by James Axler
"Who's there?"
"Me, Doc. Ryan Cawdor, your old friend. Can I help?"
"I fear I have not..." the voice faltered, "...had the pleasure of your acquaintance. But I would be grateful for your assistance."
"Sure. How can I help you, Doctor?"
Ryan moved a few steps closer. Behind him, he heard footsteps and recognized the sound of Krysty. But he didn't turn around, not wanting to risk losing this tenuous contact.
"Help me," Doc pleaded with a desperate urgency. "Tell me where I am, Mr. Cawdor. Where am I? Why am I here? How may I be free? And where, oh, where in the name of mercy, are my wife and children?"
Ryan was just in time to catch the old man as he fell to the concrete floor in a dead faint.
Chapter Eight
"Full evacuation by 00.01 on Day Four of Schedule 01/PrOv/Ce/TC. Redoubt to be sealed throughout and only Ltd sec force remaining in approved external watch section."
Jak had found the piece of paper from which he read, crumpled in a corner of one of the corridors, near what they guessed was a triple sec door leading to the open air. It was the only clue to the speed and organization of the evacuation.
"That's why it's all left running and stocked. Like they just sealed it for a couple of days, and figured they'd return when the scare was over." Ryan handed the paper back to the albino boy, who scrunched it between his hands and threw it onto the floor.
"Only the scare was never over." J.B. shook his head.
"Best get back to relieve Krysty," Ryan said. "Least we got enough ammo to last us a while. Except for Doc's cannon."
The redoubt had been kind to them in most ways. Apart from food and drink and the good hot water, it had also allowed them all to top up on self-lights and grens. J.B.'s dark brown leather jacket concealed a whole mix of the tiny, lethal grenades: implodes and frags; burners and shraps; lights and delays. All were color-coded for maximum efficiency. Jak and Ryan had also helped themselves to a variety of the grens, hooking them on their belts.
All carried mags of ammo, some of it loose in pockets.
Ryan had been delighted to come across some of the scarce caseless rounds for his beloved Heckler & Koch G-12 rifle. The blaster held a clip of fifty of the 4.7 mm rounds, and he'd been getting low.
Since that quality of ammunition wasn't manufactured anywhere in the Deathlands, he'd started to resign himself to dumping the gun and picking up something that fired a more convenient 9 mm bullet. They had loads of 9 mm — for his own SIG-Sauer P-226, for Krysty's P7A-13 H&K, for the Armorer's MP-7 SD-8 Heckler & Koch rifle.
J.B. had also topped up his supplies of 5.56 mm ammo for his Steyr AUG pistol, and Jak's pants pocket bulged with extra rounds for his massive .357 Magnum.
The friends were ready again to take on anything that moved — other than swarms of killer bees.
* * *
Krysty stood in the passage, waiting for them. "Doc's woken up," she said. But the look on her face made it patently clear that this wasn't necessarily good news.
"But?"
"See for yourself, lover."
The old man lay on his back, boots stacked side by side on the floor, the sheet pulled up under his chin. With his hands folded on his chest, he looked like the carved figure of a crusader in an ancient church memorial.
Ryan perched on the end of the bed, the other three behind him. "Hi," he said.
Pale blue eyes turned slowly toward him. "Good day to you."
"Know who I am?"
"I fear not."
"Know where you are?"
"Some hospital for the poor and needy?"
"Do you know what the year is?" Krysty asked.
"Of course. It's 1896."
Krysty nodded. "Right on."
Doc made an effort to sit up, then relaxed and lay back on the double pillows. "Please, will one of you take a message to my dear wife? She will be so worried at my absence."
"Absence?" Ryan queried.
"I've been away from home for... let me see. It must be very close to two hundred years now, and she will be beginning to become concerned about it. Do you not think?"
Ryan kept his face schooled not to show his deep worry. "We'll do what we can. I didn't catch your name, I'm afraid." He'd fallen into the older man's old-fashioned and stilted way of speech.
"Theophilus Algernon Tanner. Doctor of Science at Harvard. Doctor of Philosophy at the English university of Oxford. A pleasure to meet you. Pray forgive my not rising."
"Course. Can we get you anything to eat, Doc? Drink?"
