by James Axler
"Dean, "he said.
"What is it, Ryan?"
"Just… take care."
The boy smiled. "I will, Dad."
"TROUBLE IS, IT'S BLACKER than a stickie's soul down there." J.B. was on hands and knees. He looked around as Ryan rejoined them.
"Clear up top, but the gang's gathering. We'd better move."
"I don't want to make the first tie-off out here. Too bastard vulnerable. One knife cut, and we'll have us about four and a half seconds to think about eternity."
"And kiss our asses goodbye," Mildred muttered. "Christ, friends, but I surely wish that this was over and I in my bed again."
"I'd like that very much," J.B. said quietly.
"Better move before we get company down here." Ryan glanced behind them, listening for any threatening noise. Nothing.
Doc had also been staring into the void. "Is there no other way to get at the gateway? I fear that the journey thither seems beyond the realms of possibility."
"You can always stay here, Doc," Krysty said, patting him on the arm. "You'll be fine. Be over before you know it."
"Yes," he replied, drawing out the syllable. "That is what concerns me, my dear."
"How we doing this if it's much longer than the rope?" The boy had gone to the brink of the shaft, looking fearlessly into it.
J.B. finished knotting the cords. "Long as we can find something partway down to tether to we're fine. Use a release knot up here. All get down and wait. Then tie off and do it again. Three times should do it."
"Yeah… but…"
"What, kid?"
"Don't call me 'kid,' please. What if there's nowhere on the way down to rest?"
Ryan smiled at his son. "Then we fight our way out of here and find some other place."
Above them they all heard a muffled shout and stones clattering. J.B. looked around at his friends, "Time to go, people."
Chapter Six
DEAN PLUCKED AT Ryan's sleeve.
"What?"
"How about him?"
"Who?"
"The old man."
"Doc? What about him?"
"He won't get down a rope."
"Why not?"
"Too old. I never seen anyone old as him. How come he's not dead?"
Doc had good hearing, and he caught the end of the exchange. "I often ask myself the same question, young friend. But worry not. One day I shall explain to you all the facts about my true age. I'll get down the rope as well as you."
Dean sniffed, not bothering to conceal his considerable disbelief.
"Right." The voice of the Armorer was muted, reaching them from inside the top of the shaft.
"Got it tied?"
"Yeah. Plenty of shit around here to use. Old winding gear. Might not be so easy farther down. I'll go first. Rest of you follow when I call. Not before."
"Mildred first?" Ryan looked at her.
She nodded. "Sure. Used to wow them in gym classes with my rope climbs. Going down should be easier."
"Brace it between your feet. Hand over hand. Don't slide. Whatever you do, don't slide."
She grinned at him. "See you down there."
"Wait for the word," Ryan said. "Doc, you next. Then you, Dean. Krysty and then me last."
"I confess that I've never really been all that good at heights, my dear Cawdor."
"Fastest you can go is about a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, Doc. What they call terminal velocity," Mildred whispered. "And in three hundred feet you won't get anywhere near that speed."
"Your so-called sense of humor, madam, is about as funny as undergoing an urgent appendectomy at the hands of a blindfolded, drunken gorilla."
Mildred paused in the damaged doorway and blew him a kiss. "Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye," she said.
Dean tugged at Ryan's sleeve. "I can hear them up top. Be here soon."
"Yeah. Better give them something to think about, huh?"
The boy grinned.
J.B.'s voice came from the echoing shaft. "Ready in here."
"You get moving," Ryan said. "I'll just wait awhile."
The Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless rifle was set on triple-burst. Single shot would be less effective, and full-auto a waste of precious ammo.
Ryan moved, light-footed, to the bottom of the flight of stairs, picking a position to the right, under an alcove. Hidden in a block of dark shadows, he watched as the others pushed their way past the elevator sec doors and reached for the dangling lengths of rope.
Krysty was last.
