by James Axler
Then he ran out of the smoke. He didn’t take a breath until he could see Magus again. He coughed, he spit, he made a show of it. All the while, he was thinking through his story. He knew he was going to get only one chance to tell it.
After he regained his breath, he trotted back down the hallway. All he could smell was burned fish.
“Well?” Magus said as he stepped up.
“Looks like a malfunction in the time unit caused a fire that ignited the enforcers. Everything is burned up in there.”
“What about Cawdor?”
“Never got out of the time unit.”
“You saw him?”
“Couldn’t open the door. Lock is fused. It’s so hot everything in there is melted together.”
“Is he dead?”
“If he isn’t, then he’s trapped inside the unit.”
“Damn,” Magus said. “This isn’t how I planned it at all.”
“At least you didn’t send out the invitations yet.”
McCreedy could have bitten his tongue. The remark just came out. He was thinking about Silam, about what Magus did to him after the failure on gladiator island. He decided he wasn’t going to stick around for that kind of death. At the earliest opportunity, he was going to quietly slip away, disappear in the hellscape.
The enforcers were getting more and more stirred up. They had started making rhythmic grunting noises, the significance of which McCreedy had no clue.
Magus quickly settled them down.
Smoke continued to roll their way, obscuring more and more of the corridor.
“How could you see through that?” Magus asked him.
McCreedy was trying to think on his feet. He didn’t want to give the wrong answer. The wrong answer would get him killed.
“Show me your hands,” Magus said.
He didn’t understand why he was being asked that.
“Your hands!”
Understanding was less important than obedience. McCreedy extended his palms.
“No burns on your fingers,” Magus said.
“I’m sorry?”
“If you’d touched anything, your fingers would be blistered and red. You couldn’t see through that smoke. You would have had to touch something to find the doorway. Ergo, you stopped short and are lying to me.”
“No, really...”
McCreedy could feel his good fortune rapidly running out.
“If everything is as you say, there is no problem,” Magus told him. “No harm done. If not, you will pay.” To Kossow he said, “Put some manacles on his ankles so he can’t run. Then have someone bring him to me. In the meantime I want your men to cordon off this hallway. Make sure nothing gets past you. Shoot to wound, not to kill. If you bring me live captives, there will be a bonus in it for you. After the smoke clears, do a thorough search of the mat-trans chamber. I want a full report. If there are bodies in the time unit, bring them to me at once.”
“The enforcers are really looking jumpy,” Kossow said. “They could turn on us.”
Magus aimed steel eyes on the sec man. “Don’t worry about them,” he said. “Worry about me.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The heat inside the chamber had become unbearable. Ryan knew they had to get out soon or their ammo would start to spontaneously cook off. What a sad end that would be: shot to pieces by random bullets they could not escape. He got up from the floor and tried to turn the wheel on the door to their back, the one that had opened onto 2001. It wouldn’t budge.
“That door leads nowhere,” Doc said. “Don’t waste your strength.”
“He’s right, Ryan,” Mildred added. “In this time there is nothing on the other side.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Krysty said.
“Not wan die here,” Jak agreed.
“The immediate enforcer threat is over,” Doc said. “If we can get out of this death trap and through the anteroom, we have a chance.”
“The smoke will hide us,” Ricky said.
“It’ll also smother us,” Ryan told them. “If we open that door, it will pour in, and there will be no alternative. We’ll have to press onward or suffocate in here.”
“I’m game,” Mildred said.
“We’re all game,” Krysty told him.
“Look how thick it is,” Ryan said. “We’ll be running blind. There’s only so long we can last, breathing it. Then we’ll lose consciousness.”
“You’re right about that,” J.B. said. “And if we pass out, that’s where we’re going to die. We’d have to tie ourselves together. If someone goes down, the others can pick them up.”
“I get us out,” Jak said. His ruby eyes flashed.
“How?”
“Forget I know way?”
Ryan had never had reason to doubt the tracking skills of the albino. He’d proved that he could find his way blind on the deadly nukeglass road leading to the Slake City massif, Though the one-eyed man had no idea how he did it. Some questions had no answers.
Making the decision was not easy, but he had made similar ones many times before. At a certain point you just had to take your chances.
“Tear up some clothes for face masks,” Ryan said. “We can stop some of the smoke from getting in our lungs that way.”
“And like I said, we need to tie ourselves together,” J.B. repeated. He produced a coil of thin rope from one of the pockets of his leather jacket. “This should do it.”
“The heat and smoke aren’t the only things we have to worry about,” Ryan told them. “There could be more enforcers. Mebbe sec men. Keep your blasters ready. Use the thermite if an enforcer is bearing down on us. Mildred, you got point with the Eagle.”
“What about the sec men?” Ricky asked.
“That’s the easy part,” Ryan said. “Shoot them down.”
They set about tearing strips of cloth for masks. When they all were masked, J.B. slipped his line through their belt loops, tied it in front to Jak’s waist and to the rear around his.
“We’ll go through the door single file after Jak,” Ryan said. “There will be bodies on the floor outside. They’ll be hot. If you fall, the people in front and back will feel it, and someone will help you up. Now, let’s see about that door.”
