by James Axler
Faster.
Now the faces were blurred as they hissed by, and your eyes betrayed you so that you couldn't quite focus on anything anymore.
Faster.
Theo realized that he was on his own on the smooth polished seat. The other children—his laughing chums—had vanished.
So much faster.
Now there was nothing to be seen, except a swirling, endless smear of colors, the only sound a high whining from the friction of the central pillar, a sound that rose until it passed beyond human hearing, sending farm dogs into hysterical, barking rages.
Doc was aware that he was crying, tears flooding his eyes, running down over the grizzled stubble on his cheeks. His fingers gripped at the bar along the rear of the seats, his lips moving in a silent, pattering prayer.
A rope of saliva dangled from his chin onto his waistcoat. His swordstick, with its silver lion's head hilt, spun away from his feet and disappeared.
It wasn't humanly possible to rotate at such a speed. He was pushed back in the chair, feeling the skin on his face tightened by the whirling force.
Doc began to weep.
And weep.
J.B. DIX SAT crouched over in the dead end of a long, narrow tunnel, holding an empty .25-caliber Bauer automatic. With a neutral satin stainless finish and American walnut grips, the little gun looked much like the Baby Browning.
"Know everything about it," he whispered, holding the cold metal against his cheek. "Made in Fraser, Michigan. Bauer Firearms Corporation. Says so, right here on the side of the barrel in this pretty, incised writing."
The walls of the tunnel were bare earth, running with brackish water. It was two feet and four inches wide and less than three feet from muddy floor to dripping roof.
J.B. tightened his finger on the trigger, knowing what would happen if he squeezed it. There'd be the cold click of the dry-fire, the noise carrying through the lingering stillness far beneath the earth. Bringing them to him.
"Empty," he said.
There was nowhere left.
He couldn't quite recall why he was in the tunnel, or whom he'd been with. There was the memory of a woman. Funny. He knew her name but couldn't remember what she'd looked like.
"Mildred."
The darkness was pressing in on him, suffocating his mind so that it seemed to be melting within his skull. Everything was falling apart, and he knew that he couldn't put it back together again.
"Finished," J.B. whispered laconically.
Now he could hear them.
Soft sounds, far away, like a finger being rubbed over rotting silk, moved toward him.
"Enough." He lifted the delicate metal shell of the Bauer to his face. It was empty, not even a spent cartridge remaining.
J.B. opened his mouth, jumping for a moment as some tiny creature wriggled over his skin, and parted his lips just wide enough to slip the barrel inside.
"Better this way," he mumbled, hearing the sounds drawing closer.
He bit hard on the metal to hold it steady, then pulled the trigger.
The dry click.
"Bang," he said.
J.B. sat alone in the circling blackness and waited.
And waited.
MILDRED WYETH WALKED along empty streets, the heels of her shoes tapping on the dusty concrete. The sound traveled around her, before and behind, like the ripples from a pool-tossed pebble spreading outward.
It was a city that she sort of recognized. Parts of it were familiar, but parts were different—hills where the highway should have been flat; squares instead of shopping malls; office towers where she remembered tree-lined suburban streets.
And all empty.
There was a child's small yellow ball resting in the gutter, and she paused and stared down at it, certain that it must mean something. She stooped to pick it up, then a worm came from the heart of the golden apple. Mildred was conscious of a prickling warmth between her thighs and she wondered where John had gone.
"John?" she called, trying to focus on a face to go with the name, seeing only the glittering blankness of sunlight reflecting off the lenses of metal-rimmed spectacles.
Standing still, she was aware of the silence.
"I don't feel myself," she said.
"A young girl who begins to feel herself will come to a bad end," said a deep, menacing preacher's voice from somewhere above her.
"But if nothing is true than everything is permitted, "she replied.
"Nobody loves a smart-ass."
This voice was different, older and creaky.
