James Axler - Deathlands 20 Cold Asylum

/* /*]] */ Axler, James - Deathlands 20 - Cold Asylum Guiteau's desperate voice rose above the crackling of flames and thunder. "Any moment a hundred armed sec men'll be on top of you, Cawdor. Give up and the boy lives. Best offer you'll get all day."

He stepped into the open, crouched and almost totally hidden behind Dean, the muzzle of the Armalite digging into the boy, his finger on the trigger."Let him go, or I'll put you down." The voice, surprisingly calm, was Mildred's.From the corner of his eye, Ryan saw the doctor standing like a statue, her right arm extended, the ZKR 551 target pistol pointed at the sec sergeant."The boy dies before I take a hit," Guiteau called, crouching even lower, so that she could see very little of his head or body.But that didn't matter. The Czech revolver snapped once, and at forty paces and in poor light, Mildred put the .38-caliber round precisely where she aimed it. Both Harry Guiteau's index finger and the trigger of his automatic rifle were blown off. The Armalite clattered to the ground, and Dean scampered toward his father."Best damn shot I ever saw," the sec sergeant gritted through his pain.Mildred's second shot punched through the bridge of his nose, ensuring the companions' escape. They turned and headed for the redoubt. 20 in the Deathland series A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM WORLDWIDETORONTO NEW YORK LONDON AMSTERDAM PARIS SYDNEY HAMBURG STOCKHOLM ATHENS TOKYO MILAN MADRID WARSAW BUDAPEST AUCKLANDIf you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."This dedication, belatedly, is to the countless legions of fans of the Deathlands series. The people who love Ryan, Krysty, Doc, J.B. and the company as much as I do. Thanks for riding the dangerous highways of this alternative future at my side. Onward into new tomorrows, together. This is for you. James AxlerSecond edition AprilISBN 0373625200COLD ASYLUMCopyright 1994 by Worldwide Library.All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.Printed in U.S.A."Kansas...John Stewart has sung movingly of it, and Dorothy so wanted to return there. But during the War Between the States it earned its name of 'Kansas, bloody Kansas.' So it was and so it will be again."The Great Plains,Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow ,by Tecumseh Shelby, Ryan Cawdor paused, his hand on the heavy door, ready to pull it shut and trigger the mat-trans system that would propel them into elsewhere. "Here we go, friends."He sat on the floor beside Krysty Wroth, with his son, Dean, on his left. Doc Tanner was opposite, lying on his side, his knees drawn up to his chin. The rest of the companions had assumed the positions that they knew from previous experience would be the most comfortable for making the jump.Ryan took Krysty's hand in his.The lamps outside the chamber dimmed, and he heard the crackling of a major electrical circuit malfunctioning. The metal disks in floor and ceiling began to glow, and the pale yellow armaglass walls started to pulse with the familiar misty light.The inside of Ryan's brain was already beginning to float in the nauseous way that he hated so much. He closed his good eye."Something's wrong."The voice was his father's, but it couldn't be. The man was long dead at Front Royal in the Shens."Something."It was an old man's voice. Doc Tanner. Something felt wrong.Ryan gripped Krysty's hand more tightly, seeking some portion of her mystical power, the Earth Mother's power, trying to hold her.But they were suddenly wrenched apart with a dreadful force and violence.Now he could hear the roaring of a mighty water, and his breathing was being choked.Tidal wave off the Keys."Wrong."The word sounded flat and unemotional.Now a profound darkness engulfed Ryan, and he realized with a chilling terror that he was completely alone, alone in a different time and place."What's happening?" His lips formed the words, and his brain could hear them.Wrong."Happening?"Alone. One. Ryan opened his eye.He swallowed, tasting the yellow bitterness of bile at the back of his throat, the inside of his skull still swimming in its own secret sea. His muscles ached as if he'd been on the wrong end of a beating in an alley behind a frontier gaudy."Fireblast!" His voice was so quiet it hardly carried as far as his ears.The mist in the chamber of the gateway was clearing slowly, the metal plates losing their silvery glow. He noticed that the armaglass walls were a rich, deep purple. Coming out of a jump, the brain never functioned all that well, but Ryan couldn't remember seeing walls of that color before.He felt more deeply sick and confused than he could remember, and he looked around the six-sided room to check on how the others were feeling.The others.There was nobody else there.He was on his own.That wasn't possible. He'd closed the door himself and triggered the jump mechanism in the buried redoubt in Florida, and everyone had been there then.Ryan took a sudden harsh breath, biting back the desire to vomit. He closed his eye again, battling for self-control and checking in his memory where everyone had been sitting.Krysty had sat next to him, her brilliantly red hair dark and wet, pasted to her head, her long legs stretched out in front of her, back against the wall, fingers clasped in his. Some incredible force had torn them apart. Ryan remembered that.She'd been on his right, with his eleven-year-old son, Dean, on the left. The boy had been toying with his beloved turquoise-hilted knife as he sat and waited patiently for the jump to begin. His big 9 mm Browning automatic pistol had been jammed into a holster at his belt. Who'd been next in the circle? "Mildred Wyeth."Ryan could see the black doctor in his mind's eye. A relative latecomer to the group of companions, the thirty-six-year-old woman had been wearing a cotton shirt and quilt-lined denim jacket over reinforced military fatigue pants, tucked into calf-length boots. In December of the year 2000, Mildred, an expert on cryosurgery, had been taken into hospital for minor abdominal surgery. Things had gone wrong, and she'd been placed in cryogenic suspensionfrozena state from which Ryan and the others had eventually freed her nearly a century after her "death."Recently she had deepened her relationship with the Armorer of the group, John Barrymore Dix, who'd sat next to her. About the same age as Ryan, J.B. was his