Chapter One

 

The cold fingers of fog were drifting away, out of Ryan Cawdor's brain.

 

The one constant thing that someone could safely say about making a matter-transfer jump was that there was no constant thing about making a jump. Sometimes there were dreams during the period of unconscious blackness, gibbering nightmares more often than sweet dreams. Sometimes there was no sensation of time passing at all. The mind closed down and then opened up again like a parched flower during a spring rain, with no awareness that anything at all had happened-except the one certainty that the complex machine, dating back nearly a hundred years, to the last days before the nuclear holocaust devastated the Earth, would definitely have taken you somewhere different. It could be a hundred miles away, or it could be ten thousand miles to another of the so-called gateways that had been built and buried in one of the chain of triple-secure military complexes known as redoubts.

 

The trouble with jumping was that you had no control over the destination. All the instructions had vanished during the nuking and the long winters that followed, and every living person who might once have known was long, long dead.

 

Most mat-trans jumps left you feeling like someone had sliced the top of your skull off, scrambled the soft tissues inside, then jammed the lid back on. It also churned up your guts like you'd been strapped under a war wag going flat out across forty miles of bad road.

 

As Ryan lurched back toward waking, he was aware that this particular jump hadn't been too bad.

 

"Some you lose and some you draw," he muttered.

 

When he'd locked the sec door on the chamber in the redoubt in Kansas, triggering the mechanism, everyone there had been holding hands, and the armaglass walls had been a virulent shade of cherry red.

 

Now his hands were free.

 

Several jumps ago something had gone horrifically wrong, and Ryan and his six companions had all ended in different destinations, only getting back together by a mix of judgment and luck.

 

Ryan opened his good eye.

 

The walls in this gateway were a dull, indeterminate shade of gray, closer to black than white.

 

The metallic disks dotted across the floor and the ceiling had resumed their usual color, and the white mist that often flooded the chamber during a jump had vanished.

 

Everyone was there.

 

Krysty Wroth, next to him, lay sprawled against a wall, her brilliantly red, sentient hair packed tight across her shoulders, crowding onto her nape as though it were trying to protect her.

 

His eleven-year-old son, Dean, was halfway across Krysry's lap, his eyes squeezed shut, moaning softly, looking like he'd be next to recover consciousness.

 

Nineteen-year-old Michael Brother was doubled over, his knees drawn up in the fetal position, a tiny thread of scarlet blood at the corner of his mouth, as though he might have nipped his tongue during the jump.

 

J. B. Dix, Ryan's oldest friend and armorer to the group, was also beginning to stir, muttering in his sleep. His normally sallow face was even more pale than usual. Without his glasses, his eyes looked oddly naked and unprotected. His scattergun was at his side, his Uzi clutched to his chest.

 

Mildred Wyeth was next. The black doctor was breathing very heavily, her mouth sagging open, her left hand gripping J.B.'s right.

 

The last of the seven friends was Doctor Theophi-lus Algernon Tanner, who was stretched out next to Ryan, flat on his back, his hands folded across his stomach, holding the gold-plated J. E. B. Stuart Le Mat blaster.

 

Normally it was Doc who had the biggest problem in using the mat-trans system. Even at the best of times his brain was a touch unreliable, and the pressures of jumping sometimes pushed him a few inches closer to the edge.

 

On occasion it had even pushed him completely into the abyss of insanity.

 

Ryan looked at the wrinkled face, the silvery stubble showing through the leathery skin.

 

It wasn't that surprising that Doc often found h'fe in the last part of the twenty-first century hard to bear.

 

He'd been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14 in the year of Our Lord, 1868, and was married to Emily Chandler twenty-three years later on June 17. Had two children-Rachel, born in the second year of their marriage, and little Jolyon, born to the happy parents two years later.

 

In November of 1896 Doc had been in Omaha, Nebraska. In a nanosecond he was transported to a laboratory in a discreet and heavily guarded building somewhere in Virginia, one hundred and two years later.

 

It was a time of extreme fragility and suspicion in international relations, and the United States of America had poured limitless squillions of dollars into the ultrasecret Totality Project, which explored arcane and esoteric possibilities for future warfare.

 

One of its subdivisions was Overproject Whisper, which, in its turn, had spawned numerous other research missions. One, Cerberus, involved the transfer of matter from one location to another, which became known as "jumping."

 

Another research mission was called Operation Chronos and focused on time trawling.

 

Chronos had some spectacular and hideously disgusting failures. Not many of their targets ever arrived in the year 2000 either physically or mentally whole. Some simply disappeared.

 

But Doc arrived-mentally scarred, but he arrived and lived.

 

However, they had picked a bad subject. Doc wouldn't sit quiet under their battery of tests and interrogation, insisting on trying by every means necessary to try to rejoin his wife and family.

 

In the end, the faceless military scientists got rid of him. They sent him forward in time, to the heart of Deathlands, where he came close to death before being rescued by Ryan Cawdor.

 

Michael Brother was also one of the tiny number of successfully trawled victims of Chronos, helped into the dubious future by Ryan and the others.

 

In the late 1900s he'd been taken as a baby into a closed-monastic order near Visalia in the Sierras. He'd spent all of his life as an oblate within the serene community of Nil-Vanity, then was sucked away by Chronos into the late part of the next century.

 

Mildred was also from the past.

 

But time trawling wasn't responsible for her being stuck in Deathlands.

 

Born in 1964, Mildred had become one of the country's leading experts on cryogenics and cryosur-gery, the science of medical freezing. Ironically, at the age of thirty-six she'd gone into hospital for routine minor surgery.

 

Which had gone wrong.

 

She'd been frozen, deeply unconscious, not long before the missiles darkened the skies of the world and civilization came to a grinding halt.

 

Not with a whimper, but with a megabang. ' During the exploration of one of the concealed redoubts, Ryan and his friends had come across Mildred, sealed away, her life-support system powered by a long-running and reliable nuke generator. And they had brought her back to the land of the living.

 

"Feel sick, Dad."

 

"Hang on, Dean. Just try to sit up and keep your head still. If 11 pass."

 

J.B. was also coming around.

 

His first movement was to fumble his fingers over the stock of the Uzi, then reach down for the Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun on the floor.

 

"Not too bad, as jumps go," he said, his voice sounding hoarse. "You okay, Ryan?"

 

"Yeah. Wasn't a bad one."

 

Krysty sighed and opened her emerald eyes, turning to Ryan and giving him a lazy, jump-stoned smile. "Hi, lover. Once again we made it with nothing worse than a nauseous headache."

 

He stood, reaching a hand down to help her to her feet. The heels of her dark blue Western boots skidded a moment, but Ryan steadied her.

 

Dean and J.B. were also up, stretching, easing the kinks out of their spines.

 

Michael was coming around, his eyes blinking fast, his head shaking from side to side. "Hey," he said, "I

 

don't feel too bad. We did jump, didn't we?" He looked at the sludge-colored walls. "Oh, yeah. They were red last time, weren't they?"

 

Only Mildred and Doc were still unconscious.

 

"Can't feel much." Krysty closed her eyes and took a dozen slow, deep breaths. "No. Air tastes like it generally does. Flat and... There's a kind of bitter, chemical smell to it, though. Least it's not corpses Like the last place."

 

Mildred sneezed, making them all start. "Bless me." She shook her head, the tiny beads in her plaited hair clicking softly against one another.

 

"All right?" the Armorer asked, never a man to use three words when two would do the job.

 

"Think so." She looked inward for a moment. "Yes. Not too bad. Must be one of the better jumps. I suppose we really have... Walls were that screaming red last time, weren't they? Not sure this gray's much improvement."

 

Now everyone was up but Doc, who slept on, oblivious to the six friends gathered around him. Mildred put her index finger against his throat, checking his pulse. "Slow but not that slow," she announced.

 

J.B. was examining the walls of the gateway chamber. "You notice this, Ryan?"

 

"What?"

 

"Sort of careless built."

 

Ryan looked more closely and saw what J.B. meant. The sheets of armaglass didn't quite match up, and some kind of sealant had been pushed into the gaps.

 

One of the walls was cracked, and two of the ceiling disks were actually hanging loose.

 

"Yeah. That's the first time I've ever noticed anything like that."

 

"Last year's loving, bitter, still remains," said a familiar deep, resonant voice.

 

Ryan turned. "Doc's on his way back out of the darkness," he said.

 

"There is no memory of her here." Doc's eyes bunked open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, gradually returning to focus on the walls and the six faces looking down at him. "Upon my soul, my dear friends, I wondered when we seven would meet again. And here we are, but not upon a blasted heath. A bastard wreath. Last teeth." He struggled to sit up, helped by Mildred and J.B. "Have we successfully completed our jump? I see we have, from the change in hue. But I confess that I fed less sickly than is usual at such moments. Perhaps I am finally building a tolerance to such events."

 

"We all feel better than we normally do after a jump." Ryan looked around. "If we're all okay to go, we can take a look at where we've finished up."

 

He didn't need to tell them all to draw their blasters.

 

Coming out of the gateway was one of the potentially triple-red scenarios in Deathlands. But this time was oddly different.

 

Chapter Two

 

Normally there was a small anteroom immediately off the actual mat-trans chamber. The size varied a little from redoubt to redoubt, but they were usually somewhere around ten feet square, plainly decorated, mostly unfurnished.

 

This time it was simply a cave, roughly hewn from bare stones, a dull gray rock lined with narrow seams of shimmering green quartz. The ceiling was less than eight feet high, and the walls were only about six feet apart. Other than a patina of very fine dusty sand, it was empty.

 

Michael Brother ran his finger down the stone. "Still got the marks of the chisel," he said. "Looks like it was done only yesterday."

 

"Must've been one of the last redoubts to be built before skydark," J.B. suggested.

 

Nobody had ever known how many of the massive military fortresses had been constructed during the last years of international tension before nuke-day came and went. When Ryan had ridden with the Trader they'd been lucky enough to come across several.

 

One in the Apps had contained several mothballed war wags on which the Trader had based his whole operation. Another, one hundred and fifty miles north

 

of the ruins of Boston, had contained enough stored tanks of high-octane gas to keep them in jack for years.

 

All that was known was that the chain of redoubts had been a part of the Totality Concept and they'd been constructed under conditions of the utmost secrecy. Despite the whining of the pinko conservation-ists, the government had compulsorily taken over huge sectors of the country, including thousands of square miles of some of the most favored, most beautiful and most isolated national parks.

 

The irony was that the eventual war was so sudden and apocalyptic that the redoubts proved to have absolutely zero military significance and most showed signs of having been rapidly evacuated in the last few weeks of what remained of civilization and order.

 

By traveling from gateway to gateway, Ryan and his companions had located many more hidden redoubts, in varying stages of preservation or destruction.

 

But they'd certainly never come across one that looked like it was still being built.

 

Not until now.

 

"Look here, Dad!" Dean had gone ahead, through the crudely carved doorway into what would normally be the control room for the entire mat-trans operation. There would be rows of consoles and banks of comp desks, with dancing gauges and flickering dials and lights. All were powered by a hidden nuke gen, pulsing away in the deeps of the fortress.

 

"There's something seriously wrong here, lover." Krysty had followed the boy through, pausing and looking around her in disbelief.

 

"It's just a hut, Dad."

 

The walls and ceiling of the building were bare rock, with the same thread of emerald quartz running through it. But it was barely a quarter the size of the normal control room. There were comp consoles, but only twenty or so, mounted on makeshift tables, some with broken legs propped on red bricks.

 

"The air," Mildred said, sniffing. "Not like it usually is, either."

 

Ryan breathed in, half closing his eye. The woman was right. It didn't have that dusty flatness that recirculated air normally had. This was bitter and sharp, like a vaporized acid-rain storm.

 

There were loops of multicolored cable draped all over the place, with junction boxes and ends of sprayed bare metal. It was amazing that the gateway was still functioning after the best part of a century- though it crossed Ryan's mind to wonder whether this mat-trans unit might actually have been rebuilt within the past few years. If so, it was a staggering thought and opened all kinds of unsuspected possibilities.

 

J.B. was walking slowly around, reaching up to touch the rock overhead, examining his fingers. "It's dry. This couldn't have run if it had been damp."

 

"These portals to the outer world are unlike any that I've ever seen. They resemble nothing more than an ordinary door on a frontier outhouse."

 

Doc was exaggerating a little. But only a little.

 

The familiar vanadium-steel sec doors, weighing hundreds of tons and operated by a complex system of gears and counterweights, weren't there.

