Deathlands - The Twilight Children

by James Axler

  They all moved away cautiously, allowing him to sit up and lean against the armaglass walls of the chamber, which were a rich cobalt blue.

  "Everyone else all right?"

  Doc answered for the others. "Unlikely as it may be, my dear Ryan, we all came through this particular jump with colors flying, bands playing, girls scattering flowers and tickertape tumbling."

  Dean nodded. "Hot pipe of a jump, Dad."

  A little unsteadily, Ryan stood, looking around him. "Was I out long?"

  Krysty touched him on the arm. "Couple of minutes. But you were screaming and fighting. Want to tell me about it?"

  "No. Not now and not ever, lover. Best get out and see where we are."

  "I recognize this color," the Armorer said. "These dark blue walls. Reckon we might've been here before."

  "Not me." Mildred ran the flat of her hand over the silk-smooth armaglass.

  "Lovely color."

  It seemed familiar to Ryan, but he couldn't locate it in his memory.

  Chapter Ten

  "The bayous."

  Ryan looked at J.B. "Yeah. You're right. Place we first met up with Jak Lauren."

  He recalled the heat that percolated all the way down through the sec doors of vanadium steel into the heart of the mat-trans unit, and the humidity.

  Bayou country. The Cajuns. Lafayette. Baron Tourment. The swamps and alligators.

  It had been a time of violence, on their previous visit to the place. Oddly, in all the jumps that they'd made, Ryan couldn't recall finishing up in the same redoubt twice. Since they had no real control over the destination of any of their jumps, that had to be a statistical oddity.

  Krysty wiped a tiny bead of perspiration from her upper lip. "Course. Ace on the line there, J.B., remembering that. The dark blue armaglass walls."

  "Unless there's someplace similar." Ryan found his breathing was slowing back to normal, his nightmare erection finally subsided.

  "Don't find heat like this in many parts of Death-lands." J.B. ran a finger round inside the collar of his denim shirt. "We going to take a look outside?"

  "Sure." Ryan tried to recall the layout beyond the control room of the gateway. He had a memory of dense, fetid swamps, with giant skeeters and a broken, rotted causeway over the muddy bayou water.

  "Could be we might meet up with some of Jak's old friends." Krysty's face had a sheen of perspiration. "Get some good fried pork and beans and plenty of fresh spring water. You could hold the pork and the beans, and I'll just settle for the drink. Another half hour of this and I'll have dehydrated down to a little puddle on the floor."

  "Then we'll go take a look."

  Outside the chamber they saw the same notice that they'd seen a number of times before Entry absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat Trans.

  The usual massive sec doors were down and closed, the green lever at the side pointed to the floor. Ryan laid his hand on it and glanced at the others.

  "Ready?"

  Blasters were drawn. J.B. crouched on the floor, gripping the Uzi on full-auto, preparing himself to peer under the lifting doors, in case anyone-or anything-waited outside. It had happened before.

  Ryan noticed that Michael looked a little pale and worried, licking his lips, breathing fast.

  "All right, Michael?"

  "Yes, of course. Just hot and damp, and thirsty as well. What are you waiting for?"

  "Nothing."

  Ryan pushed the lever upward* hearing the familiar grinding sound behind the thick concrete walls of buried gears, as the huge weight of the sec doors began to move.

  He halted it after six or eight inches, giving the Armorer the chance to peek through the gap.

  "Nothing."

  The door lifted smoothly, halting with a hiss of compressed air.

  The corridor outside was about ten feet wide. Pale cream, seamless stone curved to the right. The arched roof about twelve feet high.

  Ryan led the way, noting the sec barriers concealed in the ceiling, and the tiny vid cameras, every forty paces, set in the angle between wall and roof.

  The passage bent around and around, always to the right, confirming Ryan's memory from the previous visit to that particular redoubt that it was going to complete a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

  "Here's the doors," he said. "They open onto the outside, triggered by some kind of remote scope lock. Just walk up to it and it'll open."

  "Lori showed us, didn't she?" Krysty glanced toward Doc, who had once been infatuated with the tall blond young woman.

  "Pretty, sweet child." He shook his head. "In my sleep I still hear the tinkling of those tiny silver bells on her boots. Such a dear girl."

  The room opened off the corridor and was about thirty feet square, with the smudged marks on the blank walls where pictures or posters bad been hung, pulled down in the last dying, rad-blighted days before the long winters.

  Dean had moved alongside his father, and now ran toward the dull metal of the heavy double doors at the far side of the room. For a moment it looked like he was going to bump into them, but at the last moment they began to slide back.

  "Dean!"

  "Yeah?"

  Ryan beckoned for him to take his place in the skirmish line. "Wait here."

  "Thought you'd been here before, Dad. Knew that it was a safe place."

  "Because it was safe then, it doesn't mean that it'll still be safe."

  Krysty patted the boy on the shoulder. "Probably be fine, Dean. We'll soon know."

