Chapter Twenty

 

"You've gone far from your roots, Krysty. Far, far away. You may never become at home again. Just a rolling stone, and rolling stones gather no moss. No more gathering ye rosebuds as ye may."

 

Krysty Wroth walked through the garden and felt sick to her stomach. Everywhere she walked, all the green and growing things died. She halted and looked back along the path of destruction she had made through the garden.

 

"Who are you?" she demanded.

 

The voice belonged to a female, but that was all she was certain about. And the words were hauntingly familiar.

 

Ryan and the others walked ahead of her, easily within hailing distance, but Krysty chose not to call out to them. They walked in formation, the way Ryan would have ordered them to, but no way would she have been walking drag at his request. Not unless Ryan or J.B. was severely wounded. They all appeared healthy. Where they walked, the grass didn't die beneath their feet.

 

A wild rose vine brushed against the back of her hand. Immediately, as if in fright, the vine recoiled like a child shrinking from a nighttime monster.

 

"Gaia," Krysty said, turning her face up to the rad-blasted orange sky, "help me to understand."

 

"Gaia no longer hears you," the voice continued in a childish taunt. "You are only fallow ground as far as the Earth Mother is concerned. You have no future, Krysty, and now you have no past. You have only today, and that is but fleeting hours."

 

Krysty cried, feeling the tears course down her face. She called out to Ryan, but evidently he didn't hear her. She was torn, unwilling to continue across the beautiful garden and leave only blighted ruin in her wake.

 

The companions drew even farther away from her, not even bothering to turn to look in her direction to make sure that she was there. Ryan always made sure when they were on patrol that two others watched over one, and the one was responsible for looking over two others. It was a network that had saved their small party a number of times in the past.

 

"Ryan!"

 

Even Krysty didn't hear her own voice this time, though she knew for a fact that she had screamed her lover's name. Frightened now, she ran across the garden, taking huge bounding leaps so she wouldn't trample as much of the greenery. But when she looked back, she saw that a wide strip of the garden was dead anyway. All she had to do was pass over it, not simply touch it.

 

"Your time is past, Krysty," the voice taunted. "All that you've been taught to revere, you've walked away from. Mother Sonja wanted you to build, but you haven't built. You've had a hand in more destruction than anything else. You and your precious Ryan Cawdor."

 

"Not true," Krysty denied. "Sometimes we couldn't fix the horrors, or we would have been killed ourselves. But at timeswe made a difference."

 

"Lies," the voice contradicted her. "You're misremembering events and things as badly as that old cretin, Doc Tanner. Do you know why he forgets? Because it's bastard convenient, that's why. But Gaia doesn't forget, Krysty, and you've broken covenant with her. Time and again you've asked her to help you, asked her to help you help your precious companions. And what have you done for her?"

 

Krysty ran on, feeling her lungs burn in her chest. She shouted to herself, trying to drive the maddening voice from her head. It was no use; she continued to hear it plainly.

 

"Nothing," the voice shrilled, "you've done nothing for Gaia, but you've expected everything in return. Now Gaia will have her own back."

 

A summer storm gathered in the orange sky above in a heartbeat. The wind picked up speed, becoming a raging vortex that sucked cankerous clouds into the area overhead that looked like a collection of bruised boils.

 

Ryan turned then and came running back to her. His face was a mask of concern, given darkness by his black eye patch.

 

Tears streamed down Krysty's face as she reached for her lover. But a white-hot lightning bolt sizzled down to touch her with its caress. The world exploded in a bright flash of incandescence. She dropped, seemingly lifeless, to the ground, unable to control her body anymore. She felt the grass curl away beneath her, pulling back into the ground.

 

"Somebody help me!" Ryan shouted, kneeling beside Krysty. "Mildred!"

 

Mildred rushed over and grabbed Krysty's wrist.

 

Krysty's eyes remained opened. She saw everything that was going on, but she couldn't move. And she couldn't feel. That was the worst thing of all. She knew Ryan was holding her head in his lap, but she couldn't feel him at all.

 

"She's dead," Mildred replied. "I'm sorry, Ryan, but she's dead and there's not a thing I can do about it." Tears welled up in the woman's eyes, then spilled down her cheeks.

 

"No," Ryan said hoarsely. "She can't be dead. I won't let her be dead."

