by James Axler
Already the figure in the protective gear was tracking Ricky across the room. The kid glanced up, seeing his own face reflected dully in the plastic faceplate on the man’s suit. The yellow man raised his right arm again, sending another pulse across the room. Ricky rolled out of its path, his body spinning across the plastic-coated deck. Behind him, something struck one of the machines and for a moment it seemed to sing as its dials went wild.
Knife in hand, Ricky pounded across the deck toward the mysterious figure, slashing at the air with his stolen blade. The man in the protective suit sidestepped with impossible swiftness, his body shimmering from one position to the next, faster than Ricky’s eye could follow.
Sure you’re fast, Ricky thought irritably, but can you outrace a bullet?
Still low to the floor, Ricky sprung to Jak’s side, snatching up the blaster he held limply in his right hand. Ricky raised the weapon without effort, its sleek lines becoming an extension of his hand, the eight-inch barrel an accusing finger.
“Don’t move,” Ricky ordered, a slight tremor in his voice.
The figure in the radiation suit eyed him through his protective visor, anonymous beneath its dark tint. He was twelve feet away, attached by the metal-link umbilical to the room’s machinery. He said nothing, instead waiting for Ricky’s next move. He outmatched this intruder ten times over, his experience stretching back further than the kid could even hope to guess.
“Now,” Ricky said, catching his breath, “you’re going to tell me exactly where we are. Then—”
The figure in the protective suit moved in a blur, knocking Ricky backward into the wall with such speed that he hadn’t even seen the move. Ricky sagged down to the deck, bringing the Colt around to fire on his attacker. His head seemed to sing with pain from the impact with the wall.
“No...” Ricky spit, his mouth filling with blood. “You’re not going to—”
The figure in the protective suit moved again, limbs blurring, sending another blast into Ricky’s chest with the power of a hurricane. The kid was thrown back, his feet giving way under him, his whole body rising off the floor and dancing backward through the air until he struck the wall once more. The blaster fell from his hand and crashed to the deck, followed a moment later by Ricky and the knife. He was no longer moving, no longer conscious.
Satisfied, the figure in the protective radiation suit turned back to his work at the vast complex of machinery that crammed the room. And for just a moment, one of his shadows seemed to flicker.
Chapter Twenty-One
They walked for a time that felt close to an hour, six figures huddled against the cold, the chill wind returning with a vengeance as they got a little closer to the clutch of buildings hidden by the fog. Ryan wondered if this was all a big mistake, but Doc seemed in high spirits, regaling the others with stories of his youth back in the 1800s. Listening to the tales, Ryan and the others were reminded of how much Doc had lost, transported to the Deathlands via a time trawl activated by the cruel whitecoats of the twentieth century, treated with all the dignity of a lab rat. If Doc cared, he refused to dwell on the fact.
As they moved farther through the dead zone, the wind around them began to pick up, howling through the clumps of trees as they trekked past them. There was still a significant distance to go until they reached the first of the buildings. J.B. calculated that the nearest was still an hour’s walk away, and that assumed that the weather didn’t worsen.
A clutch of trees lay in the road ahead, dead things with black bark and a smattering of moss and snow running across them. One of the trees had fallen across the road itself, forcing the companions to move around and past it. Ryan assessed the route in a moment. To the left, a banked ridge of snow rose eight feet above the road. To the right, a trench had been scooped out where the tree’s roots had been yanked free. Just past that, a crevasse cut through the land, its jagged rent twenty feet across.
“Anyone else feel that?” Mildred gasped, clutching Nyarla’s arm.
“Quake,” J.B. stated.
Around them, the snow rippled and began to tumble from the high-banked slope, bumping down it in a powdery cascade. In a moment it had turned into a full-blown avalanche, bounding down the slope in great gouts of dislodged snow.
“Get moving, people,” Ryan shouted, “before we get buried.”