 

There was a single wide door, with an ordinary handle like you might put on a garden shed. It was made from wooden planks, some of them warped and crooked, with a length of one-by-four nailed across to hold the thing together. Once upon a time it had been white, but the paint had dried and flaked, like build-Ings in a desert ghost town.

 

The strip lights overhead were harsh, and at least a quarter of them had malfunctioned.

 

"I don't get it." Ryan shook his head. "This isn't like a mat-trans unit. It's like some handyman got a load of bits and pieces that fell off the back of a wag and he just put them all together and found he'd built a gateway. But the damned thing worked. Got us here all right."

 

"Mebbe we should leave right now. Could be safer." J.B. tapped on the door with the butt of the Uzi. "One-armed baby could knock this down."

 

"Why not open it?" Dean asked, "Least take a look outside, huh, Dad?"

 

"I guess..."

 

The door wasn't even locked.

 

The boy simply turned the handle and pushed, and it opened, revealing a dark, constricting passage.

 

"Wait," Ryan snapped. "Don't go rushing into that like a double stupe, Dean. Could be anything out there."

 

"A most maleficent odor," Doc commented, applying his swallow's-eye kerchief to his protuberant nose. "Like touching your tongue to tarnished brass."

 

Mildred laughed. "Nice one, Doc. Know what you mean. It isn't that deathly medical smell from the other redoubt in Kansas, but it isn't normal."

 

Ryan went to the door, pushing past Dean. The place was so small and cramped that there hardly seemed to be enough room for the seven of them.

 

Once again, the contrast with other complexes they'd visited was stark. Instead of the wide corridors, with antiseptically clean concrete walls and high curved ceilings, this was more like the mouth of a tunnel built by gnomes. There were no lights and not a sign of the usual ob-vid cameras.

 

The passage was around ten feet at its widest, so low that Ryan felt he had to stoop, oddly aware of the enormous weight of rock and earth hanging over him.

 

As his eye became accustomed to the gloom outside the control area, Ryan realized that there was a very faint glow visible away to his right.

 

"I think this place is totally open," he said, holding the SIG-Sauer at the ready. "Doesn't look like artificial light, and the smell of the air is stronger."

 

Doc's description hung in his mind. The taste was definitely metallic in origin.

 

One by one they followed him, all stooping, though the ceiling was just high enough for Doc, tallest at six feet three, to stand straight without bumping his head.

 

"Hi, ho," Mildred sang quietly. "Looks like we're all going off to work."

 

They didn't have far to go.

 

The light ahead grew steadily brighter, showing that the whole place had been hacked out of living rocks, also showing that the gateway seemed to be on its own, without the usual surrounding redoubt.

 

Ryan held up his hand as the rough-floored passage curved sharply to the right, almost in dogleg. "Hold it just a minute. Krysty?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Feel anything?"

 

"No."

 

"Nothing? Must be some sort of life around."

 

Krysty pressed the tips of her fingers to her forehead. While she concentrated hard, Ryan became aware that the fiery sentient hair was curled tight around her head and neck, often a sign of potential danger.

 

"No." Krysty bit her lip. "Can't pick up anything at all. Not close by, anyway."

 

He nodded. "Best go see."

 

The tunnel simply ended in a roughly circular opening, with daylight beyond.

 

One of the oddities about jumping was that it screwed up time in a way that Ryan had never been able to work out. Sometimes you might jump in the middle of the night and you'd find that you'd arrived at the next redoubt in the middle of the afternoon.

 

Now his wristchron said that it was eleven minutes after nine in the morning.

 

"Think we might be near the sea," J.B. said. "Walls are wet and the air seems damp."

 

Ryan was first out of the passage, finding himself on a ledge of sculpted rock, barely ten feet wide. To his left there was a steep wall of granite, rising into a thick mist. To the right, the ledge became a trail, winding out of sight.

 

There were no doors and no sign of anything else that might have been a part of a bigger complex.

 

"Don't get it," Mildred said. "Anyone could just have walked in and smashed up the gateway. Nothing to stop them."

 

"Maybe it's so completely isolated that there isn't anyone here. Not even a passing mutie." Ryan bolstered the SIG-Sauer. "Fireblast!"

 

"What?" Krysty jumped at his loud exclamation.

 

"Mebbe this a triple-bad hot spot." He checked the tiny rad counter stitched into the sleeve of his coat.

 

But it showed only a placid, safe green.

 

J.B. also checked his, finding the same reading. "No hot spot."

 

"Where are we?" asked Dean. "Looks like the inside of a stickie's ass."

 

Everyone fell silent, looking around them.

 

There seemed to be a mist both above and below them, cutting off visibility. The air was cool and moist, the cliffs jagged and irregular, rising all around them. The more Ryan stared, the stranger it all looked. He couldn't find any trace of life anywhere, not even smears of moss or lichen on the boulders.

 

He scuffed his boots in the dirt, noticing that even the most ubiquitous plant in Deathlands was absent. The tiny multipetaled daisies, with their delicate yellow-and-white coloring, were found from Alaska to the Gulf.

 

But not here.

 

"Yeah, J.B.," he said. "Where are we?"

 

The Armorer fumbled in his pockets and pulled out the microsextant, squinting around the sky. "No sun," he said. "Still, find where light's brightest." After a couple of minutes he shook his head. "Can't get a reading at all. Might be something wrong with this." He put the miniature instrument back in his coat. "Try the compass and see if... Dark night!"

 

They all gathered around him, seeing that the needle on the magnetic compass was swinging wildly, from north to south, then revolving in a blur of speed, not settling for a moment at any particular point.

 

"Anomalies," Doc pronounced. "They are known to exist in certain places where the underlying strata contain high proportions of lodestone. Some kind of considerable electromagnetic disturbance."

 

Michael had walked to the edge and was peering cautiously over the brink. "Can't make out anything. Though... No. I thought I saw something flying through the fog, way below, but it vanished." He hesitated. "Something real big."

 

Mildred joined the teenager. "Looks to me like the valley of the shadow of death, doesn't it? The land that time forgot. Ultima Thule. End of all things."

 

There was a puddle of water by Ryan's boots and he stooped and dipped a finger in it, noticing that there was an oily, rainbow sheen on it. He touched his finger to his lips, immediately spitting the substance out

 

and rubbing his mouth. "Bitter! Tastes like Badwater, down in the heart of Dry Valley."

 

"Do you think there could have been some kind of chemical pollution here?" Mildred asked. "Not radiation. There was a lot of talk before I got to be ill and got frozen, talk that the Russkies had all sorts of nerve and chemical agents. Nobody knew if it was true. Been some used in the Middle East, in the eighties and nineties. This just looks like some ghastly leakage or spillage of some industrial poison."

 

"Ow!" Dean slapped at something. "Stung me on the cheek. Look, I got the fucker.' *

 

Nobody corrected his language, all of them looking at the bizarre insect that he held, trembling in the palm of his hand.

 

It was an inch and a half long, its narrow body a dull gold color. There were four sets of filmy gray wings, and its head had six separate eyes, like tiny orbs of polished copper. At the end of its tapering tail there was a sting, grossly out of proportion to its overall length.

 

"Like a scorpion," J.B. stated, examining it carefully. "Hooked and barbed."

 

Krysty peered at the boy's face, where a nasty lump was already swelling. "Keep an eye on that, Dean."

 

"Don't think it had much chance to squirt its poison in before I got it. Hurts like a bastard, though."

 

He tipped it off his hand onto the shale at his feet and crushed it under his heel.

 

"The whole atmosphere is redolent of despair." Doc looked around at the misty wasteland. "For once I

 

would like my voice heard on behalf of making a jump again immediately. I have not been an eager apostle for this, but-"

 

Ryan held up a hand. "Sorry, Doc. But there's something triple-weird here. That gateway looked like it had been thrown together. No redoubt. Open to anyone passing through. Now we can't find any way of even knowing where we are. So, I figure we should explore a little."

 

The old man shook his head. "I do see the gist of your thinking, my dear fellow. No doubt the rest of our little party agrees with you." He looked at the others. "Well, nobody disagrees with you. Come, then, let us leave this peak in Darien and venture into this slough of despond."

 

Ryan felt more uneasy than he had for a very long time. The short hairs at his nape were prickling.

 

But, apart from the undoubted dreariness of the region, there didn't seem any immediate danger.

 

"Let's go look," he said.

 

Chapter Three

 

"This air's so rotten it makes you feel tired." Krysty was second in their skirmish line, with Dean following close behind her. "It seems like a part of the planet that Gaia must've overlooked."

 

As usual, the rest of the group was strung out, with J.B. bringing up the rear, the 20-round, 9 mm Uzi held loosely in his hands.

 

By the time they'd descended about one hundred and fifty feet, they found themselves in one of the swirling banks of fog. It was puzzling the way the banks of cloud kept moving around them, as there wasn't a breath of wind.

 

The stones were soft and crumbled beneath their feet, making progress unsteady and dangerous. At no point was the man-made track wider than a dozen feet, and there was no way of guessing the deeps that lay to their left. Dean had thrown a fist-size stone over and listened for its fall. But all they heard was what sounded like a human cry of pain, which wasn't repeated.

 

Once they were within the acrid mist, visibility was down to fifteen or twenty feet.

 

Ryan told everyone to close up and keep on triple-red alert, knowing from previous experience that muties loved to attack from the heart of fog or darkness.

 

There was still little or no sign of life around.

 

But Mildred pointed out that there were little tufts of sickly yellowish sedge growing in some of the cracks between the moldering stones.

 

The canyons were so deeply blighted that Ryan twice checked his rad counter, tapping it with his forefinger in case it was malfunctioning.

 

But it remained stubbornly in the safe, green level, showing no inclination to move toward yellow or orange, which meant there was no residual danger from the nuking.

 

J.B. was thinking along the same lines. "Nearest thing to a hot spot I ever saw," he called, his voice muffled and flattened by the damp fog.

 

The trail zigzagged sharply, the surface furrowed by rains and broken up by years of frosts. Ryan doubted that any sizable wag could ever have gotten up it. Now it would be totally impassable, except on foot.

 

There was a sudden swooping sound and all of them ducked, raising their blasters. Ryan stared up into the mist, aware only of something vast flying close by them, bringing with it the stench of rotted meat. The cloud was too thick to make out details, but Ryan had a momentary flash of a long leathery neck and an elongated reptilian head, with several sets of protruding, yellow teeth. It seemed to have a wingspan in excess of thirty feet, but it could have been distorted by the fog.

 

"What was that?" Krysty was standing upright again, facing the direction that the creature had taken. "Anyone able to see it properly?"

 

"Like a gator," Dean said, pointing his Browning vaguely into the slate sky.

 

"Flying alligator?" Mildred was perspiring, despite the dank chill in the air. "Seen most things, but-" "I confess that I caught only the merest glimpse of the creature," Doc said. "But it bore a more-than-passing resemblance to what the boy said."

 

There were more pools of the oily water, lying in hollows and crevices, all of it so alkaline and bitter that it was hopelessly undrinkable.

 

At one of the labrynthine turnings of the track there was the rotted stump of a vast tree, a good five yards in diameter. Since it was one of the first signs of anything approaching normal life, Michael stopped to look at it. He recoiled in disgust, his face screwed up.

 

"It's a mass of sort of maggots. But they're big as your thumb and like white jelly."

 

Ryan was having second and third thoughts about the wisdom of carrying on with the recce.

 

"MY CHRON'S STOPPED."

 

J.B.'s voice, from a little way behind him, brought Ryan to a halt. He checked his own chron, finding that the numbers had frozen, showing a time only a few minutes after their arrival in the open air.

 

"Must be that electromagnetic thing that Doc mentioned. Screws up direction and time."

 

They were in a particularly thick band of mist, and the figure of the old man was only a dimly seen silhouette. "If you relied on a real timepiece instead of those tinny and cheap jack digital bits of frippery, then you might care to know that we've been on this shifting, whispering trail for just over fifty-three minutes."

 

Doc was holding his silver half-hunter in his right hand, angling it to catch the poor light.

 

"How come his chron has that kind of pair of needles to tell the time?" asked Dean.

 

"They are called 'hands,' dear boy," Doc replied. "My pocket watch is a good deal older than I am, which is saying something. It is also a sight more reliable than my body or my brain. And vastly and un-arguably to be preferred against those 'wristchrons,' I believe."

 

He succeeded in making "wristchron" sound like something he'd just discovered on the sole of his boot after a morning stroll through a cow pasture.