  The air was much hotter beyond the sliding sec doors, like trying to breathe with a warm cloth over your face.

  Ahead of them, through the enormously wide doorway, they could all see a straight, brightly lighted section of corridor, less wide than the one outside the gateway chamber, that stretched two hundred yards toward a blank steel wall with a single ordinary door set in its center.

  "There's the open country beyond that," Ryan said. "Redoubt's covered with creepers and thick vegetation. We figured that was what kept it safe and hidden."

  "Can I go look, Dad?"

  Ryan touched a hand to the small wound on his neck, wincing at the stinging pain and a swelling that felt tender and badly infected. "No!" he snapped. "Fireblast, Dean, will you just stay where you're told?"

  "Sorry, Dad."

  The one-eyed warrior led the way, the passage seeming to shrink with the noise of everyone's feet. For a moment he nearly turned and snapped at them to be quieter, but managed to control himself. Blowing through his teeth, he decided that his irritation was probably because of the tropical heat.

  His recollection of the redoubt from when they first explored it was that it had been spotlessly clean, with hardly a grain of dust. Now he noticed that the floor was smudged with gray mud, carrying the faint marks of boots,

  On the wall was the single piece of graffiti that he remembered from before, stenciled neatly in olive-green paint on the right-hand section of concrete, just above shoulder-height, the single word Goodbye.

  Ryan reached the door and paused, drawing in a slow breath. He checked that everyone had their guns drawn and ready, then pushed at the door.

  "Opens the other way," J.B. said. "I remember poor old Hennings made that mistake."

  Henn had been a tall black guy off War Wag One, with a lacerating sense of humor. But it had done him no good when a musket ball had struck him just above the right eye.

  It hadn't been all that far away from where they now stood, inside the outer portal to the redoubt.

  Ryan turned the handle and pulled the door toward him, feeling it open easily.

  He took a careful step out, expecting to see the lush vegetation of the bayous.

  The shock of what he saw was so great that Ryan nearly squeezed the narrow trigger of the SIG-Sauer. Behind him he was vaguely aware of J.B. and Krysty gasping in amazement.

  "Upon my soul, what can..." Doc started.

  Dean, Mildred and Michael were less surprised than the others, ne
ver having been to the place before, not having known what to expect there.

  There had been young pecan trees and groves of cypresses, their roots dipping into the water, live oaks and graceful elms, all of them covered in delicate shrouds of Spanish moss, like veiled duennas.

  "Gone," Ryan whispered.

  "Gone," Krysty echoed, standing so close to him that he could feel her breath against his skin.

  "There was bottomless mud." Doc sighed. "Water that became watery mud. I disremember, but I believe I have said this before. Shall I say it again? Yes, I will enter the round Zion of... My apologies, friends. Water into mud. Bottomless. And now, all vanished away. And only we remain."

  The swamps had disappeared.

  Now, as far as they could see ahead of them, was a sunbaked desert. Here and there they could see darker patches that might once have been mud wallows, might once have been small pools. But they could never, by any stretch of the most fervid imagination, have been the endless bayous of old Louisiana.

  "The trees are gone." J.B. leaned a hand against the side of the door, staring out in utter disbelief.

  "It's a different redoubt." Ryan gave a whistle of relief. "Course. That's it."

  "But I remember that single melancholy word on the wall," Doc said. "It struck at my heart with its infinite sadness when I first saw it. And it strikes now. No, my dear friends, this is the same redoubt. But everything else has altered beyond all comprehension."

  There wasn't even the rotting stump of any vegetation to be seen. It was like an infinitely boring succession of rolling dunes, vanishing away in every direction.

  Without any sign of life.

  "Nothing crawled or swam or walked upon the earth or flew above it," Mildred intoned. "I thought that the place we jumped from was drear enough, but this is worse."

  "I'm thirsty, Dad."

  "Stay here a minute. J.B., come with me. Let's take a quick recce."

  Out of the shade of the passage the temperature was broiling, well into the high nineties. The sand shimmered, stinking of decay, giving off waves of sultry heat, the horizon shimmering behind a yellowish haze.

  The sky was the color of bronze, with high banks of cloud obscuring the sun. The Armorer pulled out his mini-sextant and took a bearing on where the light seemed brightest, making quick calculations.

  "Well? Same place, J.B.?"

  "Yeah. Ab out two hundred miles to the west of Norleans. I can't dig this at all, Ryan."

  On an impulse, the one-eyed man checked the rad counter fixed to his lapel.

  "Shit. Look."

  The tiny safety device was showing a dangerously high radiation count, midway between red and orange, slightly closer to the red.

  "Hot spot!"

  The two men looked at each other, both turning away to scan the horizon. Apart from the nondescript low building immediately behind them, there was no sign of any sort of life.

  "Some kind of big rad leak," J.B. suggested. "Mebbe a quake that shifted the land for a hundred miles around. Drained the swamps into the Gulf. Dark night, I don't know!"

