by James Axler
Was that yesterday?
Had he been married then?
Between the towering cylinders, the coalescing chronal energies began to take shape once more, opening a doorway into the past.
To one side of the room, Jak and Ricky shook against the wall where they had been tied to keep them out of the way. Neither of them awakened as the wanton energies of time exploded from the chronal doorway and danced through the room. And Don Nectar, in his radiation suit, watched impassively, his face hidden behind the dark glass of the suit. He could feel it deep down, the sense that one part of the equation was still missing, one final piece of the puzzle that yet needed to be slotted into place.
But that puzzle piece was close now, closer than it had ever been before. The time-lost traveler was nearly here. Once he arrived, the window into the past could be stabilized and Don Nectar could finally travel home to his wife and children, a whole man again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The wind was howling. Snow was swirling through the air, clogging their view. Mildred, J.B. and Nyarla had been walking a long time in the cold. They didn’t know how long. Perhaps appropriately, they had lost track of time. The sun had sunk, giving up on what little effort it had made to rise, leaving the whole terrain in a sort of bleak grayness, as if filtered through old film stock that had been left too long to develop, its colors expired. The cold was biting at them, too, like a living thing that kept trying to take chunks out of their faces.
At first they had been speaking, buoying one another’s spirits with anecdotes and jokes, remembrances of shared times in days gone. Nyarla had been more dour, of course, worried about her father and sister, about how anyone could survive in this deranged plot of real estate. But the cold worked its magic on them all after a while, freezing the conversations before they could take hold, turning them into unstructured sentences spit from broken keyboards.
In silence then, they moved on, mutually agreeing that they would keep going, stay in one direction with J.B. taking the lead. There was no way to reach Ryan’s group. The quake had drawn such a valley behind them that they would never be able to climb it. Instead they followed the incline of the newly formed valley, working their way up toward what they perceived as ground level, miles from where they had begun.
The weather became worse and icy mist washed over them in clouds, each one cold enough to make one’s bones ache.
The Armorer hunkered down, trudging forward, one foot after the other, looking up only occasionally to see where they were headed. The snow clung to the shoulders and sleeves of his jacket, webbed across his boots and the cuffs of his pants. The cold bit at his face.
There was something wrong about the way the snow fell. It seemed abrupt. Yet when Mildred watched it, it fell languidly, as if it had all the time in the world—as if it knew that she was on to it, that it was being watched. It was disquieting somehow.
How long they walked, none of them could say. The cold made it seem like an eternity, one without a start. It felt as if they had been walking forever, clock hands returning to twelve-noon, twelve-midnight, caught on the endless rotation of the clock’s face.
The landscape was simply snow with trees. Some of the snow was patchy and thin, showing the frozen ground that hid cowering beneath it. In other places it reached up almost to their knees, making them wetter and colder without respite. They knew they needed to find shelter, someplace to warm up, and find it soon.
“Makes no sense,” J.B. said through chattering teeth.
“What doesn’t?” Mildred prompted. It had been so long since she had spoken that her mouth ached from the cold air as she opened it.
“Snow falls thick then thin,” J.B. said as he kicked through another clump of the frozen white carpet. “Yet snow falls evenly. We know it does.”
“Maybe it’s what it’s landing on that’s making the differences,” Mildred said. “Different rates of melting, like the way snow settles on grass before it settles on stone.”
J.B. shook his head, unconvinced. “Weather like this.” He sighed. “It’s not natural, Millie. I tell you it isn’t.”
The snow continued to swirl around them, catching in the howling winds. Without warning, J.B. stopped. He stopped so abruptly that Mildred almost walked into him while Nyarla just seemed to flag and halt, the collar of her coat frozen stiff in an upright position by her ears.
“What is it?” Mildred asked, doing nothing to hide the irritation in her tone.
J.B. pointed, and through the swirling miasma of snow Mildred saw the dark shape that clung to the horizon like a snail shell on a garden path. It was a building, boxy in shape, and even at this distance it was unquestionably man-made, its straight lines and incongruousness in the landscape a tribute to man’s battle against the elements.