"Thank you. A glass of water, and perhaps a Bath Oliver, if you have such a thing."
Ryan nodded, hiding his total ignorance of what Doc wanted to eat. "Sure. Listen, me and the others have to talk some. Then we're going out for a kind of... of a walk. The nurses have all gone home so you better come with us."
"Delighted, my dear fellow. And you won't forget to inform my sweet Emily of my temporary indisposition, will you? My card is in my waistcoat."
* * *
"Everyone ready now? I'll just trigger the main doors for a few inches. Jak, get down and have a look under it. See anything you don't like... just say 'close,' and we'll shut it again. We don't need any more of those bastard bees. I can still feel the stings in me."
The boy lay down, his newly washed white hair spreading out on the concrete like spilled foam. Ryan punched in the number code and threw the green lever up. Almost immediately he returned it to a central position to stop the sec door about eighteen inches from the floor. Jak took his time, looking all around outside. "Nothing," he said finally.
"Nothing?"
"Fucking big trees. Fucking hot. Nothing."
Cautiously Ryan allowed the arma-door to slide all the way up.
The heat swept into the redoubt like a tumbling wave, carrying with it an overwhelming smell ofgreen.
The entrance was set back into a hillside, behind what had once been a turning area for large military wags. But that was now a plateau of solid, waving grass, speckled with clusters of the most colorful flowers Ryan had ever seen. Crimsons, golds, purples and vivid yellows seemed even brighter against the swaying emerald backdrop.
"Paradise," Krysty murmured, shaking her head in admiration and wonderment.
Beyond the flowery carpet they could see the tops of luxuriant trees, some of them resembling monstrously big palms. The air was heavy with moist scents and languorous perfumes from the flowers, some of them verging on the sickly.
"Got be Hawaii, or someplace in the Pacific," Ryan said. "Seen an old sec vid about Hawaii. Called Fiftyit was. Weird name."
"I think Hawaii had big mountains," Krysty offered doubtfully. "This looks like it's too flat to be Hawaii."
"Africa," J.B. suggested. "Or India. I've seen pics of jungles looking like this."
"Tell you one thing," Ryan said. "This surely isn't any place in Deathlands."
Doc was wandering around in small circles, head up, staring at the vivid pink clouds that scarred the orange sky. "Red sky in the morning, then shepherds take warning," he said, looking around at the florid walls of the tropical jungle. "Here be tygers, I fear. We must exercise care."
J.B. had taken the tiny microsextant from a pocket and was busily shooting the sun, checking his data on a comp-table of locations. He checked again. And again.
"Hawaii?" Ryan asked. The Armorer shook his head.
"Africa? Or India?" Krysty probed.
J.B. shook his head. "No. It's... According to this, we're in the middle of what was Minnesota."
Doc Tanner began to laugh.
Chapter Nine
Ryan carefully closed the door into the redoubt. His knowledge of prenuke America wasn't vast, but there were still enough old books to be found around the Deathlands for him to be certain of one thing — Minnesota hadn't been a state that was filled with a wild profusion of tropical plants set amid a luxuriant forest.
J.B. had checked his sextant a fourth time, then a fifth time and had shown the reading to a
nyone who would look at it. "Yeah, Ryan," he finally admitted. "It's Minnesota. North, right up close to where the border with Canada used to be. But it's not supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be..."
"Bleak," Krysty concluded. "And look at these flowers."
"And that butterfly," Doc said, reviving his interest for a moment. "It must be the size of a soup plate." The insect's wings were a good two feet across, and fluttered lazily in the afternoon sunshine. Two tips trailed from the back of the orange-and-brown-dappled wings.
"Giant Yellow Swallowtail," the old man said admiringly. "Habitat's all over South America, right up to Mexico and into Texas. But the suggestion that such a beautiful creature could survive as far north as Minnesota is obviously absurd. Therefore we are not in Minnesota. Quod erat demonstrandum."He smirked in a foxy way at the others. "Which means that which was to be proved."
"Great, Doc," Ryan said. "So we're in Minnesota, but we're not in Minnesota."
"Who gives fuck?" Jak asked. "We going look around, or not?"
