by James Axler
“We can’t stay down here forever,” he told her. “There is no food and no water. The power is going to run out eventually, and when that happens we’ll be trapped here in the dark. We’ll never escape.”
“Okay, I get that, and you’re right. But what about the force field? We’re stuck in here.”
“The off-switch has to be inside the battlesuit glove,” he said. He bent over Auriel’s body, and after some gentle fumbling, found the release button for her right gauntlet.
When he pulled it onto his own hand it was still warm inside from Auriel’s body heat. The sensation filled him with a crushing wave of sadness. Ryan shook off the unsettling upwelling of emotion, pointed the index finger at the force field and waited.
Like magic, the field fell.
“What now?” Ti asked as they warily stepped out into the corridor.
He dropped the glove to the floor. He couldn’t blame her for shooting Auriel. She had done the right thing, the only thing, for all concerned. “We’re going to look for survivors,” he said. “And then find a way out.”
They cautiously but steadily climbed up the spiral passage, until they reached the clot of exploded miners and whitefaces. The remains were so pureed that they were unidentifiable even as human.
Ryan picked up a tribarrel from the floor, where it lay against the base of the wall. Probably the one Ronbo had been carrying, he thought. One side of the weapon, barrels to buttstock, was slick with red fluid and textured with flecks of bone. He wiped it off with his palm, sweeping the residue to the ground.
He and Ti continued upward. When they reached the laboratory, they had another look inside. It was still unoccupied.
Ryan waved the woman over to the lab’s computer screen. The remote cameras at the mine’s entrance showed the companions and whitefaces cutting their way into the shaft with captured tribarrels.
“Help is coming,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here.”
As they advanced up the main passage, both of them began shouting for people to come out of hiding, telling them that the immediate danger was past, and that they had to work together to get out while they still had operational lights.
Slowly, pale faces began to appear at the entrances to the mine’s side passages ahead of them. Then the slaves who had lived through the specters’ attack staggered out into the shaft.
Ryan counted just fourteen survivors; none of them were whitefaces.
“We need to gather up all the tribarrel rifles the cockroaches dropped,” he told them. “We’re going to use them to burn our way out of here.”
As they moved toward the entrance, full of high spirits and new purpose, the miners went through each of the blaster emplacements, turned over bodies and looted the laser weapons.
When they got to the floor-to-ceiling barrier, Ryan sensed the wind going out of their sails. Great slabs of glass were mixed with the boulders and rubble—all of it razor-sharp, and some of it teetering on the verge of avalanche.
He called the miners with weapons forward, and ordered the rest of the people to stand well back and against the tunnel’s side walls.
“Rescuers are coming toward us from the other side,” he said. “They’re using lasers to melt through the glass. With any luck, we’ll meet them in the middle. If you don’t know how to power up these weapons, this is the button here that does the trick…”
He hit the tribarrel’s power button and armed the weapon system.
When the three slaves had their tribarrels humming, he said, “We’ll start at a single point, focus all our beams on it, and work out from there. We’re going to have to cut a fairly large hole, otherwise the glass melt is going to fall on us while we work.” He turned to the people along the walls. “Make sure you stay back from the center of the floor,” he warned them, “because the molten glass is going to flow out of the hole we’re cutting and there’s going to be a lot of it.”
Ti appeared by his side, holding up a strip of rag. She said, “Better cover your nose and mouth with this. You don’t want to breathe in the smoke that comes off the melting nukeglass.”
After tying the mask in place, he braced the tribarrel against his hip and pressed the trigger. A fine green beam shot from the muzzle and stuck the barrier. The glass immediately began to smoke, then drip like hot, green-gray candlewax. The others fired their weapons at his impact point, and the drip suddenly became a splashing fountain.
Boring through the collapse was sweaty, dirty work and not just because of the caustic black smoke. Even after the glass had solidified, it radiated sweltering heat. Ryan and the other men carved out a roughly rectangular tunnel, foot by foot, yard by yard. The laser beams fused together the loose material, so the five-foot-wide walls and ceiling didn’t fall in on them.
The laser weapons’ power was just starting to give out when Ryan caught sight of a shifting green light on the other side of the blockage.
The light was growing brighter.
Ryan waved for the miners to get back. “The other side is going to be breaking through any second,” he told them. “We have to get out of the way or those beams are going to cut us, too.”
After they’d cleared the entrance to the passage they’d made, he shouted through it to the companions, “You’ve got about four more feet to go!”
Moments later, blinding green beams sliced through the last of the barrier, stabbing deep down the shaft for hundreds of yards.
“Everybody stay put!” Ryan shouted when the tribarrels ceased fire. “The hole has to cool off.”
Waiting was hard. The slaves were champing at the bit to put the depths of hell behind them forever.
Ryan let everyone else go first. He came out of the hole after Ti, under the blazing kliegs and the dark night sky, into the open air and endless space, and found himself locked in the passionate embrace of a lovely, long-legged woman.
Ryan and Krysty held each other for a long moment. When she relaxed her grip, he noticed that she was staring fixedly at the little auburn-haired former slave, who was staring right back.