The building sat in the middle of the wastes, a dark box on the blank horizon. J.B. looked at it, looked at Mildred, then looked back to the building. More buildings were materializing behind it, peeking shyly through the billowing snow like a bride though her veil.
The snow was swirling in the air, stabbing at their skin like a handful of tossed quills. It didn’t feel like snow, it felt harder than that, more like ice in the air. Its patterns were visible if you took the time to stop and watch, the flecks of snow falling too slow here for the drag of gravity, then too fast there, as if a speeded-up recording on an old video cassette.
“Weather’s shot,” J.B. said, his eyes fixed on the building up ahead. “We need to get inside, warm ourselves up. Warm up you—the girl, too.”
“I don’t know, J.B.,” Mildred disagreed. “This place doesn’t feel right.”
J.B. looked at Mildred then, his mouth a grim line. “If we stay out here much longer, we’re going to freeze to death. We’re no use to Ryan dead. And even if we survive, Nyarla there is just skin and bones—she’s practically an ice block even now.” He didn’t say what he was really thinking—that Mildred had been under the snow long enough to get hypothermia before any of them. She’d turn down his concern, he knew, try to bullshit him with medical speak. She wasn’t thinking straight out here; maybe none of them were.
Reluctantly, Mildred agreed, nodding. She couldn’t let Nyarla die. They trekked across the ice-flecked path to the low buildings.
The nearest building looked to be just one story, but as they neared it they saw that it had two floors, but they had become buried in the piling snow. The exterior walls were painted a drab olive color, with stenciled yellow lettering at the doorway that indicated it had been constructed for military use. J.B. reached into his jacket, placing his hand on the butt of his mini-Uzi.
“Army hole,” J.B. said.
Beside him, Mildred nodded and plucked the ZKR 551 from where it was holstered at her hip. Behind her, Nyarla cowered in the lee of the building, keeping out of the biting wind. She didn’t offer to pull her own blaster out; she was simply too cold to do that now.
“Still feels wrong,” Mildred muttered.
“It’s dry,” the Armorer replied. “That’s enough for me.”
There were other buildings close by, a little cluster of them meeting in a junction. The mess hall was the nearest, but the others were just a little way from them now, appearing and disappearing through the flickering snow.
All around them, the snow seemed to billow then wait, billow then wait. For a moment, Mildred could have sworn she saw it stop dead in the air, held there as if in a photograph; a frozen image of frozen water. She almost laughed at that, despite the way it worried her. Natural reaction, laughing at what scares us, Mildred reminded herself. Maybe J.B. was right, maybe she was delirious.
The building had a curved roof with a corrugated pattern across it, and it stretched back sixty feet. Wide-spaced windows ran along its sides, but the ones they could see had blinds drawn over them, likely to keep the heat in. Behind the building, J.B. eyed the other buildings, dotted around a central hub, materializing through the falling snow like a stalker’s shadow.
/> J.B. stopped at the doors, reading the words that had been stenciled there. “Mess hall,” he read aloud. The name was followed by a serial number that he figured meant nothing to anyone not a part of the army base.
After checking a few of the windows, Mildred hurried back to where J.B. waited at the main set of doors with Nyarla. Once she was within hearing range, she raised a concern in a quiet voice. “Are you sure this is a good idea, J.B.? Can’t see shit inside and it’s awful quiet. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Me, too,” J.B. agreed, “like snakes running up and down my spine. But the weather out here is seriously harsh. I haven’t ever seen its like. And I’ve seen toxic rains that could strip a man to his bones quicker than a stream full of hungry mutie fish.”
Nyarla balked at that, her eyes going wide.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Mildred reassured. “That’s not going to happen out here.”
Then Mildred turned to look behind her, eyeing the falling snow and the way it seemed to stutter and stop in the air for a moment every few seconds. J.B. was right—there was something seriously wrong with this place. “Guess we won’t find out anything out here,” she agreed after a moment’s consideration.
