Chapter Two

 

 

"Sounds like a motorcycle," Mildred said, craning her neck to see over the surface of the roadbed.

 

"Look," Doc said, gesturing with the long barrel of the Le Mat.

 

The screamwings crawling over the surface of the wag had fallen silent. With their heads darting to and fro, they looked like hounds sniffing the wind for a scent. The engine sound grew louder, rising and falling as gears were shifted.

 

With a piercing collective shriek, all of the scream-wings flung themselves into the air. Like a cloud of black smoke, the flock rushed away, drawn toward the throbbing noise.

 

Ryan got to his feet and ran to the wag, Mildred and Doc at his heels. While they climbed inside, the one-eyed man gazed down the long flat ribbon of roadway. It stretched ahead, cutting through the foothills, then dropping across rolling plains.

 

Less than an eighth of a mile ahead a figure sat astride a motorcycle. Above it were dark fluttering shapes, like bundles of dirty cloth unfolding and folding in the air.

 

As Ryan got inside the wag, Jak said, "Lucky break us."

 

"Pretty damn unlucky for somebody else," J.B. commented. "We drew those monsters out. Now that poor bastard is paying for it."

 

Even as he spoke, the motorcycle toppled, throwing the rider to the road. The scream wings covered the bike and made darting passes at the rider, who tried to crawl toward the vegetation.

 

Ryan eyed the grade of the road and said to J.B., "Put us in neutral. Let's roll forward."

 

J.B. engaged the gears and the wag slowly moved forward. Peering between the front seats, Ryan kept his eye on the rider, who was swatting and batting at the winged demons. He picked out more details as the wag picked up speed. The rider was a man, and his long, dark blond hair was tied at his nape. He wore only cutoff jeans and a sleeveless denim jacket. He was bleeding from a score of fang and claw inflicted lacerations.

 

"J.B.," Ryan directed, "when we get abreast of that guy, just slow down. Don't stop."

 

"What're you planning?" Krysty asked, a line of worry appearing on her brow.

 

"I'm going to get him inside. Give me those gloves and a blanket."

 

After slipping on the heavy work gloves and draping a blanket over his head and shoulders, Ryan crouched by the door, holding the handle.

 

"I'll need both hands free," he said to Mildred. "Keep me covered."

 

Mildred moved directly behind him, her Czech-made target pistol held at the ready.

 

"Almost there," J.B. said. "Get ready."

 

"Keep the door open a crack and keep the wag moving. I don't plan to be out there more than thirty seconds."

 

"Touching the brakes," J.B. called.

 

In two smooth motions, Ryan slid open the door and leaped out of the vehicle. Since it wasn't traveling more than five miles per hour, he hit the turf running.

 

The man was on the ground, adding his shrieks to those voiced by the darting, slashing, biting creatures. He was trying to cover his face and protect his eyes. Three of the screamwings were on top of his head, sinking teeth and claws into his scalp. He wasn't fighting back, and he appeared to be completely unarmed.

 

The rest of the swarm was occupied with the idling motorcycle, or so Ryan hoped. Because of the blanket hooding his head, his peripheral vision was obstructed and he had no idea if any of the screamwings were turning their attention to him.

 

Even as the thought registered, he heard the sharp double crack of Mildred's revolver. Something limp landed on his right shoulder, then fell to the ground at his feet.

 

Not bothering to look down, Ryan kept his eye on the blood-streaked man howling and thrashing over the sandy soil. He reached him in two long-legged bounds and snatched one of the little demons from the man's head.

 

It came away clutching pieces of scalp and hanks of hair, yowling in protest and pain. It sank its teeth into the thick leather of Ryan's glove, and though the needle points didn't penetrate, Ryan felt the pinching pressure. He snapped its neck with his other hand.

 

Flinging the body away, Ryan slapped another screamwing from its perch on the man's head, at the same time swatting at the third. It took flight, hissing in anger and fear, its tail lashing from side to side like a miniature whip.

