James Axler - Deathlands 44 Crucible of Time

* * * *

Title: Deathlands: Crucible of Time 44 (Deathlands, 44)

Author(s): James Axler

ISBN: 0373625448 / 9780373625444 (UK edition)

Publisher: Silhouette Books

Ryan Cawdor moaned and blinked open his eye.

His head felt like someone had been using it to grind flour. He cautiously parted his lips and swallowed, tasting the bitterness of bile. It seemed as if a gang of muties had been using his mouth for an outhouse.

"Fireblast!" he whispered, his voice sounding high, thin and cracked.

The flash of dazzling light that had drilled through the optic nerve into the forepart of his brain had made him close his good right eye immediately. He took several long, slow breaths, trying to gain a measure of control over mind and body.

All he knew was that the mat-trans jump had been a bad one. The leap from one gateway to another was never a pleasant experience, but some jumps were worse than others.

"Bad one," he muttered to himself.

There was only the briefest memory of starting the jump. All of them had sat down on the floor with its pattern on steel disks, matched by the ones in the ceiling. His back settled against the cold armaglass, with Krysty Wroth at his right and Dean, his son, on his left. Doc Tanner, Mildred Wyeth, J.B. Dix and Jak Lauren had ranged themselves around the hexagonal chamber.

The door had been slammed, triggering the mechanism that would whisk them from that location to someplace else in the blighted remnants of the United States, now known as Deathlands. They had no control over their destination.

Ryan sat still, swallowing hard to avoid throwing up. He eased open his eye again, squinting to see how his companions had survived the jump.

The first thing he noticed was the color of the armaglass walls of the chamber. They had been blue; now they were a deep maroon, like venous blood.

As far as Ryan could tell, everyone else was still alive and breathing. Krysty's head was on her shoulder, mouth open, her fiery scarlet hair coiled tight at her nape. Her long fingers were clenched tightly into the palms of her hands, and he could make out a worm of bright blood inching across the pale skin. Her emerald eyes were clamped shut, and a thread of saliva dangled from a corner of her lips.

"Bad one," Ryan repeated.

"Yeah, compadre, it was." The almost inaudible voice came from the far side of the mat-trans unit, from J. B. Dix, the Armorer, as he'd been known during the years when the two men had ridden together on the war wags of the legendary Trader.

He struggled to sit upright, feeling in one of the deep pockets of his coat for his spectacles. He wiped the lenses on his sleeve and perched them back on his narrow nose, then picked his beloved fedora hat from his lap and jammed it on his head. "Yeah, bad one, bro," he said.

"Doc looks in a sorry way."

J.B. nodded. "And the kid doesn't look like he's ready for action."

"Not 'kid,' old man." Jak's lids peeled back, revealing the ruby eyes of the true albino. His skin, as white as new-fallen snow, was smudged with dirt across the high cheekbones.

Jak Lauren, from West Lowellton in Louisiana, was still only sixteen years of age, as skinny as a lath, with the wiry strength of a self-trained acrobat. His mane of white hair hung across his shoulders, onto his leather-and-canvas camouflage jacket. Like the other companions, he carried a blaster at his hipa satin-finish Colt Python, with the long, six-inch barrel. But his favorite weapons were the half-dozen leaf-shaped throwing knives that he wore concealed about his person. Jak was able to take the eye out of the jack of diamonds at twenty paces.

Or kill a man at three times that distance.

"Damn it all to hell, Dad. That was a bad one. Worst jump I can ever remember." Dean Cawdor, at age eleven, was a mirror image of his father. He was the fruit of a brief liaison Ryan had with Sharona Carson, wife of the baron of Towse. Though Dean hadn't been long in Ryan's life, the one-eyed man loved him fiercely.

"One of the worst, son, that's for bastard sure."

Ryan was aware that Krysty was recovering consciousness. She coughed, then retched, putting her head in her hands.

"Gaia! That was"

"A bad one," chorused Ryan, Jak, Dean and J.B.

Krysty managed a wan smile. "Yeah. Had a foul dream, if that's the right word for what passes dribbling through your skull during a jump."

Ryan nodded. "I was strapped to a table of polished chrome, and men with white robes and masks were working on me with long tubes and needles. Probing at my arteries, sucking my blood through into a whirling machine."

"I was crawling through tunnels that were filling with warm mud," J.B. said.

Jak shook his head. The snowy mane whirling like a torrent of melt water spray. "Can't remember. Just know was frightening. Old women in it, holding small knives. Pecked like beaks of birds. Blood on snow like petals of roses."

"What was your dream, Krysty?" Ryan asked, holding her hand in his.

"Only recall bits, lover. I was held captive by a man who stood always in the shadows. I could save myself if I could complete a puzzle. Just one last piece was needed, but I couldn't find it. Didn't know what shape and size it was. So it was totally impossible, but I had to keep on searching." She shuddered and squeezed Ryan's hand so hard he almost cried out. "Nightmare alley, lover. That's what it was. One of those black nightmares when you think you've actually lost your mind somewhere during the jump. Your brain's been swirled apart."

Mildred Wyeth had recovered consciousness while Krysty was talking.

"Know what you mean," she said, coughing, pressing her hands against her brown eyes to regain control. "My dream was about traveling back in the days of Amtrak, when I was a little girl. Before skydark, I was wandering from platform to platform in a huge station, trying to find the right train. Then I was in a train car but nobody knew where it was going. Just endless and pointless. It was like running and staying still."

She smiled at J.B. and patted him on the arm, using his help to get upright, staggering a little.

Ryan admired her toughness, knowing that he would almost certainly puke if he didn't stay sitting a while longer. But he already knew what a tough person Mildred was.

She had been born way back, on December 17, 1964. Mildred was black, and a doctor, and came from Lincoln, Nebraska. Her father, a Baptist minister, had been burned alive less than a year after her birth by firebombing racists who hid their cowardice beneath white hoods.

Her beaded plaits rattled and whispered as she shook her head to try to clear it. Two weeks after her thirty-sixth birthday, she had gone into the hospital for minor abdominal surgery that had gone badly wrong. Ironically, since cryonics was her medical specialty, she had been frozen to save her life. Very shortly after that the world blew apart. But she slept dreamlessly on, her body monitored by a small, timeless nuke reactor, until she was finally woken by Ryan and the others.

She pulled J.B. to his feet, adjusting her Czech ZKR 551, a 6-shot target revolver, in its holster. Before being frozen, Mildred had been a silver-medal winner in the free pistol shooting at the 1996 Olympics. And she was the best shot with a handgun that Ryan Cawdor had ever seen.

Mildred rubbed her forehead. "I know everyone says the same, but that was a mother of a bad one." She looked down at the motionless figure of Doc Tanner, who lay at her feet. "Old-timer looks a lot less than well," she said.

The old man lay flat on his back, gnarled hands down at his sides. His grizzled hair was matted with sweat, and his breathing was harsh and irregular. Ryan crawled across the chamber, seeing that Doc had been bleeding from both ears, as well as from nose and mouth. His pale blue eyes were tight shut. It looked like he might have had some sort of convulsion, as his massive Le Mat pistol had been jolted loose from the holster on his hip.