She gently shepherded the young boy in front of her, patting him on the shoulder to encourage him into the freezing chasm. Her eyes, glittering emerald in the dim light, turned toward Ryan's hiding place.
"Don't take too long, lover," she called quietly. Then she eased herself past the dull metal of the doors and out of his sight.
Ryan was only too aware of how intensely vulnerable their position was. If any of the gang in the street above came down from the ice-shrouded rubble while they were still climbing on the thin cords, then life would become very brief and bloody.
The one-eyed man waited.
A tiny pebble, hardly larger than a grain of dust, came skittering down the flight of steps, reaching the bottom and rolling from sight.
They were on their way.
The tip of Ryan's tongue flicked out and ran across his dry lips. Now he could hear whispering, the shuffle of boots on concrete, the rasp of clothes, once the dry sound of a blaster being cocked. Even a muffled cough.
Ryan's finger tightened, putting a couple more ounces of pressure on the release mechanism.
The shadow of the first of the invaders was edging along the steps, sliding down toward the floor, then was joined by a second. The whispering voices carried clearly to Ryan.
"Fuck gone."
"Look, sec doors."
"Hey…blown fuckin' open. Must have good blasters for that."
"More stairs?"
"Gotta be."
"Follow 'em."
"Yeah." The shadows moved quickly toward the warped sec doors to the elevator shaft.
"No," Ryan Cawdor snarled.
As a firefight, it never even got close to first base.
Ryan drew a bead on the shoulders of the leader of the gang, aiming at the center of the clenched white fist daubed on the back of the tattered jacket.
He squeezed the trigger and felt rather than heard the triple concussion, the three rounds so close together they sounded like a single shot.
He wasn't even watching as the teenager was flung forward by the hammering impact of the caseless bullets, his chest exploding with gobbets of flesh and shards of white, splintered bone.
Ryan shifted his aim, his finger tightening repeatedly on the trigger.
Twelve rounds were spit out in less than four seconds, and the first quartet of the white-fist gang was clinically dead in the dirt at the bottom of the stairs.
Only now did Ryan move from his hiding place, darting to one side so that he could see up the old staircase.
There were four or five more of the skinny youths, only one holding a blaster. Ryan shot him through the throat, the bullets also killing the lad behind him.
The others dropped their knives and ran screaming up and out into the street beyond.
Ryan considered going after them, but he mastered the killing urge. Slinging the rifle across his shoulders and moving past the jumble of bodies, he squeezed through the narrow gap in the doors and reached for the knotted rope.
WHEN THE ELEVATOR CAGE had tumbled down the shaft, trailing its snapped cables behind, it had done considerable damage to the interior of the shaft. Some of the rusted supports had come away from the sides, leaving a number of places where they could all rest in comparative safety before pulling down the rope from its release knot above. It would then be retied and the procedure repeated.
"Going to have to get through the remains of the elevator," J.B. said. "Must be wrecked down at the bottom."
"Shouldn't be that difficult." Ryan tried to see into the stygian pit. "Face it when we get there."
The only serious problem that confronted them was the ice. During the time that they'd been in the ville of Newyork there'd been a lot of snow and rain. It had seeped through and run down the inside of the shaft, coating everything in a hard, glassy layer.
It was difficult to fix the ropes, and Ryan had to use the eighteen-inch blade of his panga to chip away at the ice, sending hundreds of tiny diamond splinters cascading to the bottom of the shaft.
Despite the problems, they eventually made it safely down. There'd been some alarms and diversions on the way, the worst of them being Doc Tanner's boots slipping as he abseiled down. For some unaccountable reason this left him dangling upside down, swinging slowly and majestically like an antiquated pendulum.
It was Dean who shinned down the narrow cord to help the old man, hanging on by one hand while he tugged him the right way up. He allowed Doc time to recover his equilibrium, then carried on to the next tethering point with him.
When Ryan came down last, Doc still had his arm around the ten-year-old. It was hard to tell who was pretending to comfort whom.
