Chapter Six

 

Dean Cawdor was sometimes headstrong and impulsive and all of the other things a boy his age could be called, but certainly he wasn't a coward. That much of his makeup came from his gene pool. Still, he could be startled and react accordingly. So when his choked cry of surprise reached his father and friends, they knew something unexpected had happened.

 

After Dean yelled, he almost fell backward as he tried to put distance between himself and the unexpected figure he'd nearly run over. The boy pulled out his blaster as he retreated and leveled it at the intruder.

 

Already heading toward his son, Ryan had unholstered his own weapon and readied it. "Back off, Dean," he yelled, lining up the sights of the pistol to fire a killing shot as he waited for whatever it was to advance carefully around the blind spot of the corner.

 

 

"D-don't shoot, for Christ's sake!" the offstage figure said.

 

"Doesn't sound like a stickie," Krysty remarked. "Come on around, then, nice and slow," Ryan ordered, the barrel of the blaster unwavering.

 

Dean was still in the vantage point. "He's got his hands up, Dad."

 

A man stepped carefully around the corner, his hands held high over his head, smooth palms out and open to show his nonmutie status. His mouth was hanging open in complete and utter shock. The entire force of stickies had been cleared in less than thirty seconds, their lifeless bodies littering the floor.

 

"You got them all?" he asked.

 

"No. There's still you," Ryan growled.

 

"Don't shoot," he cried. "I'm a norm!"

 

"Good way to get chilled, norm or not. Toss your blaster over here, nice and easy. Take it out with two fingers, and try not to drop it and shoot yourself in the foot."

 

"How do I know you won't chill me?"

 

"What's stopping me from chilling you now, stupe?" Dean retorted, his courage flowing back into his veins.

 

"Got a point, I guess."

 

"Been enough chilling in here. Until you do or say otherwise, I'll take you as a norm. Keep your blaster on him, son," Ryan said as he holstered his own drawn pistol and handed over the captured piece to J.B.

 

"Colt .45 auto," the Armorer said. "And even without my specs, I can tell it needs a good cleaning. What do you want to do with this dumb shit, Ryan?"

 

"Ryan?" the scavenger repeated, a light of recognition in his brown eyes. "You're Ryan Cawdor! And that must be J. B. Dix! I'll be dunked in honey and oven-roastedyou guys rode the wags with Trader!"

 

"That was a while back. And you seem to know a hell of a lot about us for a stranger."

 

"I get around, Mr. Cawdor. Heard some things. Talked late into the night with a guy named Abe who was trying to track down Trader after he'd heard the old salt wasn't as dead as had been previously reported. Abe told me some stories and described you two. Not that many people walking around Deathlands with features as distinctive as yoursat least, traveling together with other people like the redhead and the albino. Uh, no disrespect intended," the man babbled nervously.

 

"What's your game?" Ryan asked.

 

 

"I'm a scaviea scavenger. I find and I sell."

 

"You're a damn bone-picker, is what you mean," J.B. muttered.

 

"We all got to make a living, Dix. But I don't pick no bones or truck with dead men."

 

"Speaking of dead men," Mildred said. "I'd just as soon get the hell away from all these stickies. Find another place to quiz our new buddy."

 

"Okay. You keep quiet, and you might get out of here alive. Got it?" The scavie nodded eagerly. "You're a fast learner," Ryan noted approvingly. "Most people screw up and say 'Yeah.' Can't seem to keep their mouths shut."

 

The travelers split into two teams, with J.B. and Dean staying in the corridor to keep an eye on the scavie. Doc and Jak took one end, Ryan, Mildred and Krysty the other. The rooms and corridors were laid out in a simple rectangle shape. They passed a cryo lab, a suite of empty hospital beds, a single nonfunctioning elevator, a front reception area with long dead phones and other such hardware and a sizable hole that Adrian had blown into the wall for admittance. No armory, no food and no supplies, except for a small first-aid kit Mildred found in a bedside drawer.

 

"Got J.B. some adhesive bandages at least," she announced. "There's a brand-new box in the kit."

 

"It's not a redoubt," Ryan said. "Just like J.B. predicted back in the gateway."

 

"Feels and smells more like a hospital," Mildred observed.