“That’s Ti,” Ryan said. “She was a prisoner here. She was a big help in getting us all out. Ti, this is Krysty.”
The two women acknowledged each other with nods of the head, but didn’t exchange words of greeting.
The other companions surrounded Ryan, slapping him on the back and smiling from ear to ear.
“Where’s Burning Man?” he asked.
J.B. pointed toward the former jump zone. “The baron’s that big wet spot over there, on the other side of the processer,” he said. “Whitefaces might want to scrape it up and put it in a jar to take home.”
“He was the last of the invaders,” Doc said. “The last of the conquistadores.”
“Good riddance to ’em all,” J.B. spit.
Ryan took in the carnage scattered across the width and breadth of Ground Zero. At what cost? he thought. Bodies and parts of bodies were strewed everywhere. “Buzzards are going to have quite a picnic come sunup,” he said.
“No picnic,” Mildred said. She gestured back toward the mine entrance. “It was already decided. There’s going to be a mass burial.”
Ryan saw whitefaces and ex-slaves pushing emptied ore carts out of the mine and onto the massif. Tenderly, they lifted their dead into the cargo boxes, and then they ferried them back across the glass into the depths of the mine.
It took a long time to collect all the bodies and move them belowground. When that was done, the companions chucked the drained tribarrels into the shaft. Then the whitefaces used the last of their homemade explosives to demolish the ore processor and reseal the mine entrance.
As the smoke and dust of the final explosions blew past the banks of lights, across the desolate wasteland, Krysty said, “This place was never meant for humans to see.”
“No human will ever have a reason to see it again,” Mildred said.
“A place forever cursed, forever avoided,” Doc agreed. “There will always be
evil lurking in this spot. Terrible evil and terrible sorrow.”
“More than you ever know,” Jak remarked cryptically.
“Jak, do you know something that we don’t?” Mildred asked. “What do you mean?”
“Mean nothing,” the albino youth said. He turned his back to all of them and stared across the ruin. He didn’t say another word.
BECAUSE THEY HAD to wait until daybreak to start the long walk out of Ground Zero, the companions and the other survivors searched the pits for dry places to sleep.
In an open hole, under the glare of the klieg lights, Ryan and Krysty huddled together, face-to-face, locked in each other’s arms to stay warm. She kissed him softly on the mouth, and as she did, the tips of her prehensile hair clung to and stroked the sides of his neck.
“When the entrance blew up,” she said, her lips a half inch from his, “I didn’t think anybody could have survived.”
“The rest of the whitefaces didn’t,” he said.
“I thought I’d lost you.”
“Not a chance.”
“Should I be jealous of that little cutie with the AK? You know you have a thing for redheads.”
“For one redhead in particular,” he said.
Her emerald eyes flashed with pleasure. “When are you going to tell me what really happened down there?” she said.
Ryan said nothing.
“It was something triple-bad, wasn’t it?” she went on. “I can see it in your face. You can’t hide something like that from me, lover. I know you too well.”
Ryan still said nothing.
“You have to tell me what happened.”
“The cockroaches got themselves contaminated again,” he said. “Only with something much worse than what they picked up in Deathlands the last time they dropped in. They brought the contamination with them to Deathlands when they jumped here. I can’t really even describe it to you, except that down in the mine it killed all of the she-hes and a lot of innocent people, too. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.
“Krysty, some things just aren’t meant to be. No matter how much we want them to happen, no matter how hard we fight or how much we pray, we aren’t in control of events. The she-hes thought they were in charge, and they learned the hard way that they weren’t. Turns out the only thing we can control is our own thoughts. And honestly, I don’t want to think about this, now.”
He paused for a long moment, then said, “You know, I really miss my boy…”
“I know, lover. I miss Dean, too.”
She squeezed him so tight he thought his heart would break. And then he told her about Auriel.
Epilogue
Big Mike acted like he was invisible. Something impossible, even ridiculous, for a man of his size and bulk had the whiteface warriors’ attention not been focused elsewhere. As his captors charged through the gap in the ridge, heading for the bright lights of Ground Zero, he simply moved slower than they did. While he pretended to keep up, he actually slipped farther and farther back in the mob.
When there was no one else behind him, he turned and ran in the opposite direction, toward the darkness, hoofing it hard down the road to Slake City. Getting away was so easy, he had to stifle the urge to laugh.
The blasterfire and explosions had already started by the time he reached the limit of the kliegs’ illumination. When he entered the shadows he knew that he’d made it to safety. Because he couldn’t see more than a few feet of the road ahead, because he wasn’t in good physical shape, he had to drop his pace to a walk. He didn’t stop, though. He wanted to put a lot more distance between himself and Ground Zero—just in case the cockroaches decided to send out a hunting party before dawn.
The battle at his back grew more and more intense. The booms of explosives overlapped, and the clatter of blasterfire was constant. Big Mike did a happy little turn in the middle of the road, a dance-move pirouette on the toes of his boots. Pleased as punch, he was. A consummate actor, at least in his own mind, he had played dumb and defeated. He had waited for his main chance and when it appeared, he had seized it. In a matter of minutes, all the whitefaces and Ryan and friends would be laying in chunks on the glass of Ground Zero. This while Big Mike lived to enjoy another Deathlands sunrise.