 

Now they could catch the noise of running water, a sullen and deathly sound, less than a hundred feet below.

 

The height of the unseen peaks around, glimpsed briefly through the shifting banks of cloud, laid a leaden weight on everyone's heart, and there was none of the usual good-natured banter. The rocks underfoot were treacherous and slippery, taking full concentration to avoid a nasty fall.

 

Ryan began to notice more vegetation, though it was in keeping with the desolate place.

 

Stunted and mutated, it showed no recognizable signs of being a plant any of them could identify. The dominant color was gray-dark gray, with veins of sulfurous yellow running through it.

 

Most were bushes, though a stooped tree, crooked and broken, had occasionally found a foothold in among the crevices of the boulders, nourished by the poisonous water.

 

There was also more life.

 

Of sorts,

 

They saw no repeat of the monstrous creature floating low over their heads, though the fog occasionally echoed to bizarre cries, yelps and screams.

 

Ryan spotted some kind of mutie...thing. It wasn't exactly an insect or a lizard or an animal, but it was a vile mix of all three. Though it had six stumpy, clawed legs, they propelled it in a peculiar scuttling, sideways movement. The head, with a fringe of spiky hairs, was narrow and fierce, turning to hiss at the seven intruders into its domain. From snout to the quivering tip of its barbed tail it was less than nine inches, the skin a set of overlapping, mottled scales. The eyes were an opaque crimson, standing out from the skull on stalks that enabled it to glare in every direction at once.

 

"I'll chill it," Dean said, leveling his heavy blaster, but his father knocked his arm down.

 

"Next time you do something as triple stupe as that, son, I'll put you on your back in the dirt!" The anger rode high in Ryan's voice, and his good eye stared intently into his son's face. "You hear me?"

 

"Sure, sure." Dean backed quickly away. "Keep the rad green, Dad. No harm."

 

"No harm!" Ryan felt the pulse throbbing hi the empty socket of his left eye, and he swallowed hard to control the red mist. "Little mutie bastard wasn't doin' us no harm. This is a shit-dangerous and fucking creepy place, Dean. I never saw anywhere like this. None of us did. Chrons don't run. Compass don't work. Sun doesn't fucking shine." The anger still burned in Ryan, but he could feel the blood leaving his temper. "We don't know what's out there, do we?"

 

"Sorry, Dad."

 

"Yeah. And I'm sorry I went off at you like a rogue gren launcher, Dean. But you pull the trigger on that Browning, and you could alert any living bastard within five miles that there's outlanders in their territory."

 

"See that now. Sorry."

 

"Never apologize, son. It's a sign of weakness." Mildred grinned at Ryan. "Not the best John Wayne impersonation in Deathlands, but the only one I got."

 

AT LAST THE TRACK BEGAN to level out.

 

It was lined with a kind of sagebrush, and decorated with gray-white berries that gave off a bitter dust if anyone brushed against them. They saw several more of the six-legged mutie creatures, but nothing that represented an obvious threat.

 

"There's the river." Krysty pointed to their left. "Gaia! It looks as inviting as everything else around here. Dismal isn't the word."

 

They stood in a row, all staring in silence at the slow-flowing water. Above them, the acidic layer of fog shifted in impenetrable coils, making it impossible to see anything more than a hundred feet high.

 

The river was forty to fifty feet wide, with a shelving beach on both sides. The rocks that protruded above the surface were greasy, looking as though they were composed of gray mud. The color of the water was an oily brown, but it was moving so unhurriedly that Ryan blinked, thinking he was a victim of a trick of the admittedly poor light.

 

"That river..." Doc began hesitantly. "I would swear that it was going past us in slow motion. Or are my tired old eyes deceiving me?"

 

Michael stepped down, perfectly balanced, over the banks of shingle and knelt at the edge of the river. He reached out slowly and dipped a hand into the water, pulling it hastily out, shaking his fingers and wiping them quickly on his black parka.

 

"It's warm, it stings and it isn't water!" he shouted to them.

 

"What is it?"

 

"Kind of thicker than water. Consistency of very thin honey, or cooking oil."

 

Before any of them could even open their mouths to shout a warning, something darted from the oily liquid, propelling itself toward the oblivious teenager's throat. There was only a moment for a glimpse, but Ryan had the impression of a large rat with fins and webbed feet, or a furred fish with a body and head like a rodent.

 

Though he was facing away from the foot-long mutie, Michael's astounding combat reflexes saved him from, at best, a nasty bite.

 

His right hand punched sideways, hitting the thing in midair, chopping it a few yards along the pebbles. It landed on its back, but wriggled over and propelled itself, not back to the safety of the river, but toward the kneeling man.

 

Mildred had her ZKR 551 drawn and cocked, and she sighted along the barrel of the Czech target revolver, glancing sideways toward Ryan, waiting for his word to put a .38 round through the malevolent monstrosity.

 

"No!" Michael called, uncoiling and standing with his legs a little apart, braced and ready for the attack. They could all hear a faint mewing sound, like a kitten being tortured, coming from the thing*s needled mouth.

 

Michael was wearing his sturdy knee-high hiking boots, and he waited until the mutie was within range of him. He kicked out once, sending the creature spinning along the shingle. He followed it, hesitating only for a second before bringing his heel down on it, crushing the small body into the stones. He turned away with an expression of disgust. "Skin must be like paper," he called. "It just burst open and rotted in front of me." He bent down. "Now there's just... like a sticky puddle of stinking grunge left."

 

"HOW'S THE TIME, DOC?"

 

The silver watch appeared from the fob pocket of his waistcoat. "Not too far off noon, my dear fellow. I was wondering whether it might be possible to find anything to eat hi this godforsaken place." He laughed. "I have never seen a place that was so literally forsaken by the Almighty."

 

J.B. looked around them. "I'd be double surprised if there was a creature here that we could safely eat, Doc. Think about that rat-fish that went for Michael."

 

"What's that?" Krysty was shading her eyes, looking farther down the valley to where the strange river made a sweeping curve from the left.

 

There was a cluster of buildings, looking to be wood-framed, like some kind of frontier ville.

 

It was one of the last things that Ryan had expected to see in this hostile wilderness of acid water and fog and ghastly nuke muties.

 

"Might be some folks there," he said doubtfully. "Could even be food, Doc."

 

There were no folks.

 

But there were other things.

 

Chapter Four

 

"Looks like there used to be a real blacktop running along here-" J.B. had dropped to a crouch and was peering at the ground "-before whatever blanked out the whole region."

 

"That a real ville?" Mildred asked, her right hand resting gently on the Armorer's arm.

 

"Looks like it." He straightened and wiped his spectacles, easing the scattergun across his shoulders. "We going to go in, Ryan?"

 

"Guess so. From what we've seen since we left the redoubt-I mean the gateway-I hate to think what kind of human muties might live there."

 

"Looks graveyard creepy, Dad."

 

"Looks don't hurt you, Dean."

 

ONE OF THE SUPPORTING posts had rotted through, leaving the sign hanging slantwise. The paint had faded and weathered away so that it could barely be read: Welcome to Lonesome Gulch. The Famous Ghost Town of the Old West.

 

"We in the West?" Mildred asked. "This doesn't look like any part of the West that I ever saw."

 

Ryan shook his head. "Nothing makes much sense, does it? Still, we could find some shelter for the evening, then head back to the gateway and make another jump if there's nothing here worth staying for."

 

There was another sign a little farther on for a parking lot, a yellow arrow pointing to the right, where there was a large bare stretch of what might once have been tarmac but was now a meadow of rank grass and spiked weeds.

 

"There's something called a company store." Krysty pointed. "Says it's the first stop and the last stop on the visit. Get your ticket there for the ghost-town tour."

 

The weather was as good as it had been since the jump. The mist had lifted, though it still hung below the surrounding peaks, and a few threads of watery sunlight seeped through the leaden clouds.

 

Beyond the store they could all see a street of ramshackle buildings, some of them without roofs, some with collapsed walls. In the distance there was a rusting railroad engine that looked like it dated back well into the nineteenth century, and a few rotting wagons.

 

Doc was fascinated. "Upon my soul. This is uncommonly like a return to the days of my youth." He shook his head. "Though I would hazard a guess that this place has been reconstructed for the benefit of the tourist industry."

 

As they reached the first of the buildings, the store, Doc was proved correct.

 

Under fly-smeared glass, there was a notice that contained the history of Lonesome Gulch, explaining how a local historical society had been formed in the

mid-1900s to save and re-create the vanishing parts of the national heritage. Genuine buildings in various states of disrepair had been collected from all over the region and brought together, "so that our children, and their children's children might still be able to relish the romance and reality of the days of yore."

 

J.B. pushed the door of the store, ignoring the handwritten card that announced it was closed.

 

A bell gave a dusty tinkle, then fell off the wall, its bracket rusted through.

 

"I'll stay out and keep watch," Ryan said, leaning cautiously against the wall, half anticipating that the whole place would crumble into sawdust.

 

He turned quickly as he thought he saw something moving at the far end of the street, by the old locomotive. It moved in an odd way, part wriggling, part crawling, but he didn't react fast enough to be sure of what it was.

 

It certainly wasn't anything human.

 

The rest of them roamed through the shadowy interior of the store, which looked like it had been simply abandoned around the time of sky dark.

 

"Look at this." Michael had found a big display case near the rear of the building. "What are they?" He held up a number of small sacks.

 

"Tobacco?" Doc suggested.

 

"No." J.B. untied the whipcord around the top of one of the bags and tipped the contents into his palm. It was fine grains, as black as midnight. "Blasting powder," he said.

 

"Some candy here." Dean called to his father, standing just outside the front door. "Can I try some?"

 

Mildred joined him. The candy was in narrow sticks, thinner than a finger, about six inches long, wrapped in crinkling twists of cellophane paper. They were in different sections, each one described in old-fashioned golden lettering.

 

"Cinnamon and mint. Julep and spearmint. Saltwater taffy. Clove and apple. Banana and coconut. Brings back my childhood, this place. I see what you mean, Doc."

 

"Can I have some, Dad?"

 

"Let's look around the town first. Before the light starts to get worse."

 

"Can I go on my own?"

 

The boy was unbelievably eager, hopping from one foot to the other. Ryan smiled and ruffled Dean's shock of black hair. "I guess so. But don't go beyond the main street, and yell if you see anything. All right?"

 

"Sure." The boy ran off.

 

Ryan called after him. "Yell if you even think that you see anything!"

 

The group split up.

 

Ryan and Krysty crossed over the main street, stepping down off the uneven planking of the boardwalk. J.B. and Mildred stayed on the same side as the store. Michael and Doc strolled together along the rutted center of the street, pausing to investigate any building that looked particularly interesting to either of them.

 

"See that," Krysty said, pointing to a torn poster stuck inside one of the windows of the nearest buildings. "They were going to hold a pack-burro race a month or so after the long winters started. Just where in Deathlands are we?"

 

"Lonesome Gulch. Says this was a typical homestead from the late 1800s. Let's take a look."

 

It was a sodbuster's shotgun shack, with a single hallway and the rooms opening off to one side, a small parlor, then a bedroom with bunks, and finally a tiny kitchen with an iron stove and hand-pumped sink.

 

Everything was rotting, the surfaces were all slightly moist, with a microscopic covering of mold.

 

"I'm amazed this place has stayed here as long as it has," Krysty commented. "All around's got the flat taste of death and decay. Why don't we go, lover?"

 

"Kind of interesting. Seems to me that the frontier villes in the old, old past weren't all that different to some of the frontier pestholes we see nowadays."

 

The next building, with a shingled roof that had managed to resist the hostile elements, had once been a combination dentist's and doctor's home. Krysty paused in the entrance, shuddering and putting a hand to her eyes. "Gaia!"

 

"What?"

 

"So much pain and misery here," she said, looking at a rusted pair of obstetric stirrups, standing in a corner like instruments of torture.

 

Ryan was examining some Victorian dental tools in a glass case, brushing away the dust with his fingers, wincing at the shape and size. He recognized some of them from his own infrequent visits to fangcarvers around Deathlands.

 

Doc stood with Michael a few yards farther up the grassy street, staring up at a building with an odd design of a protractor and a pair of compasses carved near the peak of the gable roof.

 

"A Masonic lodge," he said wonderingly. "First one of those that I've seen since being trawled to this dreadful future. Who would ever have thought that such a widely powerful organization could so simply vanish from the face of the earth."

