by James Axler
Doc flipped and spun, trying to keep sight of the bullet as it disappeared. Below him, he saw the telltale kick of riverbed where the bullet impacted uselessly; his aim had been thrown by the movement and he had wasted the shot.
He had been under the water for almost thirty seconds now, barrelling beneath the freezing waves as the creature hurtled onward. It was moving at a decent clip, Doc surmised, difficult to tell with the light-dark flash of sunlight through water. His chest cried out for air, his eyes ached from the water pressure and its punishing temperature. He needed to get out of the water, and get out fast.
He brought the blaster around again as he spiraled through the water, timed more carefully to try to snag the creature. It loomed ahead of him, pushing through the water, one thick tentacle wrapped around his ankle as it hurried through the ice, a dark shape at the edge of his vision. It had a rounded body and moved with a kick of limbs, propelling itself with a sort of thrust-brake, thrust-brake movement. Some kind of mutie, Doc guessed, didn’t matter what. The thing wanted him for lunch; that’s all that really mattered right now.
Gritting his teeth, Doc fired the LeMat again, sending another .44-caliber slug through the water. He heard it dreamily, muffled by the cool medium, then watched as something began to leak from the creature’s flank.
The creature’s grip slipped fractionally. He fired again, feeling the pressure rising in his lungs, seeing the dark spots before his eyes that either meant the sunlight was being obscured by ice, or he was running out of oxygen. The bullet hit home, slamming again into the creature’s body somewhere among that cluster of writhing tentacles.
* * *
WOUNDED AND LEAKING dark, inky blood, the creature surfaced, batting great chunks of ice aside. At the river’s edge, Ryan and Krysty spotted it—fifty yards downstream—and brought their weapons to bear without a second’s hesitation.
The side of the river erupted with the sounds of blasterfire, the grim cough of Ryan’s SIG-Sauer sending four 9 mm slugs at the creature in a flash, Krysty’s .38 driving two rounds into the creature’s side. They chased along the river, sending more shots into the wounded creature as it thrashed in the icy waters. It looked massive. Limbs seemed to spew from everywhere, trailing behind the beast like great swirling snakes, their flesh as gray and shiny as a seal’s pelt.
The thing was pinned against the bank, struggling among great hunks of ice where it had been forced to surface by the wound Doc’s blast had dealt it. Ryan rammed his SIG-Sauer into his waistband, bringing the more powerful Steyr Scout to bear. He had the weapon up to his shoulder in a matter of seconds, centered the mutant creature in the center of the crosshairs. Beside him, Krysty reloaded her blaster and sent another burst of fire at the horrendous beast.
Ryan aimed and fired, feeling the familiar kick of the Steyr as it pumped against his body. A 7.62 mm slug drilled into the creature’s face where one milky black eye was sunken in place, staring out at the sky and the riverbank. The shot turned the eye into so much jelly, spurting gunk and mist into the air.
Doc emerged from the water a moment later, Krysty’s bullets spitting great gobs of water all about him as he thrashed amid the ice. He had his own blaster in hand, the replica LeMat, and he brought it around even as he heaved for breath, squeezing the trigger and sending another blast at the creature’s writhing form.
The mutie squid-thing hissed like a burst tire, sending a jet of dark inky liquid up into the air.
Icy water poured from Doc’s hair as he struggled to take another breath before the mutie submerged him again. His shoulders struck against the water as the creature thrashed, flipping him up and back. The water felt hard, striking Doc with the forgiveness of brick.
On the riverbank, Ryan calmly reloaded and aimed the Steyr at the creature’s other eye. Before he could fire, the mutie disappeared under the surface, dragging Doc with it.
“No!” Ryan shouted as his colleague disappeared under the ice once more.
Beside him, Krysty was a blur of hair and rushing limbs. She had removed her fur coat and she threw it and her Smith & Wesson aside as she leaped into the water in a graceful dive. Ryan watched her go, all too aware of how bitterly cold that freezing water was.