The front wall of the unit was so hot it was painful to even step close to it. “We’ve got to wrap the wheel in something, or we won’t be able to turn it,” Ryan said.
Ricky took off his jacket and handed it to him.
After Ryan draped it over the wheel he said, “Everybody take slow deep breaths, get as much air in your lungs as you can. When the door opens, we go. No talking. Save your air. Don’t breathe until we get clear of the thick smoke.”
Ryan followed his own advice, pushing as much air out of his lungs as he could, then refilling them deeper. Air out, then in deeper. When he’d reached his limit, he said, “Jak, let’s open her up.”
The wheel was searing, even through the coat, and something inside the locking mechanism had stuck; the metal had probably expanded because of the heat. They couldn’t budge it.
“Doc, Ricky, give us a hand,” Ryan said. When they were in position, he said, “All together now...”
The wheel resisted their combined force for an instant, then rotated to the left. Ryan spun it as fast as he could. “Deep breath!” the one-eyed man said through his mask. Then he pulled the door open.
Smoke as black as ink boiled into the chamber.
Jak was already moving over the threshold. His white hair vanished into the cloud beyond. As visibility quickly dropped in the chamber, Ryan felt the tug at his waist and stepped out after him. Outside the chamber, he could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. Footing was bad because the enforcers hadn’t completely turned to ash. There were lumps, things that rolled underfoot. He stumbled but used the butt of the Steyr to right himself.
He had only thought that it was hot inside the chamber. Outside it was like walking on a bed of red-hot coals. It jolted his every nerve end.
Maybe they were red-hot coals; the gloom was so dense he couldn’t see past the end of his nose. He felt the tug of Krysty on the line behind him. She had cleared the unit’s door.
They were moving steadily, but not fast enough.
He stumbled again, caught himself again, then his shoulder hit something hard. Jak had found the door to the control room. As Ryan slipped around it, he made the mistake of breathing in just a little. It felt as if he’d inhaled razor blades. He choked down the urge to cough.
Ryan felt himself being pulled away from the security of the wall. Jak was leading them into the redoubt proper. When the left-hand wall brushed his arm, he put his palm against it and let it slide along over it.
The smoke hadn’t thinned at all. His chest began to ache. A deep throbbing ache. The reflex to inhale was getting harder and harder to fight. If someone fell, he thought, they were all going to die. Then he felt a reassuring tug from in front and behind. Everybody was moving.
At first it was almost imperceptible, but it was definitely getting lighter ahead of them. Black smoke was turning gray. He could see the line stretching out in front of him. Then he got a glimpse of Jak’s white hair.
Hold it, hold it, don’t breathe yet, he commanded himself. Another few steps. Just another few steps. The smoke had cleared, but it still swirled around him. He wasn’t sure he could inhale without breaking out in a fit of coughing. If there was someone or something waiting for them on the other side of the dark haze, the sound would be a dead giveaway.
Then Jak reached back with a throwing knife and cut the tether between them. That told Ryan two things: the pall thinned out even more ahead and Jak thought they needed to be able to move quickly and independently. Something dangerous was just out of sight.
Ryan pulled out his panga and, with a swipe of the blade, cut the cord between him and Krysty. Her prehensile hair had pulled up close to her head in tight coils. The tightest coils he had ever seen it make. Although her hair showed fear, her eyes were bright and sharp. She nodded at him and reached for her own knife.
They kept on moving forward. After another ten steps Ryan could make out the sides of the corridor. He took a quick breath through the mask. The air rasped down his throat but didn’t make him cough. Jak darted away from him to the other side of the passage.
Whatever lay ahead was close now.
Ryan turned and hand signaled for Krysty to go that way, too.
He didn’t remember how many doors there were along the route; he’d been running for his life the last time he’d come this way. There was an intersecting corridor, though. He remembered that. From its corner, he and Jak had chucked thermite grens at the enforcers. The rest of the passageway they were walking down was a long, unprotected straightaway.
In other words, a shooting gallery.
* * *
KOSSOW’S MIND HAD long since drifted onto things other than waiting for the fire to burn down and the smoke to clear. He was reminiscing about a particularly favorite gaudy slut of his when one of his men jarred him with an elbow out of the reverie.
“Something moved down there.”
He knew that was impossible. Nothing could survive the heat and smoke, not even an enforcer. The rest of his men were looking at him expectantly. It was comical how stupe they were. But for Deathlands they were the cream of crop, the best of litter. “You’re seeing things, Reggie. You’ve been staring into the smoke too long. Take a break.”
“No, there it...”
The sound of a longblaster shot cut him off in midsentence—a boom from the edge of the murk, then a thwack as the slug plowed into Reggie’s head. It was a big bore slug. The back of the sec man’s skull exploded in a wet whoosh of gore, and he toppled onto his back. His legs kicked once, then were still.
Kossow blinked in astonishment. It took a terrible, long second for him to fully realize what was happening. The impossible was happening. As he opened his mouth to give the order to fire, something slammed into the side of his head. It happened so fast, the impact barely registered; in the next instant his brains lay in a plume on the floor, alongside Reggie’s.