"Okay," Ryan agreed, "let's go."
As they moved away from the entrance and down through the clinging vegetation, they saw that the hill was very short. Effectively the whole place was set in a shallow bowl of similar low mountains, making a flat-bottomed valley. Ryan guessed that it was this particular sheltered formation that kept the air so still and warm. But it didn't explain how such rare tropical trees and flowers came to be in Minnesota.
At the back of Ryan's mind, though he hadn't mentioned it to any of the others, was Rick Ginsberg's information about other freezie centers. One was near Big Bend, down in south Texas, and the other was somewhere close to the old city of Duluth, in northern Minnesota.
* * *
One of Krysty's areas of specialized knowledge was botany. In her birthplace of Harmony there had been a number of men and women with arcane skills. Dulcie Harrison had encouraged the flame-haired young girl to read in the ville's surprisingly extensive library on all aspects of horticulture and agriculture, pointing out to her that Deathlands was never likely to become industrialized again.
"The land, Krysty, my dear," she used to say, spluttering around her ill-fitting false teeth in her vehemence, "there has always been the land. And there will always be the land."
"Silver oaks and begonias," Krysty said now. "And that's a huge eucalyptus. No idea what that is, but I know that's a giant nasturtium climbing all over it."
They were following what had at first looked like the main trail down from the redoubt. But the many years' growth of lush foliage had obliterated almost all trace of what must once have been a well-kept two-lane blacktop. In the end Ryan was forced to draw his panga and hack away at the dense foliage with the hissing eighteen-inch blade.
"What are those wondrous blooms?" Doc asked.
"Hibiscus, Doc," Krysty replied.
"Thank you, young lady. I am much indebted to you. Hibiscus. It puts me somewhat in mind of the flowers that one might see strewn across a funeral bier. Now, what a dismal thought is that!"
The smell of the vegetation was overwhelming, and Ryan paused to draw breath and wipe the sticky mulch from the edge of the steel cleaver. Sweat streaked his face and body, and the hot shower seemed a millenium away.
Doc's voice floated to him again, but with a whining, querulous tone that was quite unlike his usual way of speaking. "Pardon me, young lady."
"What is it, Doc?"
"I would prefer a more formal response than 'Doc.' It makes me sound like a stock character in a cheap melodrama. But that is not what I was about to remark upon. You are wearing breeches, young woman, are you not?"
Ryan turned around at that and caught Krysty's expression of amused bewilderment.
"Yes, I am, Dr. Tanner. What of it? You want I should take them off?"
"Of course not! What a wanton and brazen reply!"
"You figure a woman should only wear pretty dimity dresses. Is that it?"
"I have no objection to working clothes for working women. But not breeches."
"And women shouldn't have the right to vote, either, Doc?"
He shook his head, and for a moment Ryan glimpsed a dreadful uncertainty in the old man's eyes. A spasm of doubt. "I thought they already... But not back when I've been... If it comes, then I shall support it, my dear. You have the word of Theophilus A. Tanner upon it."
Ryan grinned at that, and turned once more to resume his battle with the clinging, suffocating walls of undergrowth.
* * *
The sun had clawed its way through the layers of ragged cloud until it was nearly overhead. The companions had stopped three times for a rest and a drink from their supply of water. It seemed to Ryan, looking behind them, that the vegetation was growing faster than they could cut it down. Their beaten path was already becoming invisible. Fortunately J.B. had been taking bearings every two or three hundred yards to make sure they'd eventually be able to track their way back.
"How much farther are we going to go?" J.B. asked.
"Another hour, I figure. If there's no sign of getting out of this jungle by then, we can head back to the redoubt. Rest up some and then make another jump to get out of here."
"Terrific." Krysty sighed. "Just what I always wanted, lover. Another wonderful jump. It'll kill Doc."
"You know a better hole to go to?" Ryan asked. "Any of you? I don't know what this place has for mutie life, but I don't take to the idea of spending a night out in the middle of it."
"Go on longer," was Jak's terse comment.
"How about you, Doc?" Ryan asked. "You want to go on or go back?" He knew immediately that it was a mistake to use the word backto the befuddled old man.