Without her being aware of change, the city was gone and she was sitting on a porch in an old rocking chair. It was a hot summer evening, with the cicadas cluttering away from the trees that fringed the garden. A pitcher of homemade lemonade stood on a round table, its sides misted with cool dew beads of condensation.
A little boy was standing beside her, holding a swatch of cloth, a dry, crackling, ivory material that smelled strongly of pitch and cinnamon.
Mildred smiled at him, but the boy didn't respond. He began to wind the cloth around her head and face, masking her eyes, muffling her hearing, choking her with its oppressive heat and scent. She opened her mouth, and the material flooded in, pressing down on her tongue like the shed skin of a serpent.
Her arms and legs felt paralyzed.
Suffocating in darkness, helpless, Mildred sat very still.
DEAN CAWDOR HAD BEEN BORN into fear. There'd been scarcely a single day in his ten years of life where fear hadn't squatted grinning in his shadow.
Fear had come in so many different shapes, lurking behind myriad changing masks. Some pretended to smile, and some offered true friendship. But you looked into the eyes that lay beneath the sockets of the masks and you saw the cold flames of Hell itself burning there.
Some found no need of masks. Their pride, power and pomp was out in the open, naked and lustful.
Dean was more afraid of the smilers with the knives beneath the cloaks.
But all his life he had been taught to live with fear, to conquer it and keep it under control. His mother had always told him that. "A man who lets fear beat him isn't a proper man. He's a cringing, cowering corpse on two legs."
Dean remembered that. As he remembered everything that Rona had taught him.
But she hadn't told him anything about small rooms with walls of thick, golden glass, rooms that filled with humming sounds and whirling, blinding mists, rooms where your head began to slowly turn itself inside out.
The young boy felt sick. His stomach churned, and the taste of bile rose in his throat, making him gag at its seething bitterness.
He was out in the desert, with mesas scarring the horizon. A two-lane blacktop stretched ahead of him, narrowing into a penciled line. Turning his head, he saw the same thing in the opposite direction. The road ran the whole length of a vast, flat valley, farther than the eye could see, both ends disappearing into a blur of heat haze.
Far above him Dean could see a hawk soaring effortlessly on a thermal, its eyes covering the dusty, baked land, watching for the flicker of frightened movement that would mean food.
The boy was waiting.
Waiting where his mother had left him, waiting for the man with one eye to come riding on a gold-and-silver two-wheel wag, a handsome man, tall and straight astride a roaring machine that would take them both off like the hot wind. Dean could imagine locking his arms around his father's waist as they soared effortlessly across the dusty, baked land.
There was something in the boy's pocket, and he took it out to look at it. The object was a shaped prism of crystal, pure and clear, reflecting every color of the rainbow within itself.
Dean held it up to his face, seeing a thousand shimmering images of the red-orange world around him.
But the crystal began to melt, turning warm in his fingers and soft, like the wax of a candle left too near a camp fire. The brightness disappeared as did the sun and the highway.
The wind came up, the wind f
rom the farthest edge of Bible-black, raven's wing beyond, the wind that carries the ice breath from between the stars.
And it entered the boy, sliding like a knife of molten snow into his eyes, ears, nose and mouth. In through the tiny eye of his penis, freezing his groin and his heart.
Dean began to die.
RYAN CAWDOR FELT the familiar symptoms—the queasiness and the cold sweat that gathered at the forehead, dry lips and damp palms. The mist grew more dense from the metal disks, and the humming noise was like a drill probing at the core of his bones.
It was as it had been before.
"Worse," he mumbled.
He experienced the same sucking and whirling of the brain within the skull, making all of the normal functions shut down. He closed his eye, fingers clenching against the nausea.
Something was going wrong. He could hear it and feel it, taste it like iron in his mouth.
With the most enormous effort of will, Ryan fought off the unconscious dreams that had possessed everyone else in the chamber, clawing himself back from the darkness.
Slowly, painfully, he managed to open his good eye again.
