Chapter Three

 

 

He was on his back on the floor of a gateway chamber as the armaglass walls changed from dark brown to the lightest and palest of pinks.

 

But Ryan could hardly see any of that, couldn't see any of his companions.

 

His range of vision was blocked by a leering skull, scant inches from his. The face was long and angular, the sharp cheekbones honed like an Egyptian mummy's, the skin dried and leathery. A mane of snowy hair tumbled across the high forehead, brushing against Ryan's cheeks, feeling like the caress of a hundred tiny desiccated worms. And the eyes, wide and blankly staring, brimmed with fresh crimson blood that leaked from the tear ducts and spilled down onto Ryan's face.

 

Ryan tried to scream again, but the creature had gripped him by the throat, iron fingers crushing his neck, making breathing impossible.

 

He knew who it was.

 

What it was.

 

"Melmoth."

 

Ryan, dying, heard the name, knew that it was the right one. But he hadn't spoken it and didn't know who had.

 

"Pull him off!" It was a woman shrieking out. Even as he slipped back into unconsciousness, Ryan felt that he recognized the voice.

 

 

 

KRYSTY WROTH, lover and friend of Ryan Cawdor, had been sitting in the gateway chamber in the bayous, holding Ryan's hand, watching the tendrils of white mist gathering near the ceiling, feeling her brain start to whirl as the matter-transfer jump began.

 

At the last moment Krysty had seen someone blunder into the octagonal chamber after the door had been closed, triggering the automatic mechanism. It had been a tall figure, in black, with a shock of white hair.

 

But Krysty had been too far along the road to darkness to do anything about the intruder.

 

Now she had come down, with the bitter taste of bile at the back of her throat, relieved that the nightmares that often haunted a jump hadn't clutched at her.

 

The woman had opened her bright emerald eyes, brushed back a wisp of her fiery, sentient hair and saw that all her friends were sprawled on the armaglass floor, unconscious.

 

Ryan, no longer holding her hand, lay flat on his back, feet moving slightly, heels rasping, and on top of him was Melmoth Cornelius, last survivor of the depraved family of genetically created vampires, the lingering spawn of the Genesis Project. In the last few hours, she, Ryan and the others had succeeded in slaying three of the four bizarre beings, destroying their bodies so that they could no longer rejuvenate themselves.

 

But Melmoth had been out hunting and had escaped their vengeanceor they had escaped his vengeance.

 

Now he was in the chamber at the end of the jump. His lean body covered Ryan's, and his long-nailed fingers were clasped tight around Ryan's throat.

 

"Melmoth!" she'd screamed.

 

But he hadn't moved, his face pressed into Ryan's neck as though he were nuzzling at the artery below the ear, sucking lasciviously at his blood.

 

Ryan's face was livid, swollen, his mouth open as if he were gasping for breath. His hands lay limp at his side.

 

"Pull him off!" Krysty shouted, fighting nausea, crawling on hands and knees and placing her hands on the shoulders of the tall vampire.

 

Someone was moving to help her.

 

Mildred.

 

Mildred Winonia Wyeth was an African-American doctor from the far predark past. She had been born in December of 1964 and had become one of the United States's leading cryonic scientists, specializing in the medical applications of freezing.

 

Ironically Mildred had been frozen in December of the year 2000, when minor abdominal surgery went awry. Days later the world went nuke mad, and only one person in every ten thousand survived. Europe, Russia and the Americas were totally devastated by the brief war that ended all wars.

 

Then came the long winters when the planet was pushed back to an almost medieval state, and all science and industry vanished forever. And the death count ran higher.

 

During the next ninety years or so, Mildred had slept dreamlessly on, sealed in her capsule, maintained in a buried medical fortress by comp-controlled machinery powered by tireless nuke generators.

 

Then Ryan and the others had come by, like princes in a fairy tale, and awakened her.

 

Mildred had come around from the jump. She blinked her eyes open and shook her head to try to clear out the cobwebs, the beads in her plaited hair rattling against the glass wallswalls that she noticed had changed color to a delicate shell pink, which meant that the jump had worked and they were elsewhere.