 

Dean whooped to them, leaning out of the cab of the old locomotive. * 'You used to ride in one of these, Doc?"

 

"Indeed I did, my boy. Lynchburg to Danville was one of my favorite rides. And Durango up to Silver-ton, along the Animas. Smoke and cinders is what I remember best."

 

J.B. and Mildred had stepped into something labeled Carpenter's Shop and Morgue.

 

The walls were covered with a display of old tools, mostly disfigured with a patina of rust, their wooden handles long rotted away.

 

There was a coffin on two trestles, its chased brass handles tarnished and hidden under a layer of green verdigris. The lace around the edge of the pillow and the shroud had all yellowed and decayed.

 

Something rattled against the roof and both of than looked up, J.B.'s finger going to the trigger of the Uzi. But the sound wasn't repeated.

 

"Wouldn't mind spending some time around this place," the Armorer said.

 

He stood foursquare, stocky, staring up at an embroidered sampler, dated somewhere in the mid-1800s, and bearing a wobbly sewn signature of Esther Win-gate. "Man cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."

 

"Must be odd for Doc." Mildred ran a finger along the top of the coffin, wrinkling her face in disgust. "Everything feels kind of sticky."

 

J.B. was looking out of the window at the back of the single-story building, wiping the glass with his sleeve. "Yeah. Whole atmosphere is double freaked. The fog's coming back again, rolling up from the river."

 

Doc was in the offices of the Lonesome Gulch Courier, admiring the heavy printing press, while Michael looked at the crumbling remnants of earlier copies of the newspaper, tacked to the lath-and-plaster walls.

 

"Says here they had some real heavy snow in January 1895." The teenager turned to Doc. "That before your time, Doc?"

 

"I was a lad of twelve when the worst storms in the history of the United States struck the Eastern seaboard, in 1880. Four or five hundred people died in the hurricane winds and monstrous falls of snow. I

 

well remember, in Vermont where I was then dwelling, that there were banks of snow measured at fifty feet deep. Parlous times, young fellow."

 

Michael turned away. "Funny, you know, Doc."

 

"What?"

 

"Well, it's like Lonesome Gulch isn't a real place. The old papers talk about a holdup in the bank and a stabbing at the faro tables. Snow, a fire and stuff like that but none of it actually mentions where we are."

 

"Passing strange. But much about this region is a deal more than passing strange, Master Brother. Mistress Sister. Mistless twister. Blaster mother. Damnation! I recollect from my studies such foolish verbal confusion is known as 'aphasia.' An indication of some minor brain damage. Yet, that is clearly not true, is it?" He glowered back to where the teenager stood in the doorway of the print shop. "I said that- What are you looking at?"

 

Dean was leaning out of the starred glass of the side window of the old locomotive, imagining himself flying along steel rails at breathless speed, then his eyes were caught by something perched on the roof of the stagecoach barn, fifty yards farther up the main drag of Lonesome Gulch.

 

J.B. froze, turning away from the filthy window. Mildred had drawn her revolver, eyes turned up.

 

"What was that?" she whispered.

 

He touched a finger to his lips, catfooting toward the front door, blaster at the ready.

 

Ryan had opened the case and removed a fearsome pair of chromed forceps with jagged teeth, clicking them in his right hand as he lurched in toward Krysty, shoulder hunched to make him look more frightening-"Don't worry, my dear," he jeered. "This will hurt you far more than it will..." He stopped, putting the instruments silently on the oilcloth-covered couch.

 

Krysty had already drawn her Smith & Wesson 640, looking out into the street.

 

"What?" she mouthed.

 

Ryan shrugged. They'd both heard something, a disturbance in the air, a noise that might have been a cry. But it hadn't sounded like it came from the throat of any creature either of them had ever known.

 

And on the roof they could all hear a scraping, scratching, grating, like the points of sharp knives being drawn forcefully over the splintered top of an old table.

 

Moving with incredible lightness for such a big, powerful man, Ryan eased his way to the doorway and looked out.

 

"Fireblast!"

 

Chapter Five

 

Abe had spent some years of his life as one of the best gunners on War Wag One.

 

He'd also been wounded more often and more seriously than any man that he'd ever known. Or woman. Trader had been perfectly at ease with having female members of the war wags* crews.

 

Abe's past life was shrouded in mystery. Over the years he'd told so many different stories to so many different people that he'd honestly lost touch with the truth. But the best times had been riding with the Trader.

 

It meant that you got showed respect.

 

There wasn't a pesthole from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, where they didn't know the Trader, a grizzled man with a heart of granite and eyes of frozen jet. They knew him and they feared him. There wasn't a gaudy owner, slut or hired gun in Death-lands who wasn't aware of the reputation of the Trader with his hacking cough and his battered Armalite.

 

You were with the Trader, or you were against him. There were just the two options.

 

Abe had always been with him.

 

When Trader walked clear out of life, Abe had been the last person to see him, watching the rangy figure as it disappeared into the dark forest long months ago.

 

Ever since that bleak time, Abe had been consumed by a desperate desire to know what had happened to his old leader. Word all around Deathlands was that Trader was dead, died in some mystic ceremony with an Apache shaman; died when a woman of seventy summers, who'd been his latest lover, slit his throat when she found him in bed with both her daughter and granddaughter; died when he had faced down an eighteen-foot mutie grizzly somewhere in the Shens; died when he got bushed by a hundred screaming, blood-crazed stickies. Trader chilled ninety of them, but the last ten finally overwhelmed him and sent him off on that legendary last train to the coast.

 

But all the rumors agreed that he was gone.

 

Abe had started to come around to accepting that it had to be true.

 

Then the counterrumors began.

 

Trader was alive and running the biggest whorehouse in the world, somewhere around Hawaii or Cuba or Brazil, depending on which story you heard.

 

One of the most insidious and powerful rumors suggested that Trader headed an unholy alliance; with the steel-eyed Magus, three-fifty-pound Gert Wolfram and his traveling freakshow, Marsh Folsom, Jordan Teague and his black-clad sec boss from the nightmare ville of Mocsin, Cort Strasser, and planned to take over the whole of Deathlands.

 

Abe had decided that he couldn't sit around and wait for someone to come along with conclusive proof that Trader was alive or dead.

 

So he'd struck off alone on his quest.

 

Now, within rifle range of the old ruined ville of Seattle, on the edge of the mighty Cascades, he had finally succeeded and was riding again with the Trader.

 

"Success. WILL STAY around Seattle for three months. Come quick. Abe." That had been the message that Trader had agreed should be sent to Ryan Cawdor and the others.

 

Most of the packmen and travelers that Abe had spoken to had agreed to take the message. Some asked for a handful of small change in return for the errand. Nobody knew where Ryan would be, but they were simply told what he looked like-tall man, well armed, one-eyed, with a woman whose hair was like spun fire. And they were given descriptions of the rest of the group.

 

Only one person had argued with Abe, pushing the smaller man around, until Trader walked over from the bar and stood right up in the stranger's face and gave him his thin, dangerous smile and asked if there was a problem.

 

There wasn't.

 

THINGS WERE DIFFERENT, in ways that Abe found difficult to quantify or understand. All the years when Trader had ridden the helm of War Wag One, often with at least one more of the huge armored vehicles in the convoy, Abe had been one of dozens of men and women who'd formed the crews of the wags.

 

He saw Trader then for many of his waking hours and his recollection was of having some good times, long talks and shared experiences with him.

 

Now he was slowly coming to realize that that was an edited version of the truth.

 

In fact, hardly anyone ever had long conversations with the Trader, except maybe John Dix and Ryan Cawdor, the three men sitting together around the guarded camp fires at the end of a day's driving or trading or fighting, talking, occasionally laughing.

 

Abe was now coming to recognize the fact that he'd hardly ever had a long talk with the Trader hi his entire life. Maybe never.

 

Now he spent the whole day and long chunks of the night with his taciturn former leader, and it just wasn't at all like he remembered it.

 

Trader was content to go for hours on end without saying a word to Abe, sitting in a chair, or with his back against a convenient tree, looking vacantly out across a saloon bar or into the glowing embers at the heart of a dying fire.

 

A few times he would stir and draw out a reminiscence of some firefight or massacre that they'd shared, relishing the way they'd chilled their enemies, seeming to Abe to disregard their own fatalities and wounded.

 

The one thing that was like what Abe remembered was Trader's bleak toughness.

 

Two weeks after they'd finally met up, they were camping on the western ridge of the Cascades. The weather had been variable, often starting with heavens of sunrise, followed by a gradual thickening of the cloud from the Pacific and then a cold drizzle moving in over the mountains.

 

Trader had bought a bottle of home brew from a wizened old woman, her eyes almost blind with the pale milk of cataracts. It was so strong that even to flick a few drops from the tips of your fingers into the fire brought a "whoosh" of flame.

 

"Remember when those stickies stole a wag full of hard liquor like this, Abe?"

 

"When was that?"

 

"Must be ten years. In the Apps. Scranton. No, wait, it was down Odessa way, yeah, that was it. Odessa way. We'd camped near a broke freeway bridge."

 

It rang a vague bell in Abe's memory and he nodded. Already he'd found that the Trader still didn't take kindly to being interrupted or contradicted.

 

"Yeah," he said.

 

"Drink was so potent that they started spitting it into their big fire." He shook his head. "Them stickies surely liked a flame and an explosion." He threw his head back and laughed. "Got them both that night. Some of them kind of exploded when we threw them into the burning wood. Damnedest thing I ever saw, Abe."

 

Yeah, he remembered all right. Remembered now, like it had been that same night.

 

The stickies-there'd been about fifteen of them in the raiding gang-had made a try for someone from the wags. Who had it been? Cohn. The radio op had been out fishing in a narrow creek, near to sunset. Stickies had come after him. Abe closed his eyes for a moment, his right hand stroking at his long, drooping mustache, visualizing the wounds when Cohn had been carried back on a canvas stretcher to the defensive circle, in the looming shadows of the two war wags.

 

The unmistakable wounds were from stickies. They were muties that had developed circular suckers on their palms and fingers, and used them to hold on to their victims. Cohn had the round, raw patches on his arms and one big one on his face, where the layers of skin had been ripped away, leaving the bloody cicatrix, like a massive, burst blister.

 

Trader had been annoyed.

 

That's like saying that the midday sun could sometimes be fairly warm.

 

They'd gone after the stickies, raiding their camp while they were drinking their stolen moonshine, and chilled them all-fifteen muties, eight men, four women and three children. Most were blasted down from hiding. Trader had never been one to take chances.

 

"Man takes a chance when he doesn't have to can't wait to get into his grave," he used to say.

 

Survivors were doused in the potent liquor, then burned to death.

 

The charred remains had been left where they'd fallen, after running, burning and screaming. Abe remembered.

 

"YOU'RE MILES AWAY.1'

 

Trader's harsh voice rasped through the evening gloom, making Abe jump.

 

"Remembering."

 

"What?"

 

"Old times past."

 

"Not worth forgetting." Trader grinned.

 

Abe sat up and peered into the depths of his enameled coffee mug, finding, as he'd suspected, that it was almost empty. He tossed the bitter dregs into the dirt and stood to pour himself a top-up from the dark blue pot that hissed and bubbled in the heart of their fire.

 

"Hold it!" Trader's voice a whisper that barely rippled the evening air.

 

Abe cursed himself under his breath, half turning, seeing the glint of metal by his bedroll. His stainless-steel Colt Python, the big .357, was as much use there as if it were at the bottom of a Dubuque shithouse.

 

"Other side of the clearing."

 

Abe looked where the Armalite pointed, expecting to see a mutie rattler, ten feet long. Or a giant cougar, fangs bared, crouched to pounce and crunch and rend him open from groin to breastbone.

 

It was a gray squirrel, a dainty little creature, quite oblivious to the two men watching it, holding a small pine nut between its front paws and picking at it with quick, delicate movements.

 

Abe turned back, seeing that the Trader was cautiously raising the Armalite to his shoulder, squinting along the barrel, steadying it on the tiny squirrel.

 

"Waste of a bullet, Trader," Abe said, conscious of how high and reedy his voice suddenly seemed to sound.

 

"How's that?"

 

"You used to tell us that a bullet wasted today could be a life wasted tomorrow."

 

Trader's short, barking laugh was loud enough to disturb the creature, sending it scampering away into the lake of tranquil darkness under the trees.

 

To his relief, Abe heard the soft click of the safety going back on. Fingers trembling, he helped himself to the hot coffee sub, sitting down again across from Trader.