 

Ryan got his hands under the man's arms, lifted and heaved him up over his shoulder. Fortunately the man didn't weigh much. In fact, he was downright scrawny.

 

Securing a grip on a blood-slick wrist, Ryan ran back toward the wag, which had progressed only another fifty feet down the road. He loped across the shoulder of the road, ducking as several winged shapes swooped in front of him. The man draped over his shoulder suddenly stiffened and shrieked out a curse as one of the screamwings landed on him. He struggled and howled, "Bastard mutie's eatin' my balls!"

 

There was nothing Ryan could do but try to quicken his pace. Even Mildred, an Olympic-class shootist, would be hard-pressed to plug a target as small as the screamwing perched between the man's legs without the cure being worse than the disease.

 

Krysty and Mildred slid the door open just as Ryan reached it. He wasn't gentle about laying down his burdenhe bent over and hurled the man into the wag. The back of his head struck the metal with a sharp bang, and the screamwing, pressed beneath the body, crushed against the floorplates, squealed and clawed its way out between denim-clad thighs.

 

Ryan leapt into the wag, and Krysty slammed the door shut behind him, the edge clipping his boot heel. At the same time, the screamwing took flight within the confined space of the wag, generating shrieking chaos.

 

No one dared to trigger a blaster, but there was plenty of flailing about with gun barrels. Jak had to duck to avoid being brained by Doc's Le Mat. Ryan managed to whip the blanket from his shoulders and fling it over the frantically fluttering creature. The weight dragged the screamwing down to the floorplates. Jak used the heels of his boots and the heavy butt of his .357 Colt Python to hammer out its life.

 

Finally the lump beneath the blanket no longer stirred. Doc wadded up the cloth, rolling the remains of the screamwing into a tight ball, and Krysty opened the door just wide enough for him to throw it out.

 

Mildred had scooted over to the examine the screamwings' victim. He was groaning, his eyes closed, face streaked with blood. She peeled back an eyelid and said, "Out of it. Pain, shock or that impact to the head. Maybe a combination of all three."

 

She reached over to tug out the first-aid kit stowed beneath the front passenger seat.

 

"Can we start the engine now?" J.B. asked. "This incline bottoms out in less than a mile."

 

Though there were no nearby sounds of the screamwings, Ryan said, "Let's just keep rolling until we stop. No sense in tempting them back to us."

 

Though the rear cargo compartment of the Hotspur could accommodate eight people, it wasn't the best place for a field hospital. Mildred had the wounded man stretched out on the deck, and she kept bumping everyone as she attended to him.

 

Ryan watched her methodically clean her patient's wounds, swab away the blood and check his vital signs. For the hundredth time, he thanked the twist of fate that had planted her within his little group.

 

Mildred Wyeth was a medical doctor, a former specialist in cryogenic sciences. Though she was in her mid-thirties, she was, chronologically, well over a century old. Mildred had entered a hospital in late 2000 for minor surgery, but a freak reaction to the anesthetic had necessitated her body being placed in cryonic stasis until a treatment could be found.

 

It never was. The world was blown apart before she was revived, and she slept, like a fly trapped in amber, for a hundred years. Ryan had found her in a shielded underground cell, her life-support system still functioning. He had brought her back to life, into a world she had never dreamed existed. The cryogenic process and suspension of life seemed to have reversed the ill effects of the anesthetic.

 

Besides her medical skills, Mildred had proved herself invaluable as a tenacious survivalist. She had also won a silver medal for free pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic games.

 

Watching her ministrations with a clinical interest was another refugee from a past time period, Dr. T. A. Tanner. Unlike Mildred, who had bobbed unknowingly down the temporal stream, Doc was the subject of a cold-hearted scientific practice known in predark days as "trawling."

 

Since the 1940s, American military scientists and their counterparts in other countries had tried to reconcile Einsteinian physics with quantum mechanics. By the 1990s, the reconciliation attempts had spawned the ultra-top-secret experiment known as the Totality Concept. There were several subdivisions of the experiment, such as Overproject Whisper, Project Cerberus, and, finally, Operation Chronos.