"Back? I am already 'back,' as you call it, Mr. Cawdor. How can I return whither I am already bound? Quo vadis?as the classics have it. Whither goest thou? Where do we come from and where do we go? The eternal enigma."
He continued to mutter to himself, making little sense. Ryan glanced at the other three. "Guess that's a vote from Doc for going on a ways," he said quietly.
* * *
Jak was breaking trail, swinging Ryan's heavy panga with incredible speed and delicacy. A litter of hacked branches and broken plants marked the track of his passing.
"Houses," he announced suddenly, dropping to his knees behind a screen of reddish-purple bougain-villea.
Ryan gestured to J.B. and Krysty to keep Doc to the rear, while he wriggled forward on hands and knees to join the boy.
"Where?"
"There," Jak replied, pointing with the green-slobbered tip of the panga.
A small river flowed silently from left to right, behind the flowering shrub. Beyond it was a clearer area of long grass. A group of single-story concrete buildings lay behind the remains of a rusting sec fence that was topped with razored wire. As elsewhere in this peculiar region, the harshness of the concrete blocks was softened by a coating of pale green moss.
At first glance the installation looked like the ruins of a federal prison. Ryan had seen enough of them in his life. Not many places had survived a century after dark day, but prisons were the grim exceptions.
The friends crouched in total stillness for a long fifteen minutes, watching for any sign of human habitation. Or inhuman habitation.
Other than a swarm of myriad tiny golden insects, darting above the sullen, oily surface of the river, there was no sign of life. Ryan heard a muted clicking and glanced down at his shirt, where he kept a miniature rad counter pinned — as did most of the norm population of Deathlands. It had changed color from safe-green to somewhere between yellow and red, showing that there was a medium-hot spot not too far from them.
Jak looked at his own counter, which had remained stubbornly green. He tapped it, but nothing happened.
"Could be missile silos around here," Ryan whispered.
"Cross?" Jak asked.
"Wait a while longer. Don't like the feel of all this."
The buildings all showed signs of serious damage, e
ither from the big nuking or from earth-shakes, or from the extremes of weather and rad storms that still raged around Deathlands. The windows were gone, as well as parts of some walls and several sections of the roofs.
While they watched there was a rippling in the thick grass beyond the river and a long, copper-colored snake emerged, holding a paralyzed bundle of fur in its gaping jaws. It slid silently into the dark water, head high, swimming downstream in long undulating coils of power. Ryan's guess put the reptile at twenty-five to thirty feet.
"Big bastard," Jak hissed.
"Swallow you in one." Ryan grinned.
A noisy, chattering flock of bright-plumaged birds was perched on the corner of the roof of the nearest building. At a distance they looked to Ryan like parrots or macaws, but their presence told him that there were, probably, no hidden blasters covering them from the shadows.
He turned and beckoned the others forward, motioning Doc to keep low.
"Why? Is this some sort of sport, Mr. Cawdor? Or are we under threat from hostile Indians? I speak something of the tongue of the Mescalero Apaches, you know. I spent time among them only... only the other... once."
"Krysty. You and me go across the river. Get to the buildings and have a quick recce. We'll call the rest of you over when it's safe. Keep us covered. Questions? No? Let's do it."
J. B. Dix unslung his Heckler & Koch rifle and steadied it in a notch of the bougainvillea. He switched on the laser-optic sight and scanned the silent buildings across the water. Jak drew his Magnum and waited alongside the Armorer. Doc had lost interest again in what was happening, and he sat down with cracking knees. He picked a tiny orange flower and inhaled the scent with his eyes squeezed shut.
Ryan led the way.
There was no way of knowing how deep the river was from its murky surface, nor what kind of vicious life it might contain. Ryan could still conjure up the sight of a man called Bob Duvall, who'd been a relief driver on War Wag Three. He'd bathed in a similar river up near the Darks despite Trader's warnings about caution.
A shoal of tiny fishes had taken him. The creatures were no more than three inches in length, but two and a half inches of that was teeth. They'd stripped old Bob to the bone before he could make the bank and safety. Ryan could still recall the sight: the whiteness of washed bone and the dangling strips of mauled sinew; the fish still biting at torn slabs of flesh, while the river filled with blood.