 

"Perhaps we need to question our new friend. I wonder how long he's been down here anyway?" Krysty said.

 

"Blast in the wall looks fresh," Ryan replied, picking up a chunk of concrete. "New grit on the ground from the explosion. Our timing might have been better or we might just be unlucky. I'd say the guy with the beard hasn't been stumbling around in here for very long."

 

"Could've done without him and those stickies. He probably brought them in here in the first place," Mildred said.

 

When the two groups had converged, the scavie suggested adjourning to the cryo room, away from the smell of the fire the muties had set and the stench of death where the dead stickies had fouled themselves as they died. Ryan agreed, wanting to get the man away from the still intact and working gateway as quickly as possible.

 

They talked as they walked to the labs. The newcomer seemed to take particular delight in discovering Ryan had a son. His own boy was down south in Georgia with his mother and her kin.

 

"Guess you can say she left me. Her loss, as well as my own. Glad to meet all of you. I'm Alton, Alton Adrian. I guess you heard the explosion. That's what brought you down here."

 

"Uh, right," Ryan improvised. "The explosion. Made my eardrums pop."

 

Adrian shrugged. "I overdid it. Not a demo man. Better too much than too little."

 

"Not always," J.B. replied. "Can bring the roof in on your head."

 

"I'll remember that. Well, I owe you, I guess. I'd be chilled for sure if those stickies had got their hands on me. I've got squatter's rights, so I'm claiming half, you all can divvy up the other part between yourselves. Fair?"

 

Ryan frowned. "What are you talking about?"

 

"Scavenge the cryo spots. Try and thaw a few of the freezies, see what valuables they decided to hang on to during their stay in the cooler."

 

"Yeah. We were looking like anyone else," Ryan said gamely. If the man wanted to think they were fellow ghouls, so much the better. Such beliefs saved questions, including the big one of how they'd gotten into this area in the first place.

 

"I didn't think anyone else knew about this hidden level but me. I got sloppy and used too much plas ex. Muties must've heard just like your group did and followed me down here. Good thing you came along."

 

"Timing is everything," Krysty said with a smile.

 

"Don't I know it," he replied, reluctantly pulling his eyes away from Krysty's beauty to peer back at Ryan and J.B.

 

"Listen, Cawdor, don't take this wrong, but you and your pal there are two of the most curious-looking fellows I ever seen around here. The stories Abe told me didn't say you had such weird coloration."

 

Doc cackled. "I take it you are in awe of their dusky pigmentation."

 

"Say what?" Alton asked.

 

"Their skin, man! You are talking about their skin!" Doc replied.

 

"Yeah. Take the lady doctor here," Alton said, gesturing to Mildred, who was busy applying the bandages she'd found to the coin-sized flesh wounds on J.B.'s face. "She's beautiful. Don't get me wrong. Skin color don't mean shit to me. Attractive is attractive. And the rest of you look like any other poor white bucks running around Deathlands, even the albino."

 

Jak glared in way of response. The teen wasn't sure if he trusted Alton yet or not, and as a newcomer the man invited and deserved extra scrutiny.

 

"But I never seen men with skin color like Ryan's and J.B.'s," Alton continued. "It looks, well, it don't look natural. Looks kind of funny."

 

"Well, it isn't. We got into a scrape a while back and had to dye our faces and J.B.'s hair. Long story, but we got out alive," Ryan replied. "You should have seen us right after the deed was done."

 

"Man does anything to stay alive," Alton agreed, not pushing further. Curiosity could get a man chilled triple fast, and the bearded man had escaped death already for the day. He believed in playing the odds and not causing problems. Whatever had forced Ryan Cawdor to dye himself a new skin tone was the one-eyed man's business, and since there was no offer of volunteering to explain what had happened, it would remain a mystery.

 

"Good thing most of the dye has worn off, lover," Krysty said. "I was starting to get used to your new look until our new acquaintance pointed it out."

 

"Here we are," Alton said, gesturing toward the door of the cryo laboratory. He'd been very close to entering the actual lab. His chosen hiding place was outside the main doorway in the air lock, with the contents behind him kept sealed by a single steel door. He'd peeked inside through a small round window, but had gone no farther. Again, as in most of the lab complex except for the gateway, there were no codes or secrets for full access and entry, just a simple Admit button to cycle the air lock.