* * *
ADRENALINE PUMPING, Doc switched barrels as the creature dragged him beneath the water again. He didn’t think about it, just brought the LeMat around to where he was certain the beast was. Then he pulled the second trigger, which activated the 18-gauge shotgun barrel. Even beneath the water, the weapon sounded like a thunderclap as it sent its deadly cargo through the waves and into the creature’s body.
The mutie squid rocked as a huge chunk of its flesh was torn from it by Doc’s blast. A great gout of inky blood filled the waters around it, and the monster began to sink.
Doc gazed up his spinning body, trying to see what it was that was pulling him through the water. The dark shape loomed lower now, dragging him by his foot toward the bottom of the river.
Blaster still in hand, Doc reached down to snatch his foot away. His boot slipped back and forth against his ankle but he couldn’t pull free. Once again his chest was aching, burning with pressure as the need to breathe threatened to overwhelm him.
Then, suddenly, something pulled Doc away, dragging him by his shoulders and yanking him out of the mutie’s grip. For a moment, the world seemed to spin, flashes of light and dark—and heaven help him, was that Emily?—as he swam away from the plummeting creature in the river.
Doc surfaced a second later, gulping down a single great breath as soon as he saw the sunlight. Beside him, Krysty was gripping his waist, holding him up above the shimmering surface of the water, bobbing there with swishing feet. Her hair was soaked through and it trailed about her in jagged lines. Her Gaia power was still with her, Doc realized, turning her into a human weapon, a fantastical capacitor filled to brimming with the power of the Earth Mother.
He thanked his lucky stars. “So good to have friends,” Doc muttered as Krysty coasted with him back to the shore, where Ryan was still watching the water through the rifle’s scope.
Momentarily, Ryan spotted the beast surface amid a spume of ink, its black tentacles thrashing in the water. He squeezed the trigger again, sending another 7.62 mm slug into what he assumed was the creature’s head. The bullet struck in a great burst of exploding flesh and Ryan sent a second bullet that hit home a moment later. The creature reared from the water before diving back beneath and disappearing from view.
At the side of the river, Krysty had recovered her coat and wrapped it around Doc’s shivering body. She had to be cold, too, Doc realized, and he offered her the coat.
“Just get yourself warmed up,” Krysty said. “I don’t feel cold at all.”
Doc pulled the coat over his shoulders, staving off the freezing temperature that had dug into his core like a burrowing dog.
How much time had he been down there, under the water with that thing?
Minutes?
Hours?
It was so hard to tell. Time, that great cosmic joke, seemed so fluid, so unreal here.
“You’re losing it, Theo,” Doc chastised himself, mumbling the words.
He looked up, confirming that no one had heard him. Krysty was standing with Ryan, looking powerful and determined, her body displaying none of its usual signs of post-Gaia fatigue. Was it still coursing through her, that incredible power? Could it be that Krysty had tapped a wellspring so deep that she could remain superstrong for hours—or perhaps even longer?
And Emily. What was she doing, watching over him, whispering in his ear all the while? “I hear you, my darling,” Doc whispered, shaking his head. He wanted her to go, yet he feared she might never come back if she went this time. It was all in his head—wasn’t it? All some grand delusion, played out because of the cold, the mat-trans jump scrambling his mind so badly he was still suffering its aftereffects the way Ricky had suffered the stomach cramps.
Reason it away all you like, Doc t
old himself, she was still there. The smell of her perfume, the sound of her voice. He might be able to apply cold logic, but it didn’t change the reality he felt.
His dear Emily was there, more now than ever, as if she was closer—perhaps not geographically, but chronally, the ages reaching out for her, pulling her to him.
The eras folded and unfolded like origami, making new patterns, new days of the old.
* * *
RYAN LOOKED AT Krysty now, the worry clear on his face. “You’ve been channeling Gaia too long,” he said. “No question.”