 

But Krysty was shouting for help.

 

Mildred looked around, her attention caught by Ryan, who was lying on the floor with someone trying to strangle him.

 

"Melmoth?" she whispered.

 

She lunged across to try to help Krysty, who was fighting to drag the vampire away from his victim.

 

The noise and scuffling woke Dean Cawdor, Ryan's eleven-year-old son.

 

The boy felt as if a mule had been dancing a slow shuffle inside his brain. He groaned, wondering whether he was going to throw up. Across the chamber he saw that Doc Tanner had suffered a nosebleed, as the old man often did during a jump.

 

But his dark eyes were caught by the strange tableau at the center of the gateway. His father lay unconscious, his face swollen and engorged with blood, while one of the vampires was trying to throttle him. Krysty and Mildred were both wrestling with Melmoth to try to drag him off Ryan.

 

"No," the boy yelled, his voice cracking, as he scrambled on hands and knees to try to help.

 

He crawled across the legs of the armorer to the group, John Barrymore Dix, one of the greatest experts on weaponry in the whole of Deathlands. He and Ryan had been friends for close to twenty years, both of them having ridden the powerful war wags with the legendary Trader.

 

Dean's jostling brought J.B. slowly out of the seeping blackness and he fumbled immediately for his spectacles, putting them on the bridge of his narrow nose. His right hand felt for his blasters, the 9 mm Uzi and the unusual Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun.

 

There was a fight going on in the chamber, with Krysty, Mildred and Dean battling to drag Melmoth off Ryan.

 

Doc slept on, undisturbed by the clumsy, ugly brawl that was taking place only a yard away from him.

 

Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born in a small village in Vermont on a bitterly cold February day in 1868. In November of 1896, while a happily married man with two little children, he was a hapless victim of Operation Chronos, the time-trawling wing of the Totality Concept. A highly secret section of government,

 

Chronos had been trying to grab people from the past and bring them forward in time. There had been many hideously disgusting failures, and only one success Doc Tanner, who proved to be such a difficult specimen that the whitecoats eventually pushed him nearly a hundred years into the future, into the heart of Deathlands.

 

The double experience of time travel had tipped Doc's mind a little off its gyro centers and he sometimes functioned as if he were missing a few cards from a full deck.

 

Now he lay there, still tipped into darkness by the swirling horrors of jumping from place to place, where your molecules, atoms and neurons were scattered through the ether and reassembled someplace else.

 

At his side, the albino teenager, Jak Lauren, also lay unconscious. Mat-trans jumps affected different people in different ways, and he lay deathly still, hands folded across his breast, a smudge of blood trickling from his left ear.

 

The young man and the old-timer, side by side, were oblivious to the fight that had suddenly developed.

 

A fight that stopped just as suddenly.

 

Krysty had grabbed one of Melmoth's slender wrists, trying to break the death grip that the vampire had on Ryan's throat. But it was as hard and cold as marble and didn't give a fraction of an inch. In desperation, the woman slid her hands down to the fingers with their curved horn nails. She levered her hand under the little finger of his left hand and jerked it back with all her power. There was a fragile little cracking sound, like a dry twig, and the finger snapped, dangling back and loose.

 

But Melmoth showed no reaction, not even moving when Krysty broke two more fingers of his left hand.

 

Mildred had locked her arms around Melmoth's white neck, trying to force him away from Ryan. Her fingers clutched at the side of the vampire's throat, probing for the carotid artery, intending to try to cut off the blood flow to the brain and render the white-haired butcher unconscious.

 

" He's dead," Mildred stated.

 

"Ryan? Can't be. We've got"

 

"Not Ryan. Melmoth."

 

"What?"

 

"Dead."

 

J.B. had been trying to loosen the grip of the creature's right hand, also breaking a couple of fingers. "Yeah, he's already cold," he told them.

 

"Get him away from Ryan," Krysty said, half standing and pulling at the vampire, bracing herself as she dragged the stiffening corpse to one side of the chamber.

