Chapter Four

 

 

Coming around from any jump was unpleasant.

 

For each of the six friends, this particular interrupted jump had been the worst.

 

Doc was twitching like someone suffering from an ague, blood trickling from his nose and from both ears, matting in his silver hair.

 

Jak had been violently sick. The pool of vomit had congealed at his side and streaked his shining white hair. His nails had dug so hard into his ivory palms that they had also drawn half moons of dark blood.

 

Krysty had been crying, gobbets of tears streaking her pale cheeks. She had bitten the end of her tongue, and blood smeared her chin. As she started to recover consciousness, she was shuddering violently.

 

Mildred was trembling, the beads in her plaited hair rattling on the armaglass floor of the gateway chamber. Her hands were pressed between her thighs, and she was huddled in the fetal position.

 

At her side J.B. was on his way back from the blackness. His eyelids were moving rapidly as though he were dreaming, and his fingers kept clenching and opening, as though they were trying to grasp the butt of a blaster. Like Doc, he had suffered from a bleeding nose. The blood trickled down his face, onto the floor, where it was already beginning to clot.

 

Ryan was the first to manage to open an eye, promptly closing it again as a tidal wave of sickness swept up from his stomach. He clamped his mouth shut and swallowed hard, tasting the iron of blood on his tongue.

 

He had a pounding headache, and his good eye felt as if someone were holding a red hot dagger behind it, trying to push it from its socket.

 

The air felt neutral, flat and stale, which generally meant that they were in a redoubt that was still sealed from the days of skydark.

 

Ryan risked another brief glance, checking the color of the armaglass walls of the six-sided chamber. Back in Japan they had been a vivid orange.

 

"Purple," he whispered to himself. "Deep purple."

 

It meant that they'd made the jump safely, even though it had taken a toll on everyone's health.

 

"Fireblast!" The agony seemed to be slowly abating from his head.

 

Ryan coughed, feeling the bitterness of bile rising in his gorge. He cleared his throat and spit on the floor in the corner of the gateway, seeing the phlegm was flecked with blood.

 

He finally felt able to look around to see how the others were doing. It looked as though everyone had either been bleeding or had been sick.

 

Or both.

 

J.B. was closest to coming around, his eyes blinking open, showing only the whites. His hands were gently touching his face, as though he were trying to find some unguessable wound.

 

Doc had rolled on his back and was snoring like a blast furnace.

 

The others were still deeply unconscious.

 

Ryan was relieved that his young son, Dean, hadn't been with them. The boy had often suffered from previous jumps.

 

He wondered how Dean was getting on in the boarding school up in the high country of Colorado. Nick Brody, owner of the school, had seemed a good and honest enough person, and the place's reputation was sound.

 

Ryan had promised that he would visit the boy when it was possible, though Dean had lived long enough and hard enough in Deathlands to know that it might be quite some time before such a visit was practical.

 

"Dark night! Been rolled and tolled like a bell. Now I'm feeling just like Hell."

 

"Good day, John Dix," Ryan said. "Sounds like you feel about as well as you look."

 

"If I look as well as you look, Ryan, then I'm looking twice as well as I feel."

 

Krysty's voice was as weak as a newborn kitten's. "Gaia! I can tell you that I feel twice as bad as both of you put together. That was a mean mother of a jump."

 

In the corner Jak struggled to his knees and then puked again, bringing up a watery, yellow grue, shaking his head and moaning. "Anyone get number of wag?" he asked. "Or was it mule kicked me in balls?"

 

Ryan had managed to drag himself onto his feet, fighting a wave of vertigo that threatened to send him back to his hands and knees. He closed his eye again and took several long, slow breaths. "If there's any day-old rabbits looking to kick my ass, tell them from me that I surrender right now."

 

Krysty was sitting now, running her fingers through the tight coils of her bright red hair. "Think that Doc and Mildred are all right?"

 

The black woman answered for herself, without opening her eyes. "Don't know about that stringy old buzzard, but I think I'm still the right side of the dark river." She paused. "Though the way I feel, I might prefer it if I was dead and free from suffering. That was just about the worst jump I've known."

 

"Must've been because of the quake just as we started the matter transfer," J.B. said, carefully removing his glasses from his pocket and wiping them before placing them back on his narrow nose.

 

Doc groaned, sounding like a man in the last stages of some fearsome terminal disease. He wiped his hand across his face, peering myopically at the smear of blood.

 

"By the Three Kennedys! Holy Mary, pray for me now, sinner that I am."

 

"Too late for repentance, Doc," Mildred said, sitting up and pressing her hands together.

 

"Not too late for penalties, though, madam. I fear that I must be the most wicked of sinners. The punishments of Damien are as nothing compared to what I am suffering. All that happened to him was that he had all the joints of his body cut through and hot lead poured into them while he was being ripped apart by a team of horses. A mere bagatelle to the agonies that I am barely managing to endure here."

 

On the opposite side of the chamber, Jak was noisily sick again.

 

"I had a horrible dream," Krysty said. "Makes a bad jump worse."

 

"Me too, lover," Ryan agreed.

 

There was a general nodding and muttering of agreement about the nightmares, though nobody was prepared to tell the others what his or her own particular horror had been.

 

"Think we've landed in Tennessee?" J.B. asked, replacing the fedora and brushing down his thinning hair.

 

"Didn't catch the Japanese out in any lies over stuff like that." Ryan sniffed. "Air feels right for an old redoubt." He looked at the others. "Be nice if we found a place where we could all clean up some."

 

"I'll second that," Mildred said, leaning on the purple wall of the chamber.

 

Behind her, Jak was throwing up again.