 

"Ready?" Mildred asked, an anxious tone in her voice as she stood in front of the doorway, clenching and unclenching her hands.

 

Ryan waved her on, and the woman stuck out a stocky finger and pushed the button. The air lock hummed, then opened with a sigh, and the pressure quickly equalized, allowing easy entry to a pair of double swing doors hanging on the far wall inside.

 

Mildred stepped through, followed closely by the others.

 

Ryan held out an arm, stopping the newest addition to the group. "Why don't you and Jak stay out here," he said, nodding toward the waiting albino. "A pair of jacks to back up our hand once we're in."

 

Blocked by Ryan's arm, the scavenger's eyes narrowed and his face took on a suspicious look. "I've played straight with you and your group. You're not looking to cheat me, are you, Cawdor?" he asked.

 

"Not much you could do about it if I was, is there?" Ryan asked.

 

"No, but"

 

"I was just thinking we needed some men outside in case another band of stickies came calling. Don't worry, we'll protect your interest."

 

The scavie looked dubious and glanced at Jak.

 

"Okay, Cawdor. I owe you anyway. I guess you know best."

 

"Be here," Jak added. "Come running if hear shots."

 

"Like the wind," Ryan said, stepping into the cryo facility and sealing the door to the air lock behind him.

 

 

 

"OUR FRIEND'S OUTSIDE with Jak. Told them to watch out for muties."

 

"Good idea," Mildred said. "We can talk more freely."

 

As in other cryo centers, the layout was elementary a control room filled with comp panels dominated by a mammoth central unit in the center and a long side wall of clear glass. However, the difference came from behind the glass. There, angled on a raised platform, were a dozen silver capsules, and recessed farther into the wall on metal shelving behind the capsules were an additional twelve smaller cylinders.

 

"I confess, I have seen the larger cryo beds, but what are the little containers for?" Doc asked, his face reflecting his confusion.

 

"I don't know. Midgets?" Dean guessed.

 

"Little people," Mildred retorted. "And no, there are no little people in those casks."

 

"What do you think?" Ryan asked, looking at Krysty. "Anybody in there still alive?"

 

"No, I don't think so. Feels wrong," the crimson-haired woman replied, her voice whispery as she struggled to concentrate and expand her consciousness outward. "Feels empty."

 

"How so?" Mildred asked as she continued to inspect the room's equipment.

 

"Not like when we found you," the green-eyed beauty said in response as she blinked and tried to focus a second time. "Or Rick."

 

"Rick" was Richard Neal Ginsberg, born March 22, 1970. Ryan and his bandbefore Mildred and Dean had joined themhad discovered the man housed within one of the cryo chambers inside a military redoubt in California. An expert in the operation of the mat-trans units and the gateways, Rick had been frozen to halt the spread of the disease that was slowly killing him, waiting in the hopes of being revived when a cure was available.

 

Suffering from an advanced case of Lou Gehrig's disease, he'd been a companion for only a short time before determining that the disease was still relentlessly killing him. When the opportunity arose for a valiant sacrifice to save his new friends, Ginsberg had made the gesture.

 

Like Ginsberg, Mildred had also been placed in cryo sleep, but her problem was different from a life-threatening disease. Instead, the doctor had been hospitalized to undergo abdominal surgery for a possible ovarian cyst when an unexpected and completely idiosyncratic reaction to the anesthetic plunged her into a coma.

 

As Mildred's life signs plummeted, her personal physicianas well as her best professional colleaguehad chosen to take the step of placing the then dying Dr. Wyeth in cryo suspension in order to save the woman's life. In an ironic twist, some of the tech used to preserve her fading vital signs had been invented by Mildred herself, but the sleeping physician was in no condition to appreciate the irony.

 

When Ryan and company had reawakened the woman from her deep sleep, her life-threatening symptoms and coma had miraculously vanished during the long years she'd been under. "Must've been like a healing trance," she'd later decided.

 

"I'm not getting any sort of vibe, lover," Krysty finally said, putting her hands to her forehead and massaging her temples. "Usually with freezies, I get a strange, creepy-crawly feeling. Alive, but not alive. Dead, but not dead. A suspended-in-limbo, hovering sensation."