Krysty looked strong, her hair still crackling around her head. “It won’t stop,” she explained. “I’ve never really had a way to shut it off. It wasn’t a problem before n—” She stopped, her eyes flicking from Ryan’s face to something behind him. “Ryan, look!”
He turned, saw the disembodied mouths—the things that the minister had called chronovores—moving in a pack across the fields of ice. Not just one this time, but a hundred of them, with more emerging from the ether even as he watched. Doc was still huddled in Krysty’s coat, shivering as he tried to warm up from his impromptu dip.
“Doc,” Ryan called, “we have to move.”
Looking up, Doc nodded. “Time is coming for us,” he said. “Sending everything it has to force this aberration out of existence. And us with it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A noise drew J.B. to the window of the shack and he peered through it, wiping away the dirt with his sleeve. Something was massing out there, a great cloud of teeth flashing through the air. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
Marla was beside him instantly, staring at the dark cloud of teeth that loomed above the abandoned settlement. “Crows,” she said. “More than I’ve ever seen in one place my whole life.”
“And they’re coming this way,” J.B. observed, his hand automatically reaching for his blaster.
“They can’t come here,” Tarelya insisted. “You promised.”
Piotr shot her father a look. “We’ve hidden from them for all of End Day. But it seems that we’ve hidden for as long as we can. Now all we can do is fight.”
Grimly, Piotr led his companions out into the snow-racked plain where the chronovores were swarming. J.B. followed, turning back to Mildred.
“Come on, Millie. You wouldn’t want to miss the end of the world, would you? You slept through the last one,” he added with grim humor.
Pulling the ZKR-551 from its holster, Mildred followed the Armorer into the freezing air outside.
* * *
RYAN, KRYSTY AND Doc raced along the winding path of the river toward where the lightning shot up at the sky. There was a passenger jet in the frozen water up ahead: the minister’s fabled giant bird.
The chronovores were moving, swirling around as they searched for prey. Ryan hurried the group on, checking on the insatiable creatures every few steps, assuring himself that the chronovores weren’t following. The river waited before them, a great, wide line of churning water littered with thick hunks of ice. The ice sat low to the water, which made Ryan fairly certain that the water itself had to be deep. There were what looked like gullies running around the edges of the river, thick rips in the ground that seemed abrupt in their start and end. Some didn’t even reach the river, and Ryan wondered what could have caused them. If he didn’t know better, he would guess a military laser had been used here, but then he remembered the lightning sparking from the bent building and figured that to be the source.
They crossed the river on the aircraft’s wing, using it like a bridge to climb over the freezing water. Doc stopped and peered over the sloping edge of the wing for a moment, using his swordstick to steady himself.
The port-side wing of the crashed airplane veered down into the river, where it dipped below the icy surface just a few feet from the shore. In the lead, Ryan scrambled across to the gap then sprang, jumping the last remaining space in a graceful leap. He turned back, reaching his arms out to catch first Krysty and then Doc. The old man seemed rejuvenated somehow.
On the far side of the jet’s wing stood the crooked building, with concrete walls and the power plant attached to its side like a cyst. The plant hummed, the generators buzzing angrily, and lightning played havoc across the surface of the main building itself. It was old military, Ryan saw, recognizing the style from long experience with redoubts and other army facilities. Yet another hangover from the days before the nukecaust, when the U.S. Army seemed to expand into every corner of the country. Ryan wondered what it had been like a century earlier. It was impossible to guess, of no more practical help to him than trying to imagine himself a pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Just a lot of dead people living dead lives.
Uncontrolled electricity played across the concrete walls of the building, arcing up into the air in forked lines. Doc, Ryan and Krysty balked as a great streak shot out from the building, snapping at the locustlike chronovore swarm and blasting two of their number to a grisly ash.
“We’re not safe out here,” Krysty said, and Ryan agreed. The chronovores were snuffling around again, a whole swarm of them blipping in and out of sight through the falling snow, just their rows of teeth hanging in the air.