oldest friend. The two of them had traveled for years with the legendary Trader, rising in the ranks to become his two most trusted lieutenants, as they ranged all across Deathlands.Thinking about the Trader brought a flicker of memory to Ryan. Abe, another comrade from the savage days riding the war wags, had gone off to search for the man. How long ago? Weeks? Months? Years? Ryan couldn't remember. He knew that his old leader had vanished during one long-ago night. Everyone thought that the rad cancer had overwhelmed him and he'd gone off to die like an animal in some cramped, dark place. Then the rumors started that Trader might not be dead after all."Abe?" Ryan said, trying to remember whether the little gunner had been with them in the gateway in Florida. He was sure that he hadn't. But there had been others.Krysty Wroth.J. B. Dix.Dean.Mildred Wyeth."Doc."Of course. Doc Tanner, lying doubled up on the far side of the chamber, knees cracking as he composed himself, his mane of bedraggled white hair framing his lined face. Doc's age was a bizarre enigma that Ryan had never been able to understand.He knew that Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born on the fourteenth day of February in the year of Our Lord, 1868. He'd been married to Emily, ne Chandler, on the seventeenth day of June, twenty-three years later. He'd obtained his doctorate in science at Harvard and a Ph.D. from Oxford University in England.Tall and skinny, Doc had been a happy man, with a three-year-old daughter, Rachel, and a little son, Jolyon. Then white-coated, faceless scientists a hundred years in the future had destroyed his life.He'd been plucked into 1998 from 1896 as one of the few successful guinea pigs from Operation Chronos, a time-trawling government project that generally brought only mangled piles of unidentifiable meat, blood and raw bones from the past.Doc had proved so difficult a guest of that particular present that they had eventually pushed him forward another ninety years or so into Deathlands."And Michael," Ryan announced triumphantly.Michael Brother had been brought into their world as another faulty experiment of Chronos. Since his birth he had been an oblate, a trainee monk, in a closed community called Nil-Vanity, above Visalia in the Sierras. Nineteen years of age, he had been disciplined into the martial art of Tao-Tain-do and had the fastest fighting reflexes that Ryan had ever known.That was all of them.The name of Jak Lauren came unbidden into Ryan's mind. Had Jak been with them in Florida?"No."The albino youth had traveled with Ryan and the others through many lethally desperate adventures.Now he was married to Christina, and they and their child, Jenny, lived on a spread in New Mexico.Ryan managed to get himself upright, conquering the sickness, trying to get his brain working. They'd all been together as the jump began, but there had been some kind of electronic malfunction. He recalled that. Could that have been responsible for the jump going so wrong?Were the others together, or had each of them been sent tumbling through time and space to different locations?He breathed deeply, trying to deduce some clue from the taste of the air.Most gateways were buried deep within old top-secret military installations called redoubts. They were generally powered by long-lived nuke generators that kept the heat and lights in the complexes functioning at survival levels.The air didn't smell like it normally did. Most jumps took the companions to gateways where the air was stale, dusty and dull. It often hadn't been breathed by anyone for close to a century, since the nuke cataclysm of 2001 that had wiped away civilization.This air was fresh and clean, warm, with a strange, foreign scent to it that Ryan couldn't quite identify.Automatically he checked through his personal armory of weapons, then adjusted the long white silk scarf around his neck, fingering the weighted ends that turned it into such a lethally effective garrote.A fresh wave of dizziness made Ryan stagger, and he leaned his hand on the cold glass wall. What was happening didn't hang together for him. How could they all have been in the Florida gateway and then end up in different destinations? Assuming that the others had materialized somewhere else in Deathlands. The idea that they hadn't was too appalling to entertain.To try to steady himself, Ryan drew his blaster from its holster. The familiar shape made sense to him, and he lifted it closer to his face to peer at it."Schweizerische Industrie-Gesellschaft Sauer." The trusty SIG-Sauer, Model P-226, that he'd carried for so many years had never let him down.Ryan took several more slow, deep breaths, reciting the vital statistics of the gun. "Nine millimeter. Fifteen rounds with push-button mag release. Weight twenty-five and a half ounces. Barrel length 4.4 inches. Total length 7.7 inches. Built-in baffle silencer."He bolstered the blaster and stopped to pick up the rifle that lay on the floor by his feet. His free hand had been gripping the sling on the Steyr SSG-70 during the jump, which explained why it had come along with him. The bolt action, 10-round blaster fired the uncommon 7.62 mm bullets, and Ryan had intended to try to find some way of changing it for a long gun that used a more standard caliber. Ammunition was a whole lot better than gold in Deathlands. If you didn't have any, it was almost impossible to obtain. If you had plenty, then you could generally find a way of getting hold of even more.It had been something that Trader had constantly drummed into every man and woman who rode and fought with him on the lumbering war wags. "No bullets gets you dead" was one of his more succinct and memorable sayings.Ryan was feeling better.There were two simple options.One was to open the door and then close it again. About the only thing that they managed to learn about the lost science of gateways was that this would normally speed you straight back to where you'd been.But Ryan's prime guess was that the Florida mat-trans chamber might well now be destroyed, flooded full ten fathoms deep in saltwater.The other option was to go out and try to find where in Deathlands he'd landed and begin the monstrously difficult quest of trying to track down Krysty, Dean and the others.Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer in his right hand and reached out with his left toward the control on the door. Next page