 

With the use of a complex matter-transfer device called a gateway, the project scientists had tried time and time again to snatch subjects from a past temporal line and "trawl" them to the present.

 

Their only success was a man from 1896. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, Ph.D., scientist and scholar, was plucked from the bosom of his beloved family and deposited in a sterile subterranean chamber a century hence.

 

Though he learned all he could about the twentieth century, Doc never forsook the hope of returning to his wife and two children. His constant attempts to return to his own era so angered the overlords of Operation Chronos that they eventually used him as a trawling subject again. Rather than sending him back, they opted to transfer him decades into the future. Like Mildred, he missed the nukecaust by less than a month.

 

All that remained of the Totality Concept and its spin-off researches were the matter-transfer units tucked away in underground redoubts.

 

The other members of the group were the products of the hellgrounds known as Deathlands.

 

Sixteen-year-old Jak Lauren had all the hard, bitter experience of a man twice his age. An albino, with fearsome ruby eyes and a shock of bone-white hair, he favored bladed weapons over blasters. He bore scars from many near-fatal encounters, the least of which curved up from the corner of his mouth and across his high-planed face.

 

Jak had buried two sets of families during his young lifehis folks back in Louisiana and his wife and infant daughter in New Mexico. He hid the tragedies behind a taciturn mask and an eerily calm, almost detached, manner.

 

Ryan Cawdor and John Barrymore Dix had been companions for well over a decade, since they traveled the Appalachians in a pair of huge war wags with the legendary Trader. The weapons dealer had been their undisputed leader and mentor, even something of a father figure to Ryan.

 

Trader had earned a considerable fortune by uncovering hidden stockpiles of weapons and fuel and using them to barter his way through the Deathlands. He had been a fearsome figure in his day, a reputation he fully lived up to and enjoyed.

 

Recently, after beating a case of rad cancer, Trader had been reunited with his former lieutenants. His long illness had changed him, leaving him sometimes confused, sometimes irrational, but still a dangerous man to cross. People had always treaded lightly around him, but his weathered skin had become so thin with age, it was anybodys guess as to what might provoke him.

 

He had resented that Ryan was his group's undisputed leader, and that the younger man no longer showed him the deference he believed was due. Their reunion had been punctuated by many disagreements, with Ryan and Trader frequently going eyeball to eyeball over tactics and even ethics. Everyone had feared that one day Trader wouldn't be the first to blink, and either he or Ryan would catch the last train west.

 

Though there was no denying that the grizzled veteran of Deathlands had gotten the group of friends out of a few tight spots, he'd gotten them into just as many, due to his temper and ego.

 

The last tight spot had been in California. Trader and Abe, the former main gunner of War Wag One, had apparently sacrificed themselves to save Ryan and the rest of the group from an enemy attack.

 

The love of Ryan's life was Krysty Wroth, who was, by definition, a mutie. She possessed the empathic ability to sense danger. The few others with these prescient powers were called "doomseers" or "doomies."

 

Krysty had been trained to hone this empathy by being in tune with the energies of Gaia, the great Earth Mother. By tapping into these energies, the power field of the planet itself, Krysty could gain superhuman strength for a limited time.

 

Ryan had an eleven-year-old son, Dean. The issue of a brief encounter between Ryan and Sharona, the wild wife of a frontier baron, Dean had been united with his father for only a short time. Ryan grew used to being called "Dad" and was totally devoted to the boy. Recently he had enrolled the lad for a year in the Brody School in Colorado. While his son received an education, the companions continued their journeys throughout Deathlands, with Ryan hoping to find that undefined something that would give his soul peace.

 

Frequently they used the gateway chambers to make mat-trans jumps, but those jumps had too many variables, since they never knew whereor even ifthey would rematerialize.

 

As Doc had pointed out on more than one occasion, it was like deliberately jumping from a hot yet familiar frying pan into an unknown fire.