They needed no further prompting. Ryan and his companions began running away from the rushing snow as it hurtled down the slope toward them, smothering what was left of the asphalt strip of road in a matter of seconds. All around, the trees shuddered in place and the ground shook as if being struck repeatedly with a giant mallet.
“Keep moving,” Ryan commanded. No blaster could fight this enemy. The only chance they had was outdistancing the avalanche before it reached them.
Ryan ran ahead, with Krysty keeping pace with her long-legged stride. A pace or two behind, Doc made swift progress as the snow tumbled down from the slope in a great wave, using his lion’s-head swordstick to propel himself over the unstable ground. J.B. kept up with Doc, his shorter legs and lower center of gravity helping him remain upright as the world all around him violently shook from the earthquake. At the rear, Mildred was hurrying Nyarla along. The young woman was cold and exhausted from her journey to this place, and her every step seemed to be a struggle.
“Someone’s going to have to carry her, Millie,” J.B. said, turning back to join the physician and her charge.
“I can manage,” Nyarla insisted, pushing J.B. away. “You don’t need to treat me like child.”
“I’m not arguing with you, girl,” J.B. told her, scooping her up in his arms. “Once we’ve survived this, then you can bitch at me all you please.”
While the teenager may have wanted to argue, her limbs were too exhausted to fight back. She sunk into J.B.’s grasp, lolling there like a ragdoll, her heavy coats making her look more like a bundle of rags than a human.
J.B. trekked on through the snow, keeping his head down as debris from the wave front of the avalanche slapped against his back and licked at his shoulders. Two paces ahead, Mildred turned and saw how close the front of the avalanche was.
“Keep going,” Mildred shouted.
“How close is it?” J.B. asked.
Before Mildred could answer, the three of them were swallowed into the earth as the ground crumbled beneath them.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Everything turned white in an instant. J.B. felt something crack against the sole of his shoe and then he was falling, still clinging to Nyarla’s body.
“Oh—shit!”
He tumbled downward, feeling as though his stomach was still six feet above him as the ground gave way and his feet cycled for purchase. For a moment there was nothing beneath him. J.B. clung tighter to Nyarla as she screamed in his ear.
A moment later they hit something. J.B. let his knees go limp, springing with the impact as he struck solid ground again. Freezing cold slapped behind him, striking his back and rushing over his head from behind. There was snow in his mouth now, turning to ice water before he could spit it out, so cold it numbed his tongue and made his teeth ache.
“Hang on, girl,” J.B. shouted over the sounds of tumbling snow. Automatically, her hands had grabbed around his neck as they began to fall, and he felt her grab tighter.
J.B. let go with one hand, holding Nyarla close to him with the other as he reached out and slapped the ground, trying desperately to slow their descent.
Then they struck something hard, solid unforgiving ground, struck it with such force that J.B. swore that he felt his brain jar against his skull.
* * *
“WHERE THE FUCK did they go?” Ryan asked irritably.
He was standing with Krysty and Doc amid the swirling aftermath of the avalanche. Great swathes of powdery snow hung in the air like dust, obscuring everything beyond a few feet like a raging sandstorm in white.
“I can’t see them,” Krysty said. “Should we go back?”
“Ryan, are you—?” Krysty began as Ryan leaped backward.
“Ground’s gone,” he replied.
The mists parted and for the first time Krysty and Doc saw what Ryan had almost stepped into. A great chasm cut across the ground where they had walked just minutes before, sweeping out beyond them like a gaping mouth. The chasm stretched as far as they could see, its width almost a half mile across and dropping to a depth of hundreds of feet. The walls of the chasm showed gray rock and already the snow was settling there, burying them beneath its white blanket.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc snapped. “J.B., Mildred and Nyarla... They must be...”
Ryan nodded, his lone eye fixed on the chasm that had appeared in the ground.
* * *
EVERYTHING TURNED black for an instant. J.B. lay on the ground, his body hunkered over Nyarla as loosened snow tumbled all around them. He had lost consciousness, and awakened to her still screaming right up against his ear.