THE THREE-HUNDRED-FOOT fall had smashed apart the passenger compartment of the elevator like a matchstick box. The roof had split back like a peeled orange, and the sides had impacted and fragmented. The whole cage was less than three feet high, giving them all a chilling glimpse of what their fate would have been if they'd failed to escape the drop.
One by one they picked their way through the devastated heap of twisted metal and plastic into the passage beyond.
Ryan was the last one out of the shaft, and he paused for a moment as he heard faint echoing shouts above them. He strained his head back and peered toward the tiny pinprick of silver light, but he couldn't see anything.
As he joined the others, they all heard a series of rumbling crashes as lumps of masonry were heaved down the shaft.
"Close, lover," Krysty commented.
"Not close enough," Ryan replied, grinning.
THE COMPANIONS WALKED down a staircase and then along a curving passage, its walls hewn from living rock. Bare quartz glittered in the darkness.
The overhead lights seemed even more faint than they'd been a few days ago. J.B. led the way through the control area and into the anteroom next to the gateway entrance.
Dean hung back, his face turned up to his father's. "We have to go in there?"
"Only way out of here."
"You sure I'll be safe?"
Ryan knelt by his son. "It's unpleasant and it can be dangerous. I won't lie to you about that. But it'll get us someplace else. And whatever happens, happens to all of us."
The boy smiled, reaching out to take Ryan's hand. "Then let's go."
Chapter Seven
"HOW'S IT—"
"Just sit down here, back against the wall, like the others."
The boy looked around. Doc was squatting to his left, cross-legged, knees cracking like muskets. Krysty was making herself comfortable beyond Ryan. Next was Mildred, leaning back, an expression of unease on her face. J.B. was last around, taking off his spectacles and folding them carefully before tucking them into one of the pockets of his capacious coat. He caught Dean's eye and winked at him.
"Doesn't take long," he said.
"Sure," Mildred agreed. "It's like banging your skull against a wall, Dean. Terrific when you finally stop."
Ryan patted the boy on the head. "Ignore them. You'll feel a bit dizzy and maybe a bit sick. You black out. We all do. Nothing to worry about."
"How does it work?"
Krysty laughed. "Work that one out for us, Dean, and you'll get the biggest ace on the line ever. Last person who knew the answer to that probably died off around a hundred years ago."
Ryan moved to the heavy door, hesitating with his hand on it. "All we know is that we shut this and there's a kind of humming noise and a sort of mist. And then we're someplace else."
"Could we be someplace… dead?"
Ryan shook his head. "Never happened yet. Everyone ready? Here we go."
He tugged the door shut, hearing the familiar solid click of the locking mechanism. He moved into the space beside his son and sat down, stretching his legs out ahead of him, pressing back against the cold, golden armaglass.
The metal disks in the floor and ceiling began to shimmer, and tendrils of pale fog came ghosting out of the empty air. A distant humming sound, like a thousand hives of bees in a far-off valley, began to filter into the chamber.
"My head hurts, Ryan," Dean said, pressing his hands over his ears.
"Soon be over."
He could feel the whole thing vibrating against his spine, more strongly than he remembered, quivering like War Wag One tackling a deep incline. The humming grew louder.
On one side Krysty was reaching for his hand, shouting something he couldn't hear. On the other side Dean was screaming, high and shrill. Ryan glanced down and saw that a thin caterpillar of dark venous blood was trickling from the boy's nostrils.
Doc was halfway across the polished floor, hands out toward Ryan like claws. The old man's pale rheumy eyes were staring blindly, almost as though someone were behind them, trying to press them out of the sockets. Blood seeped from the corners of Doc's open, mutely screaming mouth.
Mildred had fallen sideways, her face as gray as parched soil, her knees drawn up to her chest in an agonized fetal curl.
J.B. was trying to get to his feet, reaching toward the locked door, but the wraiths of cloud were now so thick inside the chamber that he'd become almost invisible.