 

"You were right, Abe, but I wouldn't cross me too often." A long pause. "Ten weeks for Ryan to get up here. Ten weeks isn't that long."

 

Chapter Six

 

Despite being only eleven years old, Dean Cawdor had been most places in Deathlands and seen most things.

 

But he'd never seen anything like the thing that now sat perched on the back of the rusting locomotive tender, staring at him from golden eyes. There was another on the roof of the stagecoach barn, another squatting up on the splintered gable of the Masonic lodge.

 

And another.

 

And another.

 

The boy slowly drew his heavy blaster, unsure whether it would be a good idea to start shooting or not, not yet certain whether any of the others had spotted the threat.

 

Then he saw his father, holding the SIG-Sauer in his right hand, peering out of the doorway of another of the tumbledown old buildings, heard him say "Fire-blast!" and knew that meant that he had also seen the sinister creatures that had appeared from out of the shrouding mists.

 

"I chill it, Dad?" he called, as loud as he dared, his voice bringing the other five into sight, all of them looking up at the apparitions.

 

Ryan waved his hand low, indicating a negative to the boy's request.

 

But the mutie thing on the tender still hadn't moved, its eyes boring into Dean with as much passion as a melt-washed boulder of Sierra granite.

 

J.B. waved a clenched fist to Ryan, gesturing toward the general store, at the far end of the street of the re-created ghost town.

 

Ryan nodded. The Armorer's tactical skill hadn't deserted them. The alien creatures might not be hostile, but you didn't take a chance on something like that. It was better to gather in what seemed the strongest of the buildings.

 

He checked that the rest of the companions knew where they were going to go, hefted his blaster and made sure that his rifle was secure across his shoulders.

 

None of the weird things had moved at all, though five more had arrived, circling lazily from the belt of the fog, settling on other roofs.

 

"Now!" Ryan shouted.

 

They moved together at the signal, running along the furrowed main street, up onto the splintered, damp boardwalk to the store.

 

Michael was there first, followed closely by Dean and Ryan. All of them stood by the open door, ready to give the others covering fire against the threat of the creatures.

 

"Inside," J.B. said, ushering Mildred, Krysty and Doc into the shadowy interior.

 

"They aren't moving, Dad."

 

The things all watched the flurry of movement with a calm, disinterested stare, the protuberant yellow eyes not seeming to register what was happening.

 

"In," Ryan ordered, gesturing to Michael and Dean with the SIG-Sauer.

 

He stood and waited.

 

During the last quarter of a minute a dozen more of the muties had flown in, all finding places to perch on the roofs, all along the strip of buildings. They wheeled down onto Lonesome Gulch in almost total silence, the only sound the beating of their strong-pinioned wings.

 

Ryan studied them, trying to weigh up what kind of threat they might present, assuming that they were any sort of danger at all. The more he looked, the more it seemed a fair assumption that the things could be bad news.

 

He guessed that their genetic mutation, triggered by the nuking of a hundred years or so ago, had begun with them being some kind of bird.

 

They had a wingspan of about five feet. But from what he could see from the doorway, it looked to Ryan as though they didn't have normal avian feathers. There was a metallic, leathery appearance to them, like the wings of robotic bats, with sharp claws spaced out along the leading edge.

 

The jaws were elongated, like an alligator's, with two very prominent, curved teeth and then a myriad of tiny ones. The golden eyes protruded from sockets of bones, and there was a ruff of crimson spikes around the throat that could have been either feather or bone. None of the things was close enough for Ryan to be able to know for certain.

 

"They doing anything?"

 

J.B. had reappeared at Ryan's shoulder, holding the Uzi. He peered out into the street.

 

"No. What's it look like to defend?"

 

"Shutters inside, but they got the worm. Wouldn't want to trust them to keep out a spitball. Others are putting them up now. They got ob slits in them."

 

"Fog's coming lower again."

 

Now there were about fifty of the bird creatures. Every now and again one of those farthest away would flap into the air and make an ungainly landing on a closer roof.

 

"We hold out here until night." Ryan glanced at his chron, cursing under his breath at its uselessness. "Can't be that long now. Move out then and head for the redoubt. You know, the gateway. Unless those ugly sons of bitches can see in the dark."

 

Behind them there was the clatter of wood and iron as the old shutters were eased into position, with the groaning of rusted binges. Krysty called out to Ryan.

 

"More of those birds out front, near where that parking lot used to be."

 

"How many?"

 

"Ten or a dozen."

 

"What are they doing?"

 

"Watching. Don't like this one, lover. Could be we ought to head out of here, soon as we can."

 

"They're getting restless," J.B. said. "Only trouble in trying to reach the mat-trans unit in the dark is

 

that we don't have a working compass, and those fogs can be a bastard." He rested the blaster against his hip and took off his wire-rimmed spectacles, polishing them on a kerchief. "Thought of getting lost hi this place isn't-"

 

"Here they come," Ryan snapped, interrupting the Armorer. He pushed inside, slammed the door behind him and slid across a stout bolt.

 

The mist had grown suddenly thicker, sinking from the barren peaks around onto the small ville as though it were a hostile, sentient entity itself.

 

Simultaneously all of the mutie birds began to cry out, opening their beaks wide, the arrays of teeth glittering in the odd, pallid light. The noise wasn't like the call of any bird any of them had ever heard. It had a deep, penetrating quality that struck at the hearts of the listeners.

 

To Ryan it conjured a picture of a slack-jawed, gibbering shape in a mold-stained shroud, calling to its fellows from an echoing catacomb.

 

To Doc it was the cold wind that blew between the long-dead stars.

 

Everyone of the seven friends who listened to that dreadful chorus heard it differently. But all of them found it a frightful sound.

 

AT THE PRECISE MOMENT that they began to shriek, the things rose from the roofs and flapped toward the store.

 

Dean had been watching through the narrow slit in one of the shutters that overlooked the street, and he yelled out a running commentary.

 

"They're all in the air and the fog's badder than... coming in toward-" He ducked away, though there was no immediate impact, then peered out again. "They're circling, Dad. Hundreds of them!"

 

Ryan looked around the store, all of his experience and combat sense working overtime. The room was around thirty feet long by twenty wide, with several windows, all of them now covered with the ulterior shutters. The front entrance was glass, but it had a thick wire inner door.

 

"Get something against that, Michael," he ordered. "Things that big could break through the screen. Help him, Doc."

 

"What with?"

 

"Countertop."

 

"There's an upstairs, Ryan."

 

He turned on his heel and stared through the gloom at Mildred, who was pointing along a narrow passage that ran back from near the cash register and the display cabinet holding the sacks of blasting powder.

 

"Fireblast!" He sprinted along the corridor toward the steep, narrow staircase, dropping his rifle as he ran to give himself greater speed and mobility.

 

He heard the crash of glass ahead and above him before he'd even set his foot on the steps.

 

"J.B.!" he yelled, reaching the landing and glancing to left and right. He saw that there was a single gable room at the far end, the door standing a little ajar.

 

The noise from that dark chamber was almost indescribable. More glass shattered, and the chorus of menacing cries from the lizard birds rose.

 

There hadn't been many times hi Ryan Cawdor's life when he'd been consciously frightened of anything. Yet that shadowy landing, with the half-open door at its end, containing those hideous creatures, made him hesitate for a moment.

 

But common sense carried him on.

 

If the things escaped from that upstairs room, then there was nothing to be done to prevent them flooding down into the main part of the store. And the dying wasn't likely to take very long.

 

Behind him Ryan could hear J.B.'s boots pounding on the rickety wooden steps.

 

At the farther end, a reptilian head appeared in the gap, unwinking ocher eyes burning through the gloom into Ryan, who snapped a shot at it, missing by inches, gouging a spray of plaster from the wall.

 

The thing was out, its huge wings cramped by the narrow passage, beak open, shrieking at the human intruder.

 

Ryan batted at it with the barrel of the blaster, hitting it a glancing blow across the chest, barely dodging a scything jab from the fanged beak.

 

"Chill it!" he shouted to the Armorer, who was almost at his heels. "I'll close the door."

 

He grabbed at the dark metal handle, shaped like the head of a buffalo, and tugged at it. But another of the muties had found the gap and was blocking it, head protruding, hissing its ferocious anger, the great pinions flailing at the wood.

 

Ryan held the door in his left hand, the SIG-Sauer in his right. He reacted like lightning, dropping the gun at his feet and drawing the panga from its greased sheath.

 

The blade hissed through the dusty air, striking the mutie bird just below the point where its angular skull articulated with his snakelike neck. Ryan had expected the honed steel to slice clear through, but the panga angled off, barely nicking the overlapping scales.

 

The narrow head struck again at him, the point of the beak ripping at his sleeve, nearly making him let go of the door handle. Behind it Ryan could hear a bedlam of noise, aware of dozens of bodies flinging themselves against the battered wood.

 

There was also a disturbance downstairs, with shouting and a couple of shots fired, but he was too busy with his own problem to pay it any heed.

 

At his back there came the sudden flat spitting sound of the Uzi and the shrieking sound ended abruptly.

 

"Need a hand, Ryan?"

 

"No room. Fucker's got a skin like sec steel."

 

Two more desperate hacking blows had more success, opening a gouge in the thing's throat, sending drops of amber blood pattering, hot and acid, onto Ryan's wrist.

 

He took a chance and eased the door open a few inches, punching with the haft of the panga at the wounded creature, pushing it back into the attic room. He slammed the door shut triumphantly and heard the lock click home. Until that moment it had never occurred to Ryan that there might not be any sort of catch on the door, or that it could easily have rusted away during the endless years after the long winters.

 

He spun around, stooping with an easy grace to retrieve his fallen SIG-Sauer, seeing that J.B. was standing at the top of the stairs, Uzi at the ready. The dead mutie bird was lying still on the dusty floor, one wing broken off, its head lolling on its muscular neck.

 

"Door won't hold them long." J.B. smiled at Ryan, his teeth white in the gloom. "Never figured on ending as a bird's dinner."

 

As RYAN RAN BACK down the stairs into the main part of the old store, he was figuring that J.B. was probably right. It looked as though it were only going to be a matter of time.

 

It was like being at the still center of a spinning world. Outside there was a cacophony of shrieking noise, orchestrated by the constant thudding of wings and beaks battering at the walls and shutters.

 

The other five were standing close together by the candy counter, guns drawn, waiting for die moment when the defenses were breached and the mutie creatures poured in to chill them.

 

"Any ideas?" Ryan shouted.

 

"Yeah," his eleven-year-old son replied.

 

Chapter Seven

 

It was so noisy that Ryan wasn't even sure that he'd heard his son correctly.

 

"What?" he shouted.

 

"Can I have some candy, then I'll tell you?"

 

For a moment Ryan nearly slapped the boy hard enough across the face to send him staggering into the middle of next week. That he could joke at a time of such imminent peril brought the crimson mist of rage flooding down across his mind. Krysty, at his side, caught the wave of potential violence from Ryan and gripped him by the wrist.

 

Very hard.

 

"Tell us, Dean. Then have as much candy as you want." She didn't let go of Ryan while she spoke.

 

The heavy counter that had been propped against the wire screen over the front entrance to the store was already rocking under the impact of the things.

 

"There's a root cellar." Dean pointed back toward the stairs. "Under there."

 

J.B. was closest and he moved with deceptive speed, opening a dark-painted door. "Throw us a pack of self-lights," he called. "If they still work."

 

Mildred picked up a box of matches and threw them to the Armorer, who vanished from their sight.

 

But his voice floated up to them, just audible above the sound of the ceaseless attack. "Cellar, all right. Solid. And-" he paused "-reckon we can get out of here. Double doors." There was another moment of silence from the Armorer. "Yeah. They're stiff, and there's something piled on them, but we can shift them. Definitely another way out."

 

"But those shithead snake-bird things are all the way around us," Mildred protested, staring out of one of the ob slits, pulling back quickly as the wood splintered and a length was smashed in by the attacking muties.

 

"If only we could find some way of luring them all in here and then destroy them with some fiendishly cunning ruse," Doc said.

 

Dean was leaning against one of the remaining counters, sucking pensively on a honey-and-mango sugar stick, tossing one of the little souvenir bags of blasting powder in the air with his other hand.

 

"Careful that doesn't blow us all up," Ryan said. "That's it! J.B., come here. Something you once showed me."

 

"TRICK THAT TRADER taught me, first week after I joined him."