“Shut up, will you?” J.B. said, the words coming out slurred.
Beneath him, Nyarla continued to shriek in Russian, peppering the words with what sounded a lot like curses. “You’re lying on my leg, you’re lying on my leg,” she screeched.
J.B. pushed himself up, felt the wave of nausea run over him and instantly regretted the move. No matter. He forced himself up as the last of the compact snow dotted the ground around them like debris from a meteor shower. “Are you all right?” he asked, wiping a snowy drool from his lips.
Nyarla had lost her scarf and she was breathing heavily, the breath pluming before her in great white clouds. “Da—yes, I am...aches and needles.”
J.B. looked past her, scanning the territory they had landed in. “Nothing broken?” he asked absently. “Can you walk?”
They appeared to be in a valley, characterless thanks in part to the new tumult of loosened snow. J.B. looked overhead, using one hand to shield his eyes from the tumbling snow. They had come down a long way; it had to be 150 feet to the summit. Thank goodness snow’s soft, J.B. thought, though not so damn soft he wouldn’t have bruises in the morning.
Beside him, Nyarla had pushed herself to a standing position and was brushing snow from her clothing, clapping her hands together. “I stand, I walk,” she told J.B. “I’m alive. You’re alive.”
The Armorer was still scanning the area. “Where’s Ryan?” he muttered. A moment later he repeated the question, louder this time, letting his voice carry around the chasm.
“J.B.?” It was Mildred’s voice, muffled but close by.
“Millie?” J.B. called. “I can hear you but I can’t see you. Where are you?”
“J.B.? Is that you?” Her voice was still muffled.
“Yeah, it’s me,” J.B. confirmed. “Where are you?”
There was a pause and J.B. wondered if Mildred had heard him. For a brief moment, irrationally, he wondered if she was dead.
“It’s dark,” Mildred’s voice answered. “I can’t see anything. And it’s cold. Real cold.”
“Yeah,” J.B. said irritably, “cold. That narrows it down.” Then, in a louder voice he called Mildred’s name again. “Keep talking,” he told her when she had answered. “I’ll pinpoint you by your voice.”
J.B. and Nyarla listened to Mildred as she sang an old nonsense song, something about a red-nosed reindeer that J.B. could only assume was some mutie critter Mildred had once known in her own time. It took thirty seconds to figure out that the singing was coming from a little way downslope and, once they reached it, from below their feet. J.B. began digging and Nyarla kneeled and helped.
It took precious seconds to locate Mildred, buried beneath the snow. She had fallen with the cave-in, become buried by the falling snow. J.B. felt relief when he touched her hand, putting a sudden end to her song.
“You got a good singing voice,” J.B. told her as he scooped more snow from her body. “Don’t stop on my account.”
J.B. listened to Mildred’s voice as he pulled the loose snow from around her buried body.
* * *
“J.B.?” DOC CALLED. “Mildred? You down there?” He stood at the misty edge of the new-formed chasm, leaning on his swordstick as he stared into the abyss.
Beside him, Ryan had unstrapped his Steyr longblaster from his back and was using the scope to peer down into the yawning gap, searching for his friends. Loose snow was still toppling down the walls of the chasm, and there was so much mist it was hard to make out much of anything. For a moment Ryan thought he saw J.B. and Mildred. He halted the scope on the figures only to see them wink out of sight behind a smudge of falling snow. “They have to be down there,” Ryan said. “There’s nowhere else for them to go.”
“Ryan, look!” Krysty blurted in shock.
Pulling the scope from his eye, Ryan turned to where she indicated. She was pointing to the place where they had just run from. There, trudging through the mist came three familiar figures—but it wasn’t J.B.’s party, it was themselves.
“What in the name of heaven...?” Doc whispered.