 

Though gateways were hidden in subterranean military complexes all over the continent, the vast majority were concentrated in the Southwest.

 

Mildred had said that even in her day, the public was aware that the government maintained secret underground bases in some Southwestern states. She claimed the official story was that the subterranean centers were part of the COG program, the Continuity of Government, in case of a national disaster, but most people suspected some kind of covert scientific research was going on. According to her, the gateway redoubts were probably only a small part of many hidden predark installations.

 

In fact, the wag the companions were traveling in had been found in an underground installation in Dulce, New Mexico, into which they had materialized from their last jump. It wasn't the same redoubt they had visited several times before, a few hours' journey from Jak's former ranch. They had realized in short order that the complex wasn't even a Redoubt. It was older and of a far different design. The mat-trans gateway was an addition to the original specs, almost an afterthought. There was little clue as to what function the installation had been built to serve. There were the usual No Unauthorized Personnel Beyond This Point warnings posted, but a curious symbol was imprinted at the bottom of every sign a red triangle with three horizontal black lines running through it.

 

The Land Rover, one of several identical vehicles, was in almost perfect condition, with barely a hundred miles on the odometer. A former patrol wag, it was outfitted with a barricade remover, spotlight and public address system. There were a number of airtight containers of gasoline in the subterranean hideaway, and these had been used to power up a generator and recharge the battery. They had found a hand-operated air pump to reinflate the tires.

 

A cupboard in a side room yielded camping gear, which they loaded into the vehicle, plus an assortment of shirts and jeans, which they stuffed into a backpack and took along.

 

Though earnestly searched for, no spare tires could be found beyond the one they boosted from another Land Rover, but the supply of gasoline and spare cans was sufficient to carry them several thousand milesup through Kansas and Nebraska, skirting a corner of Colorado and eventually to the ville once known as Calgary. After surveying that region, they intended to circle back around and pay a visit to Dean at his school.

 

For the past few days they had been following a remarkably well-preserved strip of road through South Dakota, toward the Black Hills. Ryan and J.B. had passed through the region before, and since in predark days it had been one of the most sparsely populated areas of America, they hoped violent encounters with muties or humans would be limited.

 

However, the injured man on the floor had obviously come from a settlement of some sort, either a ville or a barony. He had regained a sort of semiconsciousness, but he didn't speak, only murmured and groaned.

 

"Hitting the bottom of the grade, Ryan," J.B. stated. "What's the plan?"

 

"I'll take a quick look-see."

 

The wag rolled to a smooth, slow stop. Sliding open the door, Ryan cautiously poked his head out and checked their backtrack. He saw nothing, but the wind carried faint high-pitched cries.

 

"Looks fine," he said, shutting the door. "Start her up."

 

J.B. keyed the engine to rumbling life, threw the wag into gear and sent the vehicle rocketing up the road. Everyone lurched backward. Mildred, who was trying to affix a strip of gauze over one of the man's many lacerations, swore at him.

 

"Sorry," J.B. said with a grin. "Got carried away. This wag handles like a dream. Much better than that old LAV we used to have."

 

Mildred muttered something and returned to her task.

 

"One thing," J.B. added. "Got a pretty good look at that guy's bike when we passed it by. Looked like a Honda 150."

 

"So?" Jak asked.

 

"It was in great shape. Almost perfect."

 

"What's your point?" Krysty asked.

 

"Motorcycles aren't the safest form of transportation," J.B. answered. "Most of the ones I've ever seen were wired-together rattletraps."

 

Ryan considered J.B.'s words and agreed with him. Because they offered no protection from chem storms, mutie and human attacks or even bugs, motorcycles weren't the conveyance of choice in Deathlands. They were quaint, useless relics from predark days, holding a curiosity value only for kids Dean's age. Ryan could count on the fingers of one hand how many working models he had seen over the past thirty years.

 

An aspirated moan came from the man on the floor. " Damn . My balls hurt"

 

"He's coming around," Mildred announced.