 

Ryan still didn't move, the skin of his throat marred by the bruises from Melmoth's iron fingers.

 

Mildred had knelt by him, her head on his chest, her hand on his wrist, checking respiration and pulse.

 

"Slow but steady," she pronounced. "Think he'll be okay."

 

Jak came around at that moment, jumping as the first thing he saw was the distorted face of Melmoth Cornelius, inches from his own face, the bloodied eyes staring into his.

 

"What's he? Dead?"

 

"Yeah," Dean said. "Nearly did for Dad."

 

"Dad dead," Doc muttered, starting the painful journey from dark to light. "Not dead, Dad? Who did Dad dead? Blues for Father Death." He opened a pale, rheumy eye. "By the Three Kennedys! It's wandering Melmoth, looking as though he sits now in the black ferry across the Styx."

 

"Bastard's chilled, if that's what you mean, Doc," Mildred said, straightening from the side of the one-eyed man. "And Ryan here came close to joining him on the last train west. But he'll make it."

 

Doc touched a gnarled finger to his nose, bringing it away streaked with blood, wiping it with the sleeve of his antique frock coat.

 

Between them, Krysty and J.B. eased Ryan into a sitting position. Already his face was resuming a normal color, and his breathing was steadier and less harsh, though the long scar that ran from the corner of his right eye down to his mouth still stood out brightly.

 

Gradually everyone in the chamber was making his or her own recovery from the rigors of the jump.

 

Dean looked down at Melmoth's shriveled corpse. "How did he get in? When I went under, he wasn't in here with us. Someone let him in?"

 

"No," Krysty replied. "Just as I slipped into the dark I was sort of aware of someone trying to get in. Must've made it in the last second or so. If he'd tried to open the door when the jump was already going on Gaia knows what might have happened."

 

"Think there's probably a sec lock on it," J.B. said. "No way of testing it."

 

"Hey!"

 

Everyone looked around at Dean's exclamation. The boy was staring down at Melmoth.

 

"What is it, dear laddie?" Doc asked.

 

"The vampire's sort ofsort of rotting. Like dying's speeded up."

 

Krysty stayed at Ryan's side, but the others moved to join Dean, looking at the white-haired corpse.

 

"Darknight!" J.B. exclaimed softly. "You're right, Dean. Look at him go."

 

Alive, Melmoth and his brothers and sister had looked deathly pale and emaciated. Dead, he was shrinking away toward nothing. His ruby eyes had turned milky and were beginning to suppurate in their bony caverns. The skin across the honed cheekbones was so taut it was already splitting, opening up like tiny lips, showing the whiteness of bone beneath. The lips had peeled back from the slightly pointed teeth, cracking at the corners. The gums were receding, and several of the teeth were visibly loose in their sockets.

 

The vampire's fingers were curling into claws, the strong nails tearing deep gashes in the skin of the palms that wept a colorless ichor.

 

"Stinks," the boy said, pinching his fingers over his nose. "Can't we get him out of here before he rots into a puddle of dirty water?"

 

"Soon as Ryan comes around we can think about a move," J.B. told him.

 

"Air seems good, John." Mildred sniffed at it.

 

J.B. nodded. "Yeah. Fresh. Not the usual stale stuff. Mebbe a part of the redoubt's opened up."

 

Doc had picked up his beloved ebony swordstick, gripping it by the silver lion's-head hilt and tapping the ferule on the floor. "I would most certainly appreciate the chance to breathe in some cool and dry air. I think that we've had a little too much of the warm and damp recently."

 

Krysty looked up at the old man. "I have this idea that people tend to relish what they knew while growing up. Like you had in New England. Same for me. I wish I could sample the kind of air we had when I was growing up in Harmony ville. Like honey."

 

Ryan moaned quietly and lifted his right hand as though he were trying to knock away a persistent skeeter.

 

"Boss man's coming around," Mildred said. "Should be fine in a few minutes."

 

Ryan opened his eye.