 

 

 

"REMEMBER WE'RE ON RED, everyone," Ryan cautioned, easing open the heavy, opaque, armaglass door of the mat-trans unit, hearing the lock click.

 

They stepped out of the chamber, everyone holding a blaster cocked and ready, and faced a small anteroom. There was no door on their side of it, and the frame was scarred and chipped, with splinters of wood hanging off.

 

"Looks like there was violence," Krysty observed.

 

"Bullet holes," Jak said, pointing with his Python at pockmarks in the far wall.

 

"Semiautomatic, 9 mm," the Armorer stated. "Way I read it so far, it seems like there was a firefight down here, likely in the last day or so of the nukecaust."

 

"Last hours," Ryan suggested. "Minutes?"

 

"Hours. Door's missing, so there was time for someone to do some tidying."

 

"Something written there," Mildred said, indicating a neat line of graffiti in the otherwise empty room.

 

"'James Burton will live forever,'" read Krysty. "One of the soldiers here?"

 

Mildred shook her head. "No. One of the greats of rock and roll. Lead-guitar man who played with Elvis and Ricky Nelson and all the best. Nice to see someone appreciated him."

 

"They signed their graffiti," Ryan said. "Someone called Rog wrote it."

 

"Must've been a rock-and-roll man." Mildred smiled at the thought. "They always used to say that rock and roll would never die."

 

 

 

THERE WERE MORE SIGNS in the control room of a violent skirmish. More bullet holes had been stitched along one wall, running up into the sloping ceiling, taking out two strips of neon lighting and one of the probing sec cameras. There was also an ancient stain, showing almost black on the pale cream floor, that looked remarkably like old blood.

 

"Couple of the consoles been blasted from here to perdition," Doc observed, leaning on the corner of a desk to steady himself.

 

Ryan looked around the room. "Rest are all working fine by the look of it."

 

"No bodies," Krysty said. "Shows there was time to do some cleaning after the shooting."

 

"Doesn't seem to have affected any of the main controls." Ryan glanced at Doc. "Any idea what those two comp consoles would have done?"

 

"The broken ones?"

 

"Yeah?"

 

The old man walked and looked at them, his head to one side. "I believe that the one on the left was an Awac Subcomm 14. The other one was an Andromeda Suff84."

 

Ryan waited for a further explanation. "Yeah? So, what did they do? What aspects of the mat-trans unit did they work? That's what matters."

 

Doc sighed. "I fear that it would take greater wisdom than I possess to answer that, old friend. All I can do is tell you what they were called."

 

"How do you know that?" Mildred asked. "I'm grudgingly impressed at your memory, Doc."

 

"Ah, well, I cannot truthfully take the credit for that. There are neat little labels attached to the desks in front of each of the comp screens."

 

 

 

"READY?"

 

Ryan knelt on the cold stone floor, up against the massive sec door that sealed off the mat-trans section from the rest of what he assumed would be another redoubt. Jak, still looking a whiter shade of pale, was standing by to operate the green handle that controlled the raising and lowering of the door, waiting for the word.

 

"Take her up six."

 

Jak eased the lever upward, and they all heard the familiar noise of hydraulic gears operating behind the thick, reinforced walls.

 

After a moment's hesitation the door began to move slowly upward.

 

"Stop," Ryan ordered, flattening himself and squinting out to check for any obvious sign of danger.

 

All he could see was the most familiar of redoubt sightsan expanse of bare corridor, curving away to the left and right, brightly lit.

 

"Up another six inches. Hold it."

 

Now Ryan could see farther in both directions. He breathed in, tasting the air, savoring the flatness and dull quality that normally indicated that the military complex hadn't been broken into over the century since skydark.

 

All of the redoubts had been powered with the finest examples of twentieth-century American scientific knowledge, nuclear power plants that were designed to be self-maintaining, controlling every aspect of the redoubts temperature, humidity and air quality; filtering, cleaning and recycling automatically for close to a hundred years without a mortal hand being laid on the controls.

 

If there was any problem, then there were automatic cutouts and bypass arrangements so that the whole complex would carry on running at a minimally low level, ticking over, waiting for the humans to return once the nuclear threat was done and passed.

 

But the nuclear threat had destroyed the world. The events of skydark killed all but a tiny handful of the planet's population, irrevocably shattering science and industry forever and a day. The long winters set the country back to its Deathlands status, similar in some ways to the dark times of the Middle Ages in Europe, with a number of larger and smaller villes, some of them ruled by their own barons.

 

So the humans never returned.

 

But the redoubts continued.

 

Someit would never be known how manyhad been destroyed by the first strike, wiped away at ground zero. But a surprising number had survived, relatively unscarred.

 

"Take it all the way up," ordered Ryan, rising to his feet, still gripping the SIG-Sauer.

 

The gears hissed and whirred, and the huge sec-steel door rose ponderously to vanish into the ceiling of the control room, halting with a slight grating jar.

 

"Feel anything, lover?" he asked Krysty, who stood at his elbow.

 

She shook her head. "Just a great age of nothing. Can't sense any kind of life reading."

 

"Good."

 

"But there's always the possibility of my power being thrown off by all the steel and lead shielding in these places. Bear that in mind, lover."

 

"Sure."

 

The passage beyond the open door gaped smooth and silent. As in most redoubts, the ceiling was curved, with recessed lighting and a number of tiny sec cameras fixed at the junction of concrete wall and ceiling, ceaselessly roaming, a glowing red light showing when they were actually transmitting pictures back to some long-abandoned central control area of the complex.

 

"We going out?" Jak asked.

 

"Sure. Skirmish line, and everyone keep it on condition triple-red."