 

The sallow-faced Armorer was down on his knees, oblivious to the threat from the mutie birds flocked all around them. Ryan had just snatched a glance from one of the ob slits and realized then that time was sliding away from them. The fog had closed in and there seemed to be, literally, hundreds upon hundreds of the vicious brutes.

 

The temperature had also dropped radically in the past few minutes, so that everyone could see their breath misting around them in the store.

 

"Damnably chill," Doc muttered. "My Aunt Harriet used to have a saying that it was as cold as the blood in the neck of a dead horse."

 

Ryan ignored him. The seconds were running out, the sand falling ever faster through the thin glass throat of the timer. And the delicate operation he and J.B. were working on could possibly save all of their lives.

 

Or destroy them a few minutes more quickly.

 

He had taken a handful of thin black cigarillos from a sealed pack on the counter, making sure with the self-lights that they still worked and hadn't dried away to powder. He carefully got them all glowing evenly at the same length and bound them upright with a length of thin twine from one of J.B.'s capacious pockets. Then he set them amid a pile of wood shavings that Michael had whittled from the edge of one of the shutters, with a number of crumpled, dry pages from some of the old guides.

 

The main trigger for the ignition was a number of matches, tilted carefully against the pile of small cigars, so that they would eventually come into contact with the glowing ends.

 

"Nice a little fire booby as I ever saw/' J.B. said admiringly. "All we need now is a trail of the black

 

powder from the source to the main stock of the explosive."

 

Dean had slipped up the stairs, running down again almost immediately. "The bastards have almost broken through," he yelled. "One of the top panels is split from top to bottom, and I could see their beaks driving clean through."

 

Ryan nodded. "Right. Take some self-lights and go down in the cellar. Everyone except me and J.B., now."

 

To his relief they all obeyed immediately, Krysty brushing the tips of her fingers against his cheek as she left. "Don't be too long, lover," she said.

 

J.B. had scattered a trail of the glistening black grains, leading to the main store of the powder, which he'd packed tightly into a stout wooden box that had been standing in a corner of the store.

 

"Nearly ready," he said, checking that the matches were still in place and that the cigars were burning evenly.

 

"Where did you first get this idea from?" Ryan called, standing with the Armorer's Uzi in his hands.

 

"Guy in Oregon got paid to spot fires for the local baron. Paid jack on results. More fires he spotted, more jack he got. Took to starting them himself. Showed me how he did it."

 

Ryan glanced one last time through the nearest ob slit, looking out across the main street.

 

The fog had thickened, intruding through the cracks around the shutters, tasting cold and bitter, like steel and salt water. Every window in the place had been

 

completely smashed, turned to smithereens of sharp-edged glass, and the bird things kept coming. They vanished out of sight into the veiling mist, then turned and drove into the thick wood hard enough to make it shudder. It seemed like the entire building was trembling under the ferocious assault. Ryan kept his eye a safe distance from the slit, aware of the possibility that one of the reptilian beaks might smash through and pierce his skull.

 

The muties were attacking in a ceaseless stream. It was like watching them flap toward you in their hundreds, along the dark tunnel.

 

Even in the thickest of the fog, Ryan noticed that their eyes glowed with a fearsome yellow light. He stared intently out at them...

 

Someone was shaking his shoulder and shouting at him.

 

"What?"

 

"You got hypnotized, friend. Let's go." J.B. turned toward the passage that led to the stairs into the root cellar.

 

"We need them in here for the explosion to work. Kill enough for us to be able to risk a break."

 

"Dark night!" J.B. pounded his right fist into his left palm. "You're right, Ryan."

 

"Go. I'll pull down that old counter. Should give them a way in. Might have time to throw open one or two of the shutters as well."

 

Above them they both heard the startling noise of splintering wood, rising over the other sounds, and the screeches of the creatures grew instantly louder.

 

"They're in!" J.B. yelled. He ran to knock over the counter, while Ryan unbolted two of the pairs of shutters.

 

The mutie horrors held off for a vital couple of seconds, suspicious of the sudden access to the old store. J.B. led the way toward the door at the top of the basement steps, held open by a watchful Krysty.

 

Ryan was less than six feet behind him, still holding the Uzi, the SIG-Sauer in its holster. The Steyr had been taken down to safety by Dean.

 

Death was all around.

 

Boiling down the stairs from the second story, the creatures clashed in their blood lust, beaks open, their screams of hatred and rage filling the store. Others had surged in through the shattered front entrance and past the open shutters.

 

Ryan felt something pluck at his sleeve and there was a sharp fiery pain at the side of his neck, warmth running down inside his collar.

 

J.B. was through the door. Krysty's face, a taut mask of fear, was framed in the rectangular shadow.

 

Ryan paused a second, the blaster on full-auto, spraying a circle of bloody doom all around him, seeing the mutie birds falling with shattered wings and broken skulls. Then he was through the door and Krysty slammed it shut, pushing across stout bolts at the bottom and top.

 

"Fucking close, lover," she said.

 

Below him was a set of stairs, without a handrail, that led down into an earth-walled cellar, about fifteen feet square. Five faces looked up at him, illuminated by the orange glow of the brief self-lights that everyone but J.B. was holding.

 

"Best get right down," he said. "Cover your ears and open your mouths."

 

The door at the top of the stairs was taking a dreadful pounding, but that wasn't what concerned Ryan. The passage was so narrow that no more than a couple of the things could attack the sturdy wood.

 

It was the bomb they'd set that worried him.

 

He was worried what would happen if it didn't go off, and what would happen if it did go off.

 

If it didn't, the creatures would get them, either by breaking down the door or, eventually, by waiting them out.

 

If it went off as planned, then it should chill or mutilate the majority of the attacking muties, and scare the living hell out of any survivors, giving Ryan and the others a decent chance to break for it and head back for the gateway-providing that the explosion didn't wreck the store so effectively that the cellar roof collapsed and the entire place entombed them.

 

Working in the near dark, under enormous pressure, with one hundred-year-old black blasting powder, didn't lead to the scientific probability of measured success.

 

On balance, Ryan hoped that it went off.

 

One by one the tiny halos of light from the matches were extinguished, leaving the cellar in pitch dark-

 

ness. Everyone was crouched over on hands and knees, palms pressed to their ears, mouths sagging open against the anticipated shock wave. All waiting.

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

"It hasn't worked, Dad."

 

The small voice came from the raven blackness, trying to hide its fear.

 

"Can't tell yet, Dean." Ryan had only just caught his son speaking, through the muffling hands over his ears. "Not like a chron-timed gren."

 

The others were aware of the conversation and were moving around hi the dirt.

 

1 "This brings back such happy memories of playing at Sardines with my English cousins at one Christmas party. One had to squeeze into the smallest, darkest space one could find and wait for the other to try to find you."

 

Doc sounded totally unworried by their intensely dangerous predicament, chatting as easily as if he were relaxing at a faculty tea party.

 

"How long do you reckon, J.B.?" Mildred asked from near the double doors to the open air.

 

"Reckon in the next minute or..."

 

"Or what, John?"

 

"Or not at all."

 

"It's coming," Krysty said, quiet and confident.

 

"When?"

 

"Soon, lover. Very soon." She paused long enough for three beats of the heart. "Now."

 

MANY YEARS EARLIER Ryan had been knocked unconscious by an implode gren going off close to him while he was swimming hi a deep reservoir. The feeling was similar when then: homemade bomb was ignited in the store above.

 

There was a massive, muffled impact that a person felt rather than heard. It was like having the brain squeezed by a giant's fist, who was also compressing all of the internal organs of the body. It was sensation, rather than actual pain.

 

The floor heaved, and Ryan felt chunks of wood and dirt raining over him as he crouched on the packed earth.

 

J.B. was quickest, holding a dozen spluttering matches in his hand. The air was filled with powdery dust, and they could all catch the bitter stench of the explosive.

 

Krysty touched a finger to her nose, bringing it away streaked with crimson. Dean had a worm of blood creeping from his nose, and Doc complained that he'd bitten his tongue.

 

Ryan scrambled to his feet, feeling his head ringing. "Can't hear those mutie birds anymore," he said, aware that his voice sounded extremely distant.

 

"I can't hear anything," Michael countered, brushing dirt off his clothes.

 

"No point waiting." Ryan walked to the heavy doors and braced himself under them. "Dean, take the rifle and Uzi. Michael and J.B., lend a hand here."

 

Doc, Mildred and Krysty struck more matches, giving the men enough light to see what they were doing. For a frozen moment, Ryan thought that they might not be able to shift the ancient doors and was on the verge of asking Krysty to use the power of the Earth Mother, even though he knew what a terrible toll it took out of her when calling on the frightful strength.

 

"Going," Michael panted.

 

A hinge groaned in protest, then both doors swung up and back, letting in a flood of cold, bitter fog. Outside the building, the day hadn't yet quite run its course, though it was moving toward evening.

 

"Ladder?" Ryan felt around him, but there was nothing. "No. Michael, climb out first. Here, I'll give you a leg up. Then help pull everyone out."

 

The place was deathly still, the fog clamped tight around, cutting visibility to less than five paces.

 

Behind them there was the dimly seen light of a fire burning, dry wood crackling and the distinct sound of sorely wounded creatures.

 

As they moved away from the tourist ghost town of Lonesome Gulch, the noises faded behind them.

 

THE JOURNEY BACK to the gateway through the blighted land wasn't entirely without incident. None of the mutie birds that had besieged the store at the entrance to the ghost town came after them, but the

 

fog grew steadily thicker and more menacing, making it less than easy to find the trail with none of the compasses working at all.

 

They picked up the old road along the side of the slow-running, sinister river without any problems, taking care to keep as far away as possible from the strange semiliquid flow, avoiding attack from any of its lethal denizens.

 

Dean complained of being thirsty and waited a little way off the trail, looking for pools of water trapped amid the frost-riven boulders.

 

The others waited, Ryan calling out to him not to go far from sight.

 

"All right, Dad. Got some..." Then came the sound of spitting and spluttering from the gray walls of fog.

 

"Dean?"

 

"Okay, Dad. Sipped at a rain spill. Tasted just like bullock's piss."

 

"How do you know, Dean?" Michael asked. "You ever drunk the piss of a bullock?"

 

Dean reappeared, wiping his mouth, gobbing in the dirt. "Real funny, Michael. Real fucking funny."

 

"Best not to try to eat or drink anything while we're here," J.B. warned. "Soon be back at the gateway. Make a jump. Then get something."

 

THE TRACK BEGAN to wind upward, and they eventually reached the rotting stump of the huge tree that they remembered from the walk down from the gateway. The huge albino maggots that had infested it had all mysteriously vanished.

 

While they stood at the bend in the track, something scuttled out of the mist, almost under Mildred's feet, making her jump back with a gasp of fright.

 

It was like a string of mottled greenish pebbles strung together with threads of gristle, about four feet long, with no apparent eyes or mouth. Without pausing, it snaked across the path and vanished once more into the coils of mist.

 

"Proper little valley of the shadow of death, isn't it?" Mildred said to no one in particular.

 

The rank vegetation became more sparse, eventually thinning out completely, leaving them on the narrow, rutted trail that climbed higher between the granite walls.

 

The small wound on Ryan's neck was stinging and he touched it, finding that it was leaking a colorless liquid. He brought his finger to his nose and smelted at it. There was the unmistakable odor of corruption.

 

Krysty saw the gesture and moved to walk alongside him. "Problem?"

 

"Septic poisoning from that mutie back in the store. Can't wash it until we get clean water."

 

"Light's not good enough to see it properly." She touched it gently and he winced. "Sorry, didn't mean-"

 

"Sore," he said.

 

"Feels hot. Best keep an eye on it."

 

"I know. I already said that."

 

"Fine. You don't have to snap at me like that when I'm trying to help you." "Sorry. Bit ragged at the edge." "Sure."

 

THEY REACHED the narrow ledge of hewn rock, with the circular entrance to the small mat-trans unit opening off it.

 

Doc was panting hard, his face pale in the silvery evening light. Now they were well above the mist, and it was like looking down onto a gently moving sea of fresh-picked cotton.

 

"I shall have no regrets about departing from this place," he said. "My heart is working like a leaking pump, and the breath sours in my throat."

 

"Want to take a rest, Doc?" Ryan looked at the old man, concerned at how parchment-pale he looked.

 

"No. No. My thanks, dear fellow, but the sooner we get the next jump over, the better I shall be pleased." He straightened, taking some of his weight on the elegant sword stick. "Let us leave this peak above Darien," he said.