Chapter Nine
DARKNESS. A COLD, paralyzing darkness.
Ryan could feel his bile rising in his throat, and he swallowed hard to try to fight it back. The freezing air smelled of fresh-spilled blood.
He closed his eye again, leaning against the chill wall of armaglass, listening, hearing rasping breath and a faint moaning sound—and the distant whirring of a giant turbine running itself down.
The second time he opened his right eye, Ryan realized that the mat-trans chamber wasn't totally jet dark. There was a faint glimmering of light from the metal disks in the ceiling, and a purple glow seemed to shimmer through the main door.
He could just make out the sprawled figures of his four friends and his son.
Grunting with the effort, Ryan managed to get to his knees, then pull himself to his feet. His body felt oddly light, as though someone had tampered with normal forces of gravity. The sickness came flooding back, and he doubled over, retching noisily.
Even that failed to disturb any of the others.
It crossed Ryan's mind that the jump might have been so appalling in its malfunctional effects that it could have brought death.
"Open door," he muttered, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. He propped the G-12 against the wall and took cautious, unsteady steps across the floor. The feeling of unnatural lightness was worse when he was up and moving.
The hand on the steel latch didn't seem to belong to him, and he could just see it in the strange sepulchral light that filtered in from outside. He tightened his fingers, aware of the movements of tendons and ligaments within his wrist and arm.
"Coming out. Get ready."
He stopped, his forehead wrinkling with bewilderment. It hadn't sounded like anyone's voice that he recognized. A man, so that ruled out Krysty and Mildred. Too deep for a boy, so it wasn't Dean. Not the right pitch for Doc, and it hadn't sounded quite clipped enough to be J.B.
Maybe he'd said it himself.
"Coming out. Get ready." Why would he have said that, even in his present confused and brain-fucked mode?
"Outside," he breathed, seeing his breath frosting the cold air in front of him.
In all the jumps they'd made in Deathlands, and the one or two beyond, they'd never come across a gateway with people in it, though a couple of times there'd been the odd feeling of a complex that had been in recent use.
Ryan's fighting mind was beginning to find itself a working level, recovering from the scrambling it had taken.
If there were people beyond the armored door, then they might not be friendly. He remembered one of the Trader's favorite sayings: "Put a hundred strangers in a room and guess how many are friendly. If you're real, real lucky you might find one."
Ryan looked over his shoulders, wondering whether to pick up the Heckler & Koch automatic rifle, deciding it would be too clumsy while he opened the heavy door. His hand went to his belt and drew the piece of metal it found there.
A wave of nausea came clawing up from his guts, churning his brain to oatmeal. Ryan blinked and peered at what he held in his right hand, struggling to make sense of its size and shape.
"Blaster," he whispered.
He slowed his breathing, concentrating on the gun, remembering all the details.
Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft was the SIG part of the name engraved on the side of the pistol. Sauer, J. P. Sauer & Sohn of Eckenforde; the P-226 model; nine millimeter; length was 7.72 inches with the barrel being 4.41 inches; weighed in at 25.52 ounces; fifteen rounds with a push-button mag-release; built-in baffle silencer.
Ryan nodded. That was good. His mind was clear again, and he was ready for whatever lay behind the door. He pressed his ear against the icy armaglass, but it was tomb silent.
A small part of his brain nagged at him, whispering insistently that he'd imagined the words, heard them only through a distorted mind. There wasn't anyone out there.
There was never anyone out there.
Gripping the blaster in his right hand, Ryan slowly eased open the catch with his left hand, hearing the soft, hydraulic kiss of the lock. The light grew a little brighter.
Behind him in the chamber someone stirred and moaned softly.
Very slowly the door inched open. Ryan put his eye to the crack and squinted. There was the usual small room outside, with a second door that stood ajar beyond that, showing him a corner of the main control room with its banks of consoles.