 

"Trapped between two worlds," Doc whispered. "Sleeping, but not breathing."

 

"I don't have the poetry you do, but yeah, exactly," she agreed.

 

"And this time?" Ryan asked, already knowing the answer.

 

Krysty shook her head to the left and right. "Nothing."

 

"Then they're all chilled," J.B. said. "Literally and figuratively," he added laconically.

 

"Not necessarily," Mildred mused, who had been examining the cylinders with a careful eye from her vantage point behind the glass wall. She was now sitting at a comp station and rapidly typing in commands. She was amazedusually these systems were encrypted and required a series of passwords to enter, but for some unknown reason, she was being provided full access to the information stored within.

 

"There's a dozen freeze tubes in there, Mildred. I can tell from here none of them are operational," Ryan said firmly. "The liquid displays are all off-line and blank. And all of them have red malfunction signs glowing across the tops of the pods."

 

"Just give me a minute," Mildred said softly. She slid across the polished floor in the wheeled desk chair, checking a panel marked Coolants Input. The readouts were all blank, matching those on the canisters and coffinlike tubes. She flicked a switch, once, twice, before pounding a fist against the inert panel in protest.

 

"Dammit," she said in a tight voice.

 

J.B. had been carefully squinting down over her shoulder and peering at the cryo controls.

 

"Don't see an emergency-mass-release box," he said. "Course, I still can't see much of anything without my specs. Point it out to me and I'll blow the sec locks. See about doing a quick meltdown in here."

 

"There isn't a mass release for this setup, J.B." Mildred replied tiredly. "This isn't a redoubt, remember? Some military technology is here, but not enough. This has the smell of a bought-and-paid-for kind of deal. There are no secrets hidden here to require locks. In case of an emergency, you just hit that red button and there's a quick coolant drain and shutdown. Or if you're at a computer like I'm sitting at, you just enter the correct computer command and it also engages the primary release."

 

"So, go ahead and do it," J.B. urged.

 

Mildred looked sadly at the controls. "There's no need. Krysty's right, as far as I can tell."

 

"Sorry, Mildred," the redhead said.

 

"I'm being irrational, I know, but I feel a kinship to many of these freezies," the physician continued. "Would've been nice to find another batch alive, safe. But if there are no vitals, I'd be wasting a lot of time we don't really have. Takes hours to do a cryo-chamber drain and hours more to resuscitate, and there's no rushing the process. Those stickies could have friends, and we don't want to get caught down here a second time."

 

J.B. took one of Mildred's hands and squeezed it tight. "Millie, those people in those chambers died over a hundred years ago. Not a damn thing could be done for them then, or now."

 

"Any idea who they were?" Ryan asked.

 

Mildred went back and starting tapping keys on the keyboard. "From what I can tell, this place was designed with one purpose in mind. Preserve some of the finest leadership and military minds until the conflict was over. It's not the worst plan I ever heard, but as usual the x-factor came stomping in and trod all over the best-laid plans of mice and men."

 

Mildred stood, gesturing toward the units housed inside the glassed-in area.

 

"At some point in time, the power here must've gone off-line. I'd say it happened within days after the bombs fell. Could've been a fluke, but my guess is a techie took particular offense at being left behind to die in the brave new world once the bombs actually started falling, and he or she sabotaged the chambers. Once the damage was done, he turned the systems back on to cover his actions, or perhaps a fail-safe device came online and reactivated. Either way, the end result was the same. I suppose, in retrospect, I should be grateful the same thing didn't happen to me."

 

"Hell of a way to die," Ryan said, peering inside the sterile room. "You think you're going to take a long nap and pull a cheat and, boom, you die a second time in your sleep."

 

"Well, no matter how you look at it, half of them were dead the minute the war broke out," Mildred replied enigmatically. Ryan turned to look at her. "How so?"

 

"Doc, you were asking about those smaller containers, the barrel-shaped ones?"

 

"Yes. What is the concept behind those?" he replied.

 

"In those casks are twelve more cryo subjects."

 

"I don't get you," Ryan said, perplexed. "The twelve smaller tanks held human heads, Ryan, awaiting possible future transplant onto new bodies."