  Ryan stared again at his rad counter. "It's moving," he said, "farther into the red."

  None of them really knew how precise the little buttons were. The Trader had found hundreds of them in a warehouse ten years earlier, somewhere around Taos. The label on the box had talked about them being a measuring agent for roentgens, and it was obvious that green meant safe and red meant danger.

  But nobody knew just how dangerous "danger" was.

  "Can't stay." J.B. looked back at their five companions, clustered in the doorway. "Another jump so close to the last one isn't going to be a lot of laughs."

  "Rad sickness isn't a lot of laughs. Have to go for it again." He called to Krysty and the others. "Triple danger on a rad hot spot. Gotta jump."

  "No." Doc looked ill from the heat. "Need to rest awhile."

  "Rest awhile here, Doc, and your teeth fall out, your gums bleed and your liver rots. You'll be able to peel off your skin and hang it in a closet." Mildred patted him on the arm. "Lesser of the evils."

  They made their way quickly back to the chamber, locking the sec doors behind them as they went. They entered the actual gateway, sitting in a sullen, depressed circle within the cobalt blue walls.

  Ryan closed the door and squatted next to Krysty. "Here we go again."

  She held his hand as the mist gathered and the familiar brain-curdling sensation began.

  Ryan's last sentient thought was that the sore place on his neck was throbbing fit to burst.

  Chapter Eleven

  Doc Tanner was the first to come around, blinking open his eyes, rubbing at them where the lids seemed to have gotten themselves gummed together. His gnarled hand grasped at the silver lion's-head handle to his sword stick and he coughed, trying to clear a ball of phlegm that had become lodged somewhere at the back of his throat.

  "By the Three Kennedys!" he croaked, looking around the chamber, realizing that the armaglass walls had changed color, indicating, at the least, that they were somewhere else. "For better or for worse," he whispered, seeing that the other six were still unconscious. "Richer poorer. Health and sickness. Until death or Operation Chronos do us part."

  The rich, deep blue had changed to a light purple.

  The silvered disks in the floor and ceiling of the six-sided room had ceased to glow, and all but the last frail tendrils of white mist had disappeared.

  "I feel amazingly well," he stated. "Life in the old dog yet. Best wine comes in old bottles. Many a fine tune played on an old fiddle. I don't much like the constant repetition of that word 'old.' Senior. A gray panther. Not a wrinklie. Perdition take that one! Mature."

  Doc beard a low moan from the other side of the chamber and looked across to see that Dean was blinking his way toward waking.

  "The oldest and the youngest," Doc said. "Perhaps this is an omen of sorts."

  The boy's face was as white as a wind-washed bone. His dark eyes glittered in the caverns of his skull, and his mouth opened a little way.

  Then he puked.

  He retched and coughed, bringing up nothing more substantial than a few threads of yellow bile.

  "Steady as she goes, lad."

  Doc crawled slowly across to the young boy, wincing as his knees cracked and protested. Dean stopped being sick and looked up at the old man. For a moment his face showed only fear, then he managed a smile.

  "Didn't... Oh, my fucking head! Didn't recognize you, Doc. Just for a minute I thought... Don't... don't know what it was I thought."

  "Rest easy, Dean. Don't sit up until you feel like it. Triple jumps are triple painful." Doc grinned at his own joke. Unfortunately the boy was being sick again and didn't hear it.

  Mildred coughed. She was lying on her right side, both hands thrust between her thighs, like a small child seeking comfort. There was a little crust of blood beneath her nostrils and more showing among the beaded plaits by her left ear.

  "Dr. Wyeth?" Doc crooned. "Are you returning to the land of the bagels? Sorry. I mean the land of the

  angels. Dangling angles." He slapped himself on the wrist. "Shut up, you old fool, Theo."

  Mildred lifted a hand and touched her forehead, sighing, a sound that slipped into a moan. "I'll never drink again, Mama, I promise you."

  "Take it slow," Doc advised her, rubbing his fingers across her temple with surprising gentleness.

  A bloodshot eye winked open, blurred and out of focus, and peered at Doc's face looming above her. "I've died and gone to Hades. Only explanation for seeing you, Doc."

  "Welcome to... To I know not where."

  Dean was sitting up, looking at the others. "Michael and Dad are triple grunge," he said.

  Mildred groaned again. "Sorry. I'm too busy deciding whether to die or not, Dean. Give me a couple of minutes to rejoin the living dead."

  Krysty's voice sounded as though it were drifting up from the bottom of some horrendous abyss. "Living dead, Mildred. Not sur
e about the living bit. Gaia! The only good thing about pain is that your memory of it gets distorted and dimmed. If it didn't then I don't think I would ever... ever make another jump. The price is too high."

  Her crimson hair was curled so tightly around her head that it looked like a silken bathing cap. As Krysty tried to sit up, she slid sideways, banging her face against the wall.