The air still felt light and it tasted stale, as though it had been recirculated too many times. Ryan took in a deep breath—and caught the faint scent of human sweat.
He swallowed, finger tightening on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer.
The door opened a hand breadth more.
"Yo! Out there!" he called. Since they obviously knew the chamber was occupied, there was no point in continuing the standoff. "Want to show yourselves, whoever you are?"
He heard the crackle of an intercom being used, but it was too muffled for him to catch any of the conversation. His keen hearing caught the shuffle of boots, and then the unmistakable click of a blaster being cocked.
Suddenly a blaze of magnesium-bright light exploded around him. An amplified voice boomed through the complex.
"Throw down your blasters and surrender, or you'll all be instant-chilled."
Ryan didn't hesitate. He heaved the sec door closed, knowing that this would be enough to trigger the mat-trans operating function. In the nanosecond before it slammed shut, he saw an odd sight. Out in the control room three or four men leaped into view, all holding silvered blasters, all wearing some sort of uniform with a black stripe down maroon pants and a cream top. Each had some kind of goggled mask concealing his face.
The door was closed and Ryan heard a burst of gunfire, ricocheting off the purple armaglass. The whirring started and the mist began to flood the gateway, but he heard the noise of someone shouting a command to stop blasting.
He turned, grabbed the G-12 and threw himself on the floor, glimpsing the ghostly figure of J.B. standing opposite him. He leaned against the wall, his face as white as ivory, blood trickling from nose, mouth and ears.
"Not again," the Armorer croaked.
But it was way too late for that.
THE FOG SWIRLED through the chamber, penetrating into the depths of Ryan Cawdor's mind, clouding out all of the present and most of the past, taking him into an unknowable future.
He huddled up, loosening his grip on the SIG-Sauer. It fell on the steel floor by his head, with a resonant clanging chord that stretched endlessly on and on. It was the last sound that Ryan carried with him into the painful blackness.
When he began to recover consciousness, he could still hear it ringing inside his head.
Chapter Ten
"FIREBLAST!"
As he lay sprawled on the floor, Ryan realized to his infinite surprise
that he didn't actually feel any worse than he had after the first, abortive jump.
His stomach still ached as though a mule had kicked it, and the inside of his skull was aching as though a stickie had been trying to rip it loose from its moorings.
He'd bitten his tongue, and a little blood trickled from a corner of his mouth.
Krysty groaned and rolled over onto her back. Her green eyes were unfocused, and her sentient red hair was curled tightly over her scalp. "That was the triple-pits, lover," she said, her voice sounding unusually hoarse.
"Worse than you know," he said. "And weird. There was an intermediate stop along the line."
J.B. came around next and wiped the blood from his face as he sat up. He took out his spectacles and perched them carefully on the bridge of his narrow nose. "I had this dream that I was in a tunnel under the earth and then I stood up and you were there, Ryan, slamming the door. Purple walls and a bright light. What was real and what wasn't?"
Ryan noticed two things. The armaglass had changed color, from purple to a delicate shade of blue-green, and the cold had gone. The air was much warmer and humid.
"We stopped when the first jump went wrong, and we finished up someplace else."
"What's that mean? In Deathlands?"
Ryan shook his head, immediately regretting the movement, and pressed his fingers to his throbbing temples. "Sorry, lover… No, I don't think it was in Deathlands at all."
"Back in Russkie territory?"
"No, J.B., not there, either. Just somewhere odd. There were people there, like sec guards. Uniform and masks. Tried to chill us."
Mildred was back with them. "Tried to chill us? Why? Who were they?"
Ryan chose to keep to himself the strange feeling that gravity had been lighter than usual, even though it fitted in with a theory that he'd been wondering about for several months.
"Don't know. Probably we'll never know. But this second jump was better. How d'you feel?"
The doctor grinned. "Felt better. Then again, I've felt worse. That first one was a real son of a bitch. How's Doc? And the kid?"