* * *
RYAN TOOK THE second shot, watched his target fall, then shouted to the others. “Go! Leapfrog! Covering fire!”
Bursting out of the smoke, they laid down a bristling carpet of blasterfire. From the intersection, longblasters barked back. Bullets sang over Ryan’s head and skipped off the floor. The one-eyed man aimed and fired, working the bolt like a machine. Downrange, men dropped on faces and on backs.
As more of them fell, the survivors seemed to lose heart. Then shooting from that direction stopped. The sec men had turned tail.
Ryan stared down his scope. The intersection was deserted. The shooters had fled in both directions. There was no way to get them all.
A second later, the warning Klaxon began to sound. It pulsed over and over, echoing down the long hallway.
They had to keep moving; they were several levels from the surface. Ryan remembered the traps they’d passed. Those were out of commission; there were probably others that could still bite.
“Jak!” he shouted. “Back the way we came. Exactly the way we came!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When the alarm started sounding, Magus knew something had gone seriously off the rails. Then a breathless sec man burst into his office suite and gave him the terrible news.
“Cawdor isn’t dead,” the man said between gasps for air. “He and the others shot the hell out of us, and they’re coming this way!”
Magus knew what the one-eyed man was capable of when free to operate in an open field. With him and his cohorts running loose in the redoubt, anything could happen. All of his effort in revising the timeline, reliving the past, all his glorious plans for a return of status and respect had just gone out the window. There was only one safe option left: retreat. Another ignominious retreat. But losses had to be cut. Defeats swallowed. Wounds licked.
“Kill him!” Magus said, pointing a steely finger of doom at the bearer of bad tidings.
Such things were expected of him.
The enforcer seized the man by the neck and stabbed him in the chest with a talon. One slice ripped him open from sternum to pelvis. The creature then proceeded to yard out the contents of his torso while he squealed and thrashed.
McCreedy gave Magus a desperate look.
“No, you will live a bit longer,” Magus said. “I need you to drive me. Toss him the keys. Let him free his legs.”
McCreedy caught the keys the enforcer threw at him. He quickly unlocked the manacles around his ankles and got to his feet.
“Carry me!” Magus shouted at the enforcer.
Like a small child, he was scooped up, draped across the creature’s brawny arms and rushed out of the room to the beat of its heavy feet. The up-and-down motion made his head loll wildly. Objects in his field of vision lurched and yawed.
There were obvious benefits in living one’s life twice. This time he had had the foresight to plant another set of gassed-up escape vehicles in the next arroyo.
He kicked his legs at the knees to make the enforcer run faster.
Chapter Thirty
They heard the enforcers coming long before they saw them. Even over the pulses of the alarm horn, the tramp of bare feet on concrete was an audible rumble, which grew louder and louder behind them. Ryan kept driving his companions onward with shouts of encouragement. He wasn’t thinking about finding a place for them to stop and make a stand. The only way to survive was to put miles between them and the creatures who were in hot pursuit. He wasn’t thinking about how far they had to go to reach safety, either. He was looking ahead in short increments, distances of fifty, a hundred feet, trying to remember the details he had seen only once.
They dashed past the burned-out elevator doors where they had cooked the first enforcer.
Seconds later Jak led them through the half-open, steel-barred and armaglass gate of the floor’s guard post and designa
ted kill zone. Ryan remembered the sign on the wall that read: NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. And the machine-blaster posts staggered on either side of the hall.
Just beyond the kill zone’s second gate, they picked up a tail of enforcers. The creatures shot out of a side corridor and fell right into step behind them.
Jak slammed through the stairwell door, and they started up, taking the steps three at a time.
At the first landing Ryan looked back and down, letting the others pass him. Enforcers were pouring through the shaft’s entrance. He didn’t pull a thermite gren, though. There were precious few of them left. To maximize the body count, he had to wait until the stairwell was fully packed.
He was halfway up the next flight when he saw the door on the landing above swing open. As it banged back and an enforcer jumped out, Mildred was just passing. Instinctively she swung up the Desert Eagle. The creature stuck out its arms to grab her, closing the gap in a single stride. The gold handgun boomed in her hands, spitting a heavy slug and three feet of crackling fire. The slug knocked the enforcer’s head to one side. As it snapped back, the blaze caught, first on its cheek, then shooting across the top of its head. It beat its face, but that only spread the flames to its hands.
As Ryan ducked past, fire engulfed it from the waist up. Blinded, it turned left, missed the first descending step and fell head over heels down the staircase like a burning tumbleweed.
The enforcers coming up from below were gaining ground until that moment. As he turned to go up the next flight, for a split second he could see below him. The creatures had needed to stop and flatten themselves against the opposite wall to keep from being hit and ignited by one of their own.
The breathing room didn’t last long. At the next floor, the stairwell door banged back as he passed it. The enforcers were scenting them, like bloodhounds. He didn’t pause as he turned for the next flight up, but he shouted over the alarm’s wail. “Mildred!”