J.B. nodded, pleased. “That’s my girl.”
He pressed his hand to the doorknob and pushed. It took a moment—the ice had frozen to the edges of the door—and J.B. had to shove against it to break the light film of ice that had sealed it in place.
“One thing’s for sure,” J.B. said. “No one’s been in or out of here in a while. Guess we take what comfort we can from that.”
Comfort, perhaps, but J.B. still entered the building with the Uzi extended in a ready grip before him.
Inside, the building was dark, and it took the companions a moment for their eyes to adjust. The place smelled of burning dust. The smell wasn’t coming from anywhere in particular, as far as J.B. could tell—it simply was, the smell all around them, the smell of the air. They were standing in a lobby, just an anteroom that held a desk and an area presumably for storing coats and bags. The area was empty and J.B., Mildred and Nyarla stepped inside, kicking snow and ice from their boot treads as Mildred pushed the door closed. It was warmer maybe than outside—they were too numb to really say right then—but still cool enough that they could see their breath in the air.
J.B. crept forward, his movements appreciably silent. Mildred aimed the blaster over J.B.’s right shoulder as he prowled into the next room. This room was larger, taking over maybe two-thirds of the floor space. Canvas shutters had been pulled down over the windows, he saw now, but from inside enough light peeked around their edges that J.B. could see in the gloom. Long tables were arrayed in rows that stretched four tables to the length of the room, and three across; twelve in all. There were seventy, eighty, maybe a hundred soldiers sitting at the tables, poised over their food trays, cutlery in hand.
* * *
RYAN, KRYSTY AND Doc traveled across the white blanket of snow for several miles, leaving a trail of footprints that slowly filled in with fresh snow. It was bitterly cold and they couldn’t help wondering about J.B. and the others, whether they were doing the right thing to leave them in the crevasse.
Early on, Ryan made a decision to find the highest ground. Perhaps from there they would be able to see what was going on here, and maybe get a better idea of how to stop it. He led them up a slope where no path existed other than the one Ryan made with his footsteps. It was slow, laborious walking, but over time they found themselves high enough to get a clearer idea of His Ink Orchard.
With the sun—what little they had seen of it—dipped below the horizon, the world was turned into a pale blue blanket of moonlit snow. The moon looked cold, a silver coin flicked into the air in some cosmic heads-or-tails wager.
There was something else, too, visible even through the falling snow. “Look,” Ryan said, pointing to the thing his keen eye had spotted.
In the distance, all but masked by the falling snow, a lightning storm seemed to be in progress. But as they watched, Doc and Krysty realized that there was something odd about the storm.
“The lightning is traveling upward,” Doc said. “Which means it is being launched by something on the ground.”
“Exactly,” Ryan confirmed. “And I figure if we locate the source, we’ll be a step closer to figuring out just what the hell it is we’ve walked into here.”
Agreed, the group moved onward, pacing slowly down the slope as the wind whipped all around them, heading toward a wide, icy river that could be seen in the far distance wending its course through the land.
* * *
J.B. GASPED before he could stop himself, halting in place with the Uzi ready. The air, the smell, the dust; J.B. didn’t like it.
Inside the dining hall, no one moved. For a moment, J.B. stood there, watching the diners as they sat poised over their meals. Like the anteroom, the mess hall had that same distinctive smell of burning dust, the dead smell of dried-up insects left on sunny windowsills.
J.B. paced warily into the room. The diners were all soldiers, dressed in olive drab fatigues with peaked, soft caps on their heads. But there was something strange about them, J.B. realized as he walked up to the first table in the half light filtering through the shuttered windows. They were all in various stages of decomposition, like corpses torn from the ground. And whatever had once been served on their trays, the meals had turned to dust, grease spots and dried residue all that remained.
J.B. stared at the occupants of the nearest table for a few seconds, trying to figure out what had happened. Could a weapon do this? The result of the Megachill, mebbe?