The vibration was getting worse and worse, and Ryan could feel a jolting within his spine, as though a steel rod were being rotated in the core of each individual vertebra.
There was a voice inside his head, a harsh, slow voice, with a grating Louisiana accent. "Does the controlling control need control?"
Ryan knew that something had gone appallingly wrong.
And he knew that it was too late to do anything about it. His final sentient thought was to reach out with both hands—one toward Krysty and the other toward his son. . Then came blackness.
Then light.
Chapter Eight
KRYSTY STOOD ON tiptoe, the rock warm and rough beneath her bare feet, the sun hot across her shoulders, glowing over her bare breasts, rousing her taut nipples. She flexed the muscles that tightened along the back of her thighs, into the firm buttocks. Lifting her arms slowly, she looked out across the lake of azure water toward the snow-tipped peaks in the distance.
She breathed in slowly, filling her lungs with the cold thin air of the high country, tasting sagebrush and the sharp scent of balsam from the ocean of dark pines on the mountains around. She didn't look down.
The drop to the water was more than fifty feet, a gasping exhilaration as you sprang out, a second and a half of freedom before your arms sliced the icy water apart and the shock of plunging beneath the surface.
The lake was several miles from Harmony ville, and few ever bothered to take the long, winding trail. The area was known to harbor a number of savage mutie grizzlies and her uncle, Tyas McCann, had warned her to take the greatest care.
But she refused to carry a blaster, relying instead on her own power of "seeing" to warn her of the proximity of any harmful creature.
Mother Sonja had told her how to behave if she encountered one of the forest behemoths—try to make oneself small and back slowly away; don't make any challenging eye contact with the beast. The chances were very good that it wouldn't go after someone unless it felt threatened.
That thought came to Krysty as she readied herself for the dive. And freedom.
This time was different. There was no sensation of the swooping plunge into the lake.
Krysty had closed her eyes in an almost sexual anticipation of the moment. Now she opened them, blinking in disbelief, almost blinded by the platinum sheen of the sun dazzling into her face.
<
br /> She hung there, maybe eight feet out from the cliff top. Stasis, a stillness.
Finally she looked down,
To where the mirrored surface of the lake should have been. Instead there were jagged rocks, like red-orange spears and daggers, gathered beneath her, waiting to accept her fragile skin, flesh and bone and crush and tear them to bloodied flags.
Motionless in space, not daring to try to move so much as a finger, Krysty Wroth began to scream.
And scream.
DOC TANNER FELT the familiar, sickening sensation as the gateway began to function. It seemed as though the inside of his skull were being fluffed and folded, his brain being sucked and scraped out of the familiar creases and wrinkles of moist bone.
He'd been five years old, still living in South Strafford, a tiny hamlet in the wilds of Vermont. During the harvest a traveling medicine show had come through, a poor, threadbare group, selling quack cure-alls from the back of a rickety Conestoga wagon. The outfit was led by an old man with a patch over one eye and his younger wife, a handsome black woman with plaited hair. Their daughter had danced for money thrown by the local rubes. She'd been a tall girl, with a mane of scarlet hair that whirled about her brocaded shoulders as her bare feet skimmed the mown grass.
There'd been another child, Doc remembered, hiding in the shadowy depths of the rig, peeking out now and again through eyes like molten rubies. The boy had been an albino with milky skin and hair like the finest sierra snows.
And there'd been a merry-go-round, operated by a small, wiry man who had a pince-nez with golden frames. It was simply a circle of seats surrounding a central pillar, garishly painted with designs that seemed to have their origins in the Mexican celebrations for the dead—yellow skulls and gibbering skeletons; fleshless fingers that beckoned to the excited children as the carousel whirled them around and around.
The little man spun it by hand, slowly at first.
So that little Theo Tanner and the others could see their watching mothers' faces going by, could take in the long straight street of the village with its sharp bend at the northernmost point and all around the endless undulating carpet of trees.