* * *
MILDRED EMERGED from the snow shivering like a leaf in the wind. She had been buried for about five minutes, but it was enough to send her core temperature plummeting. “I—I n-n-need t-t-to g-get-g-get w-w-warm,” she told J.B.
J.B. had weapons and fire-lighting equipment, but there was nothing to blow up and nothing to set light to. So instead he leaned against Mildred, pulling her close and wrapping her coat around her while she hugged herself, trying to warm up. After a moment, Nyarla leaned close, wrapping her arms around the woman, too.
“I used to do this to keep my little sister Elya warm when the nights were too cold,” she said. “We would share a bed on those nights and tell each other stories along with my brother Evan. He always told best stories.”
After a while, Mildred stopped trembling so violently.
“No use us staying here,” he said. “Ryan won’t be able to follow us. The ground’s sheared away like someone took a knife to it. We need to keep moving, find a way back up top to where Ryan and the others are. Or find some shelter and get warmed up. Whichever we find first.”
Mildred nodded, her teeth still chattering. “Agreed.”
* * *
RYAN, KRYSTY AND Doc watched in stunned silence as the three eerily familiar figures rushed toward them from the swirling mists. The figures were Ryan, Krysty and Doc, running for their very lives as the tumult of the avalanche caromed after them. Behind them, three more figures could be seen—Mildred and J.B. with the latter carrying Nyarla in his arms.
Ryan reached out, calling to his friends. But even as he did so, the ground beneath J.B. seemed to shudder and then it fell away. J.B., Mildred and their charge disappeared amid a cascade of collapsing snow.
“What are we watching?” Ryan snarled as the flickering images of himself, Krysty and Doc came running ahead, now just a few steps away.
“The past,” Doc decided firmly, his eyes narrowed as the ghost of his past self came running by.
“That’s impossible,” Ryan growled, looking around for some projector or other similar equipment. It had to be a trick. Had to be.
“Something has been happening ever since we left that redoubt,” Doc insisted. “I have felt it even if none of the rest of you have.”
“I felt it, too,” Krysty admitted, stepping between the two men. Behind her, the other figures of Ryan, Doc and Krysty faded to nothingness. “Gaia is unsettled here, as if something has poisoned the Earth, something integral. I can’t explain it.”
“Nyarla said t
hat time was broken here,” Doc said with deliberation. “Many years ago I was a young man with a wife and children. The calendar on the wall told me it was 1896. I came through a hole in time’s flow to be here, was dragged against my will and shunted from one era to another. Twice over, in fact. Time is a far more fragile commodity than we credit. To see this place with its time echoes and its broken weather patterns makes me suspect that something is pulling time contrariwise, a direction it was never meant to go.”
Ryan looked from the old man to Krysty, his beautiful lover. “Krysty?” he encouraged.
“I understand what Doc is saying,” she said slowly. “I feel it differently, my connection to the Earth—to Gaia—is so intuitive it’s hard to put it into words. But I believe that Doc is right, that something is corrupting the laws that govern the world.”
Ryan nodded. “Then we should go find out what it is—and stop it before this Ink Orchard place expands further.”
Together, the three companions made their way from the edge of the chasm. They could come back for J.B. and the others if they succeeded. And if they didn’t, then no one was coming back for anything—ever.
* * *
MACHINERY RATTLED all about him as Don Nectar stood in the control area. Two free-standing cylinders reached toward the ceiling with prongs atop them like tuning forks. The prongs were glowing now as the energies flitted through them, drawing more and more power from the generators that fed the building. The two intruders hadn’t stopped that, hadn’t even slowed him.
Overhead the lights dimmed. Within his radiation suit, Nectar watched as the power needles flickered back and forth, trying to register the swiftly changing currents as the time window charged. This place had been built to accommodate this process, he knew, but it still rattled uncomfortably when he sent full power through the channeling rods that opened the chrono window. There was a leak somewhere, had been so for as long as Nectar could remember. He had tried doing this all before. Tried and failed.