“J.B.?” Mildred called from the antechamber of the mess hall, where she stood with Nyarla. “Everything okay in there?”
J.B. swivelled his head back to address Mildred. “It’s fine—” He stopped himself. From the corner of his eye, one of the figures at the closest table had moved. J.B. was sure of it.
As he turned back, the diners began to rise, each one a desiccated corpse coming horrifically to life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Run!” J.B. shouted, scampering back from the nearest table.
At the lobby entrance, Mildred watched J.B. race across the room, shadowy figures rising from their seats behind him.
“Wh-what are they?” Nyarla asked, peering into the gloom.
Mildred saw J.B. spin back, bringing up the mini-Uzi and unleashing a rapid burst of blastfire at the nearest figure. “Nothing good,” she assured Nyarla, bringing up her own weapon to target another soldier-corpse.
Within the vast mess hall, J.B. watched as the lead corpse crumbled to the ground, his face a wound of dried flesh cut to ribbons by 9 mm slugs from the Uzi. The next corpse was moving across the room at a frightening clip, bringing up rotted, talonlike hands to reach for J.B.’s face. The Armorer swung his compact weapon around on its strap, sent a burst of fire into the dead thing’s belly.
How the hell they were alive, he couldn’t even begin to guess. What J.B. did know, however, was that they sensed him as an enemy, and whatever they planned to do once they caught him he’d bet shells to sand was nothing he’d appreciate.
There were ninety dead figures standing in the room, and they were surrounding J.B. in a swift pattern. The Armorer looked from one to the next, seeing their ruined faces, white eyes sunken deep into deteriorated sockets. Even as he watched, the first figure he had shot drew itself back up from the floor, rising in a wavering, unsteady fashion on rotted legs.
The dead soldiers swarmed at J.B., leaving him no time to pick targets. He sent another burst of bullets in a low arc, cutting the animated corpses at chest level, commanding Mildred to duck even as he squeezed the trigger.
At the lobby doorway, Mildred targeted one of the rear-most corpses and sent a flat-tipped wad-cutter bullet into the back of its head. It impacted with the corpse’s skull in a spreading circle of debris, sending shards of bone and leathery flesh across the room
.
Mildred ducked back as J.B. brought his own attack around in a rapid arc, cutting down the corpses in powdery bursts of dead skin and flesh. Behind her, Nyarla crouched against the farthest wall, her hands cupped over her ears to drown out the cacophony of flying bullets.
They weren’t zombies, J.B. realized as he sidestepped the reaching arms of one of the soldiers. They were dead things, pure and simple—people who hadn’t realized that they were dead yet, who remained obstinately animated despite their senses and their consciousness having long since rotted away.
He kneed the nearest soldier in the gut, driving his leg up with such force that the figure in the olive fatigues jumped up off the floor.
They had to have died here, J.B. knew. When time began going askew, these poor bastards had either been caught in the time bubble or drawn up into it from whatever era that they had started at, trapped in static place as time held them in its unforgiving grip, squeezing the life out of them as they struggled to resist.
Whatever had triggered them to move now, J.B. couldn’t guess. If the snow outside was any indication, time was running in fits and starts, moving forward like a stuttering wag engine with dirt in the fuel line.
Why it hadn’t affected himself, Mildred and Nyarla was anyone’s guess. Maybe things from outside the bubble of broken time weren’t affected in the same way. Or maybe they were and they just couldn’t see it because their perception was so altered by the rogue chronal energies that surrounded the area.
One thing J.B. did know was that he had to get out of there before they were all killed.
He drove the Uzi into the next corpse as it reached for him, drilling the weapon’s muzzle into the dead man’s gut and pulling the trigger. Dried chunks of intestines burst loose from the dead soldier’s back, spraying across its colleagues with a sound like rocks striking glass. Now gutless, the soldier’s corpse sagged in on itself, its torso lurching to the left and down as it keeled to the floor.