As he continued walking, taking careful, deliberate steps, he began to visualize a brilliant new career, a new future for himself. He had no hands, but he still could talk. And he had the gift of gab. He saw himself as a Firetalker, perhaps installed as a featured part of the live entertainment in an upscale gaudy house. A mug perpetually clutched in his prosthetic fingers, and perpetually topped off with premium joy juice. Free rides on the ponies whenever business was slow. And oh, the stories he had to tell, all with the same central theme—how much more clever he was than everyone else.
How Big Mike had outplayed hundreds of whitefaces.
How Big Mike had escaped the deadly alien menace.
The sounds of battle continued to rage behind him, a counterpoint to his lurid imaginings.
And then he just couldn’t hold back his exuberance any longer. Braying with laughter, he closed his eyes, and holding his pancaked hat down on his head with his prosthesis, cut a series of wild dance turns. And as he did, he tripped and inadvertently blundered off the shoulder of the road.
When he opened his eyes, he stopped himself short. He knew he hadn’t veered far off course, but he couldn’t see anything, and he didn’t know which direction he’d come from, so he couldn’t retrace his steps.
“Oh, shit,” he moaned.
Big Mike stood frozen in place, trying to figure out which way to go. The terrain around him was treacherous beyond belief, a veritable minefield of very nasty ways to die. He looked up at the stars and realized that if he had bothered to check them before he got lost they might have given him his bearings. Now they were useless.
It was amazing how quickly someone remarkably clever could turn into a triple-stupe droolie.
One thing was for sure, he couldn’t stay where he was until daybreak; he had to be much farther away from Ground Zero by sunup. Like a tightrope walker, arms outstretched to keep his balance, he began to shuffle his boots and move forward on the glass, a foot or so at a time.
The surface he traversed offered precarious footing—knobs of melted glass, knives and sawteeth blocked his path. With his toes he felt for cracks in the surface. Between the roar of explosions in the distance, he could hear the massif moving, creaking, sighing, snapping around him. Using the stars as a guide, he tried to at least maintain a straight course over the broken ground. The idea of circling endlessly over this landscape terrified him.
Then, as Big Mike looked up to check his position against the carpet of stars, he saw a towering, shadow shape to his left. He remembered walking past a ruined, glass-encased building on the trek in. It stood within a hundred feet of the edge of the road. Awash with relief, he began shuffling doggedly in that direction.
When the ground gave way beneath him, it did so without warning. With a shriek of splitting glass, a crevasse suddenly yawned underfoot, far too broad to jump. As he started to drop he somehow managed to twist his body and throw his arms over the edge of the break. This slowed but didn’t stop his fall.
If he’d still had hands, he might have pulled himself out. But he couldn’t hold on. He slipped backward on the down-tilted plate, then dropped from its edge, bouncing off the sides of the chasm as he plummeted downward.
Big Mike crashed in a heap, the air knocked out of him. He had no idea how far he’d fallen. And it was so dark he couldn’t see his artificial hand in front of his face. There was an awful pain in his lower stomach. When he reached down and touched it with his bare stump, it was wet, and there was some kind of stuff hanging out.
Coils of stuff.
“Oh, crap,” he wailed.
He frantically tried to push his guts back in with the prosthetic hand and stump of a wrist. They wouldn’t stay inside; they kept flopping back out.
Final
ly, he just gave up. He was so tired, more tired than he had ever been, and growing so very cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. Even the excruciating pain in his stomach was fading away. Wedged in at the bottom of the crevasse, in the blackest of black pits, he sensed a gradually building glow around him, and dim shapes moving at its verge.
Hopeful to the last, Big Mike said, “Mommy? Mommy, is that you?”
DR. HUTH WAITED, hidden in a side crevice of the helix until he was fairly sure the killing around him was over. The screams and the dull whumps of exploding bodies had long faded away. His helmet visor’s infrared mode showed an absence of specters passing in front of the vertical opening, a turn of events that he found remarkable. Something clearly had happened, something unexpected.
Levering himself out of the narrow crack, he climbed the spiral, making for his lab. He paused a few times en route to listen for footsteps or voices, and hearing nothing he hurried on.
When he reached the cell, he headed straight for the computer monitor. Adjusting the view of the remote cameras with a few deft keystrokes, he took in the entirety of Ground Zero. He was astonished to discover that some of the Deathlanders had actually survived the battle. Then he saw the jump machinery was gone. Obliterated.
And suddenly everything fell into place.
The connection that had so eluded him had been there in plain sight all along. Dredda, then Auriel, had kept the jump machinery in suboperational mode ever since the first encounter with the specters. That meant the corridor between universes was never one hundred percent closed. It was the idling jump machinery that had provided a link, an open portal to the Null through which they had passed. Without it, the specters couldn’t have reached into this or any other universe.
A simple, elegant solution.
Now that he had figured it out, he found it rather amusing and droll. They’d left the jump machinery running so they could get away from the specters at the drop of a hat, but leaving the machinery on is what had allowed them in.
To end the threat, all they had to do was shut down the system and break the link to the Null.