The sky above them was charged with electricity and color, a great prismatic wash visible through the falling snow. The companions watched as another streak of lightning, twenty feet wide like a laser beam, blasted from the building in a crackling arc before striking the ground. Where it struck, the lightning left a chasm as wide as the blast and at least ten feet deep, a great trench that ran across the land like a scar. There were other similar rents all around, pits in the ground where the lightning had struck before.
“Inside,” Ryan ordered.
The companions sprinted across the snow-smeared plain toward the building, ducking their heads as another out-of-control burst of electricity zapped from the roof, reaching out in a trident fork of white against the night sky.
The main doors sat in a thick housing at the front of the building. There were two doors constructed from thick metal that met in the center in a striped yellow-and-black line. Reaching them first, Ryan shoved the point of his panga into the gap and twisted. The doors parted easily, their locks long since disengaged. If someone was inside, Ryan thought, why would they bother to lock a place like this? The whole area of His Ink Orchard was so inhospitable that he and his companions had only gotten there by chance.
Inside, the companions found themselves standing in a wide corridor with bland gray walls. The tunnellike corridor stretched a long way into the building, the only sign of color a faded yellow stripe painted along the floor. A desk waited to one side of the entry behind a thick plate of what appeared to be armaglass. The desk featured a comp and a telecommunications setup, but it was unmanned. Ryan tried to peer through the glass for a moment before moving on, leading them deeper into the building.
Behind them, the winds billowed and the lightning crackled, snow smattering the floor as it was blown in through the open doors.
Doc stopped in his tracks. “I recognize this place.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan and Krysty stopped, too, staring at the old man.
“You’ve been here before?” Krysty asked.
Doc shook his head. “Not here, but a place very like this.”
“We’ve been through a lot of redoubts and military bases in our time, Doc,” Ryan reminded him. “They all blend into one after a while.”
“No,” Doc insisted, pawing at the nearest wall. “This is familiar. It’s a facility for Operation Chronos.”
“The people who plucked you out of your own time and dumped you in Deathlands?” Krysty asked.
“Yes. I have not been to this facility, but I have been to one very like it,” Doc insisted. “It is not the design, it is the smell. Unchained energies, chronal energies. Time travel has a smell about it, the facilities that operate it—well, it is something I could never forget.”
Ryan and Krys
ty sniffed the air, but to them there was nothing. It simply smelled dry after their breakneck passage across the ice.
Ryan started to ask Doc a question. “You sure you’re not—?”
“Imagining it?” Doc finished. “No. Trust me, my dear Ryan. This place has something to do with Operation Chronos. And it is not a dead facility—it is alive.”
Ryan nodded. The generators outside had told him that much, though whether there was a human hand at the center of it all he could only speculate.
Doc stepped forward then, marching down the corridor with newfound determination. Ryan and Krysty hurried to keep up.
“I have been getting flashes from the past,” Doc explained. “They began almost as soon as we arrived here, and they have been getting steadily stronger. I felt the last one when I was plunged under the ice water by that beast.”
“You’ve had episodes before,” Krysty said gently. “Mat-trans nightmares, things like that.”
“I assure you that these are not the dreams I have had before, Krysty,” Doc insisted. “They are not memories that I am reliving. They are something different, a sense of being close to home.”
“It’s your imagination,” Ryan insisted. “Nothing could possibly set that off.”
“Do not be so sure,” Doc told him as they stopped at a closed doorway. He peered through the glass panel in its right-hand side above the doorknob, checking the corridor ahead. It was empty.
“Animals mark their territory,” Doc continued as he pushed through the door. “They come back and they recognize their own musk. And we humans are just animals by another name. Perhaps we, too, lay down trails we recognize, the things we call memories.”
“But you said yourself,” Ryan reminded him. “This isn’t the facility you were held in.”
“True, but this place is rife with chronal energy in flux,” Doc replied. “An old way station perhaps for Operation Chronos, a backup facility to experiment here in Alaska, well away from the hustle and bustle of other, more populous regions.”
