad hall that ran away until it grew indistinct in the murky distance. He raced along the corridor, not allowing himself a moment to clear the confusion in his thoughts. The corridor walls were lined by flickering torches in metal sconces. The floor, walls and ceiling were of stone, cut into huge square blocks. The walls on either side of him were covered with brightly colored friezes, portraying olive-skinned men and women. They wore filmy robes, fantastic headpieces and many jeweled ornaments and were depicted mostly in positions of lovemaking.

  The images flickered and changed whenever Ryan tried to focus his eye on them. As he ran past, it almost seemed that the women in the friezes bore Krysty's face or hair or eyes. The women smiled as their bodies were fondled by various male partners, some of them with handsome, finely chiseled features and others that looked more like dogs or rep­tiles.

  Ryan kept running, feeling his heart thud pain­fully inside his chest. He dashed through a series of empty chambers, lit by a ghostly, elusive illumi­nation. Some of the chambers showed as black as the mouth of Hell, and he tried to avoid slowing down in these.

  The long corridor abruptly ended in utter, impen­etrable blackness, like a sepia sea. Ryan couldn't stop running. Smoldering in the darkness before him, he saw a pair of crimson eyes, glowing like evil stars in an empty, sunless universe.

  He tried to stop, to slow down, to change direc­tion. Instead, he hurtled forward, all control gone. The crimson radiance grew brighter, more vivid, and he saw a face. It was a man's face, undeniably hu­man, yet with alien, hellishly glowing red eyes. Then the flesh seemed to melt away, revealing a mask of naked white bone. A grinning skull floated in the sepia sea, a skull of ivory in which sparks of livid red flame danced within the shadowed sockets.

  Ryan was no stranger to fear. He lived with it daily, but it was an emotion he long ago had learned to bottle, to contain. Now it escaped and spread through him like a virus, consuming him with terror, horror and panic. He set his teeth on the scream rising from his throat.

  The death's-head leered at him, and the jaws of the skull opened. A peal of hideous laughter poured from the yawning jaws.

  Ryan plunged toward that gaping maw, deter­mined not to give voice to his surge of terror.

  KRYSTY OPENED HER EYES and stared in wonder at the chamber around her. Silk tapestries adorned the walls, rich rugs were on the floors and the ivory chairs, benches and divans were littered with satin cushions.

  The canopy over the bed in which she lay was hung with gauzy draperies, softly stirred by an intoxicatingly sweet breeze, scented like orange blos­soms.

  The delicate aroma made her feel languorous and lethargic, as if she had just awakened from a deep, soul-restoring sleep. Stretching, she turned over on her side, wondering why Ryan wasn't beside her. She longed to feel his hard body pressing against hers, his hands fondling and caressing her.

  At the thought, the nipples of her full breasts hardened, pushing against the thin linen covering them. She needed Ryan beside her, above her, be­hind her—

  Krysty bolted upright in the bed, pushing herself into a sitting position, a sudden alarm casting all other thoughts aside, evaporating the sensual and lascivious sensations that had nearly consumed her. She remembered Ryan sitting beside her in the gate­way chamber as the jump mechanism triggered.

  She slid out of the bed and turned toward the great bronze double doors at the far end of the room. She saw no knobs or handles. She ran to it, and smote the thick metal with her clenched hands. The muf­fled beating of her fists echoed dimly.

  Suddenly terrified, she cried, "Ryan! Help me! Ryan!"

  Even as she beat and shouted, the great bronze doors swung noiselessly back on hidden hinges, revealing a heavy golden chain across the entrance. Then the chain dropped without a sound. Beyond the threshold was a long dim vista of hall. Framed at the far end was a powerful man-shape, looming gigantic in the gloom.

  Krysty couldn't make out a
ny features, then two red flickering orbs appeared, right where a normal man's eyes should be. Terror flooded through her, but she refused to scream.

  As quickly as it crested, the wave of fear receded. The shadows slipped away from the figure or he stepped from them, she couldn't tell.

  A man stood in the center of the hall, towering well over six feet, nearly half a head taller than Ryan. His shoulders were incredibly broad, his arms long and bronzed, his hairless chest rippling with muscles. He was stark naked, and his fully erect member seemed as bronze hard as the rest of him.

  Another wave of sensations flooded through Krysty—first, a rise of fiery desire, then a possessiveness, almost fiercely maternal in the urge to pro­tect and nurture. The man beckoned to her with his right hand, a simple gesture, but somehow very sen­sual. The crimson eyes blazed upon her with an un­remitting, hypnotic intensity.

  Krysty felt herself drifting forward, toward those corded arms spread wide in a welcoming embrace. Vaguely she was aware of her diaphanous clothing dropping from her body, floating behind her. With great effort, she tried to stop herself, but she man­aged only to slow her gliding approach.

  She tried to say that he couldn't have her, that she belonged to another.

  A twisting whisper of a laugh touched her mind, and a voice said that she belonged to him, had al­ways belonged to him. He had waited an eternity for her, and she would be the mother of a dynasty that would last ten thousand years.

  Then she was in his arms, the sleek muscled na­kedness of his body pressing against her breasts, her desire-hardened nipples digging into his chest. She felt the pressure of his erection against her lower belly, shifting even lower, seeking her warmth and wetness. She stared into the red flame of lust in his eyes. His lips touched hers.

  MILDRED BENT OVER over the slack forms of Ryan and Krysty, fingering the pulse beats at the base of their throats. J.B. moved closer, putting on his spectacles.