 

It took only moments for them to walk along the cramped tunnel and into the makeshift control room.

 

The battered wooden door swung slowly back on its hinges, squeaking softly. Great tangles of multicolored wire hung from the broken rectangles of chipboard ceiling. One of the overhead neon lights was buzzing and crackling erratically, its glow reflected in the vein of green quartz that seamed the bare rock above. The consoles, on their rickety tables, were cheeping and muttering to themselves and to each other.

 

Krysty ran a finger over the top of one of the comps, her red hair darkened by the blue screen. "I can't believe that this place has existed so long in this condition."

 

Mildred stood, with her hands on her hips. "Like Michael said, when we jumped here, some of the stone still has marks of the chisel. Fresh as yesterday's sunrise."

 

J.B. nodded. "With the acid rain and all those mu-ties, you'd have likely thought something would have broken in here, fifty years ago." He took off his glasses and began to wipe them clean from the smearing mist.

 

Dean had gone back out into the corridor, but suddenly reappeared. "Think there's something coming, Dad."

 

"What?"

 

"Can't tell. Just a noise like wet clothes being dragged over a cold stone floor."

 

"What?"

 

"Real big load."

 

Ryan glanced out into the rocky passage, seeing nothing but darkness and a few stray fingers of white mist that were feeling their way into the complex. He listened in the stillness, but he couldn't hear anything.

 

"I heard it, Dad."

 

"Believe you, Dean." He closed the flimsy door, aware that it wouldn't do much to deter even a sickly kitten.

 

J.B. had carefully perched his spectacles back on the bridge of his bony nose. He glanced at Ryan. "We go?"

 

"Reckon so."

 

The granite vault of the anteroom was starkly empty, and the door of the gateway chamber still stood ajar, as they'd left it only a few hours earlier.

 

Ahead of them, the dark gray armaglass walls of the unit were a patchwork of green and yellow lichen.

 

"Like getting into a toad's belly," Krysty said with a shudder of disgust.

 

Ryan shepherded them in, one at a time, though nobody was keen to squat on the cold floor. Like the whole of the region, there was something fundamentally unclean and unhealthy about the ill-lit gateway.

 

Doc leaned uncertainly against the far wall, finally sitting down, his knee joints creaking loudly, checking that the Le Mat was snug in its holster. "Come, then, my friends, and let's away. To seek the fortunes of a gentler day."

 

"That real Shakespeare, Doc?" Mildred asked, kneeling at his side. "Or just one of your make-ups?"

 

He smiled at her, his wonderfully perfect teeth gleaming in the gloom. "The truth, my sweet Dr. Wyeth, is that I have completely forgotten."

 

J.B. took his place next to her. Michael and Dean were waiting their turn, with Krysty and Ryan.

 

"Was..." he said, half turning.

 

Krysty looked at him. "Yeah. Think I heard it, too, lover. Like Dean said."

 

It was a heavy, slow, slithering sound. The picture that sprang unbidden into Ryan's mind was of a giant snail, making its inexorable way through the fog toward them, leaving a wide trail of stinking slime.

 

"Quick." He pushed his son and the teenager into the mat-trans unit, drawing his SIG-Sauer and glancing again behind him. Krysty joined the others, sitting down, her back against the wall, leaving a space for him to complete the circle.

 

Ryan pulled the door shut behind him, but realized that he hadn't heard the distinctive click that indicated that the lock had triggered the actual mechanism of the jump.

 

"It didn't..." Krysty began.

 

"I know it fucking didn't." Ryan opened it and slammed it shut more firmly, aware through the gap in the door of a shadowy bulk gliding across the control area toward him.

 

Chapter Nine

 

The sound, like a giant whispering, had grown suddenly much stronger, and Ryan knew that the creature, whatever it was, had entered the control area less than thirty feet away from the hexagonal chamber.

 

Most of the mat-trans units were firmly built of almost impregnable armaglass, set into the solid concrete of the main redoubt. But this one had shown all the marks of hasty and amateurish workmanship. With the flaws and cracks in the armaglass, it probably wasn't even proof against a decent handgun.

 

"Did it shut?" Krysty's voice disturbed Ryan because it showed fear. And he knew that Krysty Wroth almost never got frightened.

 

"Couldn't tell. Noise outside."

 

"Try it again." Michael stood now, holding his Texas Longhorn Border Special in both hands.

 

There was something barely visible through the gray walls, the same thing that Ryan had glimpsed in the nanosecond when the door had been open.

 

"I do believe that... what was the phrase? That all systems are go."

 

Doc was the calmest of them all, perhaps because he wasn't yet aware of the horror that was approaching the mat-trans unit from the ravaged world beyond.

 

Ryan glanced down, seeing the metal disks in the floor were beginning to glow through their coating of moss, and the upper half of the chamber was filling with the familiar white mist, quite unlike the acrid fog outside.

 

"Sit down, Michael." Ryan took his own place alongside Krysty, the SIG-Sauer leveled at the door.

 

The light beyond the chamber was blocked out, and Ryan tightened his finger on the trigger.

 

THE BLACKNESS was streaked with dreams that mixed past and present into a bizarre future, where reality and fantasy were inseparable and indistinguishable, where time and place were familiar and strange.

 

The woman who stood by the bed was someone who Ryan thought he knew. She was tall and blond, skinny, part woman and part child, and wore an obscenely short skirt of soft red material.

 

"Suede."

 

With a fringe. Her legs seemed to begin at her shoulders and were encased in scarlet boots with silver spurs, decorated with tiny bells that tinkled as she walked around the room.

 

"Lori." That seemed to be the right name for her, though he wasn't sure.

 

Ryan watched her with his good eye, straining to rum his head to follow her movements.

 

Aware that he was naked and cold, his breath clouding out into the air in front of him.

 

Naked and cold, tied by the wrists to the corners of the bed, ankles spread to the bottom of the bed.

 

Not a bed. Just a metal frame, with narrow strips of steel running from side to side, digging into his hips and spine and shoulders.

 

"Lori?"

 

The face, the fringe of hair so blond it was almost white. The makeup around her eyes turned them into dark, smudged pits. Her lips were pale and narrow, unsmiling.

 

Ryan tested the ropes. Not ropes. Steel handcuffs, biting into his wrists. Chains were around his ankles.

 

"Keep still, Ryan Cawdor. Don't move or you're dead. Dead men don't move. Quint not move. Quint dead."

 

Ryan turned from her, looking around the room. There was a single overhead light, a naked bulb that swung slowly from side to side.

 

There was no other furniture, except a small marble table that stood on wrought-iron legs. Some articles rested on the table, but it was just beyond the periphery of Ryan's right eye.

 

On the walls were a number of tattered old vid posters, a few with the names of ancient, predark movies that Ryan had heard about. He'd even seen speckled copies of some of them, projected on sheets with temperamental gas generators.

 

The moving light sent a dancing arc of brightness swinging over the posters.

 

"Chances run out, Ryan."

 

"What chances?" To his own ears his voice sounded odd, muffled, the words distorted.

 

"Chances to tell me. Save yourself."

 

"I don't understand."

 

The woman laughed, a bleak sound, a thousand miles away from any humor.

 

"Thought knocking your teeth out, one at a time, might have helped your memory."

 

Then he felt the pain, flooding through both jaws, and he could taste the bitter iron of his own blood.

 

"Awmyteef?"

 

"Speak properly."

 

He tried again. "You knocked out all of my teeth? You fucking slut."

 

He felt her hand on him, finger and thumb squeezing gently at the tender skin inside the top of the thigh. She pinched harder, the pain burning, making him arch his back off the bed.

 

"Hurts, does it? I'll kiss it and make it better."

 

Her lips, nibbling so softly, moved higher, her hand cupping his balls, forcing him to an erection that could have bent an iron bar.

 

"Now you're ready to tell me, Ryan."

 

"What?"

 

She smiled, showing stained, broken teeth. "You know what, lover."

 

"I don't." Whatever happened he wouldn't beg. Trader would never beg. No point.

 

She was stroking him again, bringing him tremblingly close to the brink of ejaculation. Ryan thought that he'd burst if she went on for just ten more seconds.

 

"Know what I'm going to do?" She moved out of his vision and picked something up from the table.

 

'No.'

 

"See this." Lori held up a coil of pale yellow tubing, with a greasy exterior, nearly as thick as a child's little finger. "Know what it is?"

 

Ryan did know, but it had slipped his memory. He shook his head. "Don't remember, Lori."

 

"Slow fuse."

 

"Fuse?" It was like the young woman was speaking some alien tongue.

 

"It's a length of slow fuse. I call it my friendly persuader, Ryan."

 

"Like for setting off a bomb?"

 

She smiled radiantly and clapped her hands. " Very good."

 

"What are you going to do with it?"

 

She was running it through her fingers, caressing it, bringing it to her lips to touch it with her long tongue. "It'll burn anywhere, even without oxygen. Under water. Anywhere. Once it's lit, it'll bum."

 

"I know."

 

She smiled and touched his throbbing penis. "Put the fuse anywhere and light it." Her fingers moved up the shaft toward the flat muscular wall of his stomach. "Insert it slowly and carefully, Ryan. You'd be surprised what a long way it'll go, and nothing can put it out. There are so many orifices of the human body that can receive it."

 

"Please."

 

Fuck Trader saying that a man shouldn't ever beg for mercy.

 

"Please don't."

 

"Just tell me."

 

"What?"

 

Lori bad lighted the fuse. It was glowing almost white-hot, like a fiery worm, devouring itself, defecating white ash, moving very slowly, a millimeter at a time.

 

"Tell me everything."

 

"I can't." The horror was the way her left hand kept him agonizingly erect, despite the appalling thing that she was going to do to him.

 

"Start at the beginning. Place of birth."

 

"Front Royale ville in the Shens."

 

"Parents?"

 

"Baron Titus and Lady Cynthia Cawdor."

 

"Brothers and sisters."

 

"Two brothers. Morgan and...I can't remember the other one's name."

 

"He bunded you."

 

"I know."

 

"His name?"

 

"Harvey. That was it. Harvey!"

 

The glowing tip of the burning fuse was an inch away from the tip of his cock.

 

Lori laughed at him. "Stupe! Think I give a flying fuck about your family? Or about anything you say? I don't, Ryan. Couldn't care less."

 

"Then... why?"

 

She leaned over him, and he could taste the rotten sweetness of her breath. * 'Reminds me of a girl I knew out in Las Cruces. One day she went into the desert and found a prairie rattler. Put her hand out to mate it bite her. It did. They carried her back dying. Arm black and shining from finger to shoulder. I asked her that same question. Asked her why she did it."

 

"And?"

 

"Said that it seemed a good idea at the time."

 

The young woman threw her head back and laughed, the eldritch screech of amusement turning into the lonesome howl of the midnight coyote.

 

Ryan felt the mind-toppling agony as she started to slide the burning fuse inside him, aware that his body was straining off the bed, the steel cutting into wrists and ankles.

 

He screamed and screamed.

 

"RYAN!" He tried to punch at her, but the grip on his wrist was too tight.

 

"Don't!"

 

"Just a bad jump, lover. Come on."

 

Lori's voice was Krysty *s voice, loud in his ear.

 

"Fighting like a bastard to get free."

 

Krysty's voice became J.B.'s voice.

 

Ryan opened his eye.

 

He was spread-eagled flat on his back in a gateway chamber. Doc was lying across his legs, with Mildred helping him with the pin-down.

 

Dean stood looking down at him, his face confused and frightened. Ryan managed a thin smile for his son. "Don't hurry," he said.

 

"He means for you not to worry, Dean." It was Krysty's voice.

 

Ryan was finding it difficult to focus, but his vision was filled by her tumbling mane of bright crimson hair, hanging across his face as she concentrated on holding him still. J.B. was on the other side, with Michael across his upper body.

 

"Treating me like a rabid panther," Ryan managed to say, though his tongue felt hugely swollen and too large for his mouth. "I'm fine now."

 

"Bad jump?" J.B. asked.

 

"Yeah. But you can let me go now." He was uncomfortably aware that the front of his dark blue pants was tighter than usual, though the residual erection was slowly subsiding. Ryan hoped that nobody had noticed it.

 

They all moved away cautiously, allowing him to sit up and lean against the armaglass walls of the chamber, which were a rich cobalt blue.

 

"Everyone else all right?"

 

Doc answered for the others. "Unlikely as it may be, my dear Ryan, we all came through this particular jump with colors flying, bands playing, girls scattering flowers and tickertape tumbling."

 

Dean nodded. "Hot pipe of a jump, Dad."

 

A little unsteadily, Ryan stood, looking around him. "Was I out long?"

 

Krysty touched him on the arm. "Couple of minutes. But you were screaming and fighting. Want to tell me about it?"

 

"No. Not now and not ever, lover. Best get out and see where we are."

 

"I recognize this color," the Armorer said. "These dark blue walls. Reckon we might've been here before."

 

"Not me." Mildred ran the flat of her hand over the silk-smooth armaglass.

 

"Lovely color."

 

It seemed familiar to Ryan, but he couldn't locate it in his memory.

 

Chapter Ten

 

"The bayous."

 

Ryan looked at J.B. "Yeah. You're right. Place we first met up with Jak Lauren."

 

He recalled the heat that percolated all the way down through the sec doors of vanadium steel into the heart of the mat-trans unit, and the humidity.

 

Bayou country. The Cajuns. Lafayette. Baron Tourment. The swamps and alligators.

 

It had been a time of violence, on their previous visit to the place. Oddly, in all the jumps that they'd made, Ryan couldn't recall finishing up in the same redoubt twice. Since they had no real control over the destination of any of their jumps, that had to be a statistical oddity.

 

Krysty wiped a tiny bead of perspiration from her upper lip. "Course. Ace on the line there, J.B., remembering that. The dark blue armaglass walls."

 

"Unless there's someplace similar." Ryan found his breathing was slowing back to normal, his nightmare erection finally subsided.

 

"Don't find heat like this in many parts of Death-lands." J.B. ran a finger round inside the collar of his denim shirt. "We going to take a look outside?"

 

"Sure." Ryan tried to recall the layout beyond the control room of the gateway. He had a memory of dense, fetid swamps, with giant skeeters and a broken, rotted causeway over the muddy bayou water.

 

"Could be we might meet up with some of Jak's old friends." Krysty's face had a sheen of perspiration. "Get some good fried pork and beans and plenty of fresh spring water. You could hold the pork and the beans, and I'll just settle for the drink. Another half hour of this and I'll have dehydrated down to a little puddle on the floor."

 

"Then we'll go take a look."

 

Outside the chamber they saw the same notice that they'd seen a number of times before: Entry absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat Trans.

 

The usual massive sec doors were down and closed, the green lever at the side pointed to the floor. Ryan laid his hand on it and glanced at the others.

 

"Ready?"

 

Blasters were drawn. J.B. crouched on the floor, gripping the Uzi on full-auto, preparing himself to peer under the lifting doors, in case anyone-or anything-waited outside. It had happened before.

 

Ryan noticed that Michael looked a little pale and worried, licking his lips, breathing fast.

 

"All right, Michael?"

 

"Yes, of course. Just hot and damp, and thirsty as well. What are you waiting for?"

 

"Nothing."

 

Ryan pushed the lever upward* hearing the familiar grinding sound behind the thick concrete walls of buried gears, as the huge weight of the sec doors began to move.

 

He halted it after six or eight inches, giving the Armorer the chance to peek through the gap.

 

"Nothing."

 

The door lifted smoothly, halting with a hiss of compressed air.

 

The corridor outside was about ten feet wide. Pale cream, seamless stone curved to the right. The arched roof about twelve feet high.

 

Ryan led the way, noting the sec barriers concealed in the ceiling, and the tiny vid cameras, every forty paces, set in the angle between wall and roof.

 

The passage bent around and around, always to the right, confirming Ryan's memory from the previous visit to that particular redoubt that it was going to complete a full three hundred and sixty degrees.

 

"Here's the doors," he said. "They open onto the outside, triggered by some kind of remote scope lock. Just walk up to it and it'll open."

 

"Lori showed us, didn't she?" Krysty glanced toward Doc, who had once been infatuated with the tall blond young woman.

 

"Pretty, sweet child." He shook his head. "In my sleep I still hear the tinkling of those tiny silver bells on her boots. Such a dear girl."

 

The room opened off the corridor and was about thirty feet square, with the smudged marks on the blank walls where pictures or posters bad been hung,  pulled down in the last dying, rad-blighted days before the long winters.

 

Dean had moved alongside his father, and now ran toward the dull metal of the heavy double doors at the far side of the room. For a moment it looked like he was going to bump into them, but at the last moment they began to slide back.

 

"Dean!"

 

"Yeah?"

 

Ryan beckoned for him to take his place in the skirmish line. "Wait here."

 

"Thought you'd been here before, Dad. Knew that it was a safe place."

 

"Because it was safe then, it doesn't mean that it'll still be safe."

 

Krysty patted the boy on the shoulder. "Probably be fine, Dean. We'll soon know."

 

The air was much hotter beyond the sliding sec doors, like trying to breathe with a warm cloth over your face.

 

Ahead of them, through the enormously wide doorway, they could all see a straight, brightly lighted section of corridor, less wide than the one outside the gateway chamber, that stretched two hundred yards toward a blank steel wall with a single ordinary door set in its center.

 

"There's the open country beyond that," Ryan said. "Redoubt's covered with creepers and thick vegetation. We figured that was what kept it safe and hidden."

 

"Can I go look, Dad?"

 

Ryan touched a hand to the small wound on his neck, wincing at the stinging pain and a swelling that felt tender and badly infected. "No!" he snapped. "Fireblast, Dean, will you just stay where you're told?"

 

"Sorry, Dad."

 

The one-eyed warrior led the way, the passage seeming to shrink with the noise of everyone's feet. For a moment he nearly turned and snapped at them to be quieter, but managed to control himself. Blowing through his teeth, he decided that his irritation was probably because of the tropical heat.

 

His recollection of the redoubt from when they first explored it was that it had been spotlessly clean, with hardly a grain of dust. Now he noticed that the floor was smudged with gray mud, carrying the faint marks of boots,

 

On the wall was the single piece of graffiti that he remembered from before, stenciled neatly in olive-green paint on the right-hand section of concrete, just above shoulder-height, the single word: Goodbye.

 

Ryan reached the door and paused, drawing in a slow breath. He checked that everyone had their guns drawn and ready, then pushed at the door.

 

"Opens the other way," J.B. said. "I remember poor old Hennings made that mistake."

 

Henn had been a tall black guy off War Wag One, with a lacerating sense of humor. But it had done him no good when a musket ball had struck him just above the right eye.

 

It hadn't been all that far away from where they now stood, inside the outer portal to the redoubt.

 

Ryan turned the handle and pulled the door toward him, feeling it open easily.

 

He took a careful step out, expecting to see the lush vegetation of the bayous.

 

The shock of what he saw was so great that Ryan nearly squeezed the narrow trigger of the SIG-Sauer. Behind him he was vaguely aware of J.B. and Krysty gasping in amazement.

 

"Upon my soul, what can..." Doc started.

 

Dean, Mildred and Michael were less surprised than the others, never having been to the place before, not having known what to expect there.

 

There had been young pecan trees and groves of cypresses, their roots dipping into the water, live oaks and graceful elms, all of them covered in delicate shrouds of Spanish moss, like veiled duennas.

 

"Gone," Ryan whispered.

 

"Gone," Krysty echoed, standing so close to him that he could feel her breath against his skin.

 

"There was bottomless mud." Doc sighed. "Water that became watery mud. I disremember, but I believe I have said this before. Shall I say it again? Yes, I will enter the round Zion of... My apologies, friends. Water into mud. Bottomless. And now, all vanished away. And only we remain."

 

The swamps had disappeared.

 

Now, as far as they could see ahead of them, was a sunbaked desert. Here and there they could see darker patches that might once have been mud wallows,  might once have been small pools. But they could never, by any stretch of the most fervid imagination, have been the endless bayous of old Louisiana.

 

"The trees are gone." J.B. leaned a hand against the side of the door, staring out in utter disbelief.

 

"It's a different redoubt." Ryan gave a whistle of relief. "Course. That's it."

 

"But I remember that single melancholy word on the wall," Doc said. "It struck at my heart with its infinite sadness when I first saw it. And it strikes now. No, my dear friends, this is the same redoubt. But everything else has altered beyond all comprehension."

 

There wasn't even the rotting stump of any vegetation to be seen. It was like an infinitely boring succession of rolling dunes, vanishing away in every direction.

 

Without any sign of life.

 

"Nothing crawled or swam or walked upon the earth or flew above it," Mildred intoned. "I thought that the place we jumped from was drear enough, but this is worse."

 

"I'm thirsty, Dad."

 

"Stay here a minute. J.B., come with me. Let's take a quick recce."

 

Out of the shade of the passage the temperature was broiling, well into the high nineties. The sand shimmered, stinking of decay, giving off waves of sultry heat, the horizon shimmering behind a yellowish haze.

 

The sky was the color of bronze, with high banks of cloud obscuring the sun. The Armorer pulled out his mini-sextant and took a bearing on where the light seemed brightest, making quick calculations.

 

"Well? Same place, J.B.?"

 

"Yeah. About two hundred miles to the west of Norleans. I can't dig this at all, Ryan."

 

On an impulse, the one-eyed man checked the rad counter fixed to his lapel.

 

"Shit. Look."

 

The tiny safety device was showing a dangerously high radiation count, midway between red and orange, slightly closer to the red.

 

"Hot spot!"

 

The two men looked at each other, both turning away to scan the horizon. Apart from the nondescript low building immediately behind them, there was no sign of any sort of life.

 

"Some kind of big rad leak," J.B. suggested. "Mebbe a quake that shifted the land for a hundred miles around. Drained the swamps into the Gulf. Dark night, I don't know!"

 

Ryan stared again at his rad counter. "It's moving," he said, "farther into the red."

 

None of them really knew how precise the little buttons were. The Trader had found hundreds of them in a warehouse ten years earlier, somewhere around Taos. The label on the box had talked about them being a measuring agent for roentgens, and it was obvious that green meant safe and red meant danger.

 

But nobody knew just how dangerous "danger" was.

 

"Can't stay." J.B. looked back at their five companions, clustered in the doorway. "Another jump so close to the last one isn't going to be a lot of laughs."

 

"Rad sickness isn't a lot of laughs. Have to go for it again." He called to Krysty and the others. "Triple danger on a rad hot spot. Gotta jump."

 

"No." Doc looked ill from the heat. "Need to rest awhile."

 

"Rest awhile here, Doc, and your teeth fall out, your gums bleed and your liver rots. You'll be able to peel off your skin and hang it in a closet." Mildred patted him on the arm. "Lesser of the evils."

 

They made their way quickly back to the chamber, locking the sec doors behind them as they went. They entered the actual gateway, sitting in a sullen, depressed circle within the cobalt blue walls.

 

Ryan closed the door and squatted next to Krysty. "Here we go again."

 

She held his hand as the mist gathered and the familiar brain-curdling sensation began.

 

Ryan's last sentient thought was that the sore place on his neck was throbbing fit to burst.

 

Chapter Eleven

 

Doc Tanner was the first to come around, blinking open his eyes, rubbing at them where the lids seemed to have gotten themselves gummed together. His gnarled hand grasped at the silver lion's-head handle to his sword stick and he coughed, trying to clear a ball of phlegm that had become lodged somewhere at the back of his throat.

 

"By the Three Kennedys!" he croaked, looking around the chamber, realizing that the armaglass walls had changed color, indicating, at the least, that they were somewhere else. "For better or for worse," he whispered, seeing that the other six were still unconscious. "Richer poorer. Health and sickness. Until death or Operation Chronos do us part."

 

The rich, deep blue had changed to a light purple.

 

The silvered disks in the floor and ceiling of the six-sided room had ceased to glow, and all but the last frail tendrils of white mist had disappeared.

 

"I feel amazingly well," he stated. "Life in the old dog yet. Best wine comes in old bottles. Many a fine tune played on an old fiddle. I don't much like the constant repetition of that word 'old.' Senior. A gray panther. Not a wrinklie. Perdition take that one! Mature."

 

Doc beard a low moan from the other side of the chamber and looked across to see that Dean was blinking his way toward waking.

 

"The oldest and the youngest," Doc said. "Perhaps this is an omen of sorts."

 

The boy's face was as white as a wind-washed bone. His dark eyes glittered in the caverns of his skull, and his mouth opened a little way.

 

Then he puked.

 

He retched and coughed, bringing up nothing more substantial than a few threads of yellow bile.

 

"Steady as she goes, lad."