 

"You don't have a choice," the Trader said, stepping up somewhere from behind the companions.

 

Krysty thought it was strange that she hadn't seen the old man earlier, but she'd seen stranger things in the past few minutes.

 

"You take her any farther from this spot, you'd just be carrying a corpse on your back. But you aren't going to leave here without burying her," the Trader said. "None of those people who traveled with me are ever going to be left behind without a proper hole to be covered up in. Won't allow it."

 

Krysty watched, unable even to blink, as Ryan and the others dug a hole for her. She wanted to cry, but even that was kept from her. She prayed to Gaia to have mercy on her, but only silence greeted her prayers.

 

The hole was finished in short time, only things didn't go exactly as Krysty thought they would. They put her in the grave, but they put her in it standing up, like they had dug a well instead of a gravesite.

 

She lay back against the side of the strange grave, looking up at the man she loved and the best friends she had ever made, listening to Doc say words over her as if she really were gone.

 

"I am reminded at this time," Doc said, his white hair whipping around his face, "how we humans have a span of time between two eternities, and into that last eternity we now send reluctantly one of ours, she who was like a flame that could warm and burn and heal. May your emerald eyes light the ways of angels. Gaia keep you in her graces, dear sweet Krysty."

 

Krysty tried to move, but her limbs lay leaden. She tried to shout, but her voice stayed removed from her. Then a wild burning began in her toes. They moved. At first she thought her paralysis was draining away. But that was before she felt her toes elongating and stabbing deep into the rich, dark earth. Her arms rose at her sides, reaching toward the sky above. Somehow the rain clouds had all blown away, leaving only the dreadful orange sky above.

 

Her skin sloughed away, revealing hard bark beneath. Ryan and the others stepped back, their faces dropping in shock at what was happening.

 

And Krysty continued to grow. Her arms split out and became branches that changed the course of the mild breezes blowing over the garden. Her hair became foliage festooned with bright blossoms. Mixed in with her branches, though, were whiplike, barbed appendages that coiled restlessly.

 

Ryan came forward, calling out to her.

 

Krysty felt the hunger building in her, an appetite like none other she had ever known. The barbed appendages slithered through her branches, tracking their prey.

 

She still had a face; she felt the rough bark skin that overlaid it. But she had no voice. She wasn't able to shout a warning to Ryan.

 

The barbs leaped from her, swift as striking cobras. They penetrated Ryan's body, shooting completely through his chest, killing him instantly.

 

"As this man took you from Gaia," the feminine voice spoke, "so shall you now take what you need to replenish yourself for the Earth Mother."

 

Krysty felt Ryan's blood coursing through the appendages to fill her and whet her appetite. She drank hungrily, tasting the salt of his blood, hating every drop, watching Ryan's body turn white in her deadly embrace.

 

 

 

RYAN OPENED his eye.

 

His mouth felt like desert sand, and his head throbbed like someone had slammed it with a thirty-pound sledge. He ached all over.

 

Cautiously, afraid his head might drop from his shoulders if he moved too quickly, he turned to search the mat-trans unit for his companions. Krysty lay beside him, tears running down her temples and blood dripping from the corner of her mouth where she had bitten herself during the jump. She mewled in pain, but he felt it was more from whatever she was imagining than from any real physical discomfort.

 

Ryan sat up with care, feeling his head go spinning around him. He glanced up at the armaglass walls, finding them as white as mother-of-pearl, almost angelic. The room on the other side of the walls was dark, so he couldn't discern any details yet.

 

"You know," J.B. said from somewhere over to the left, "at first when I saw these white walls, I thought maybe this was one jump we didn't make it through. Still kind of crosses my mind as I sit here. Be interesting if we open up that sec door and step out onto a cloud."

 

In spite of the pain crashing through his head, Ryan laughed. Then he regretted it almost at once as renewed pain proved to him that he hadn't been feeling as bad as he could have. The pain got a lot worse.

 

"Heaven?" Ryan asked. "Somebody who's been through Deathlands the way we have? We won't even get visitation privileges."

 

"That's probably true," J.B. agreed. "But you know what?"

 

"What?" Ryan growled, irritated at the way even the Armorer's voice seemed to inflict more pain.

 

"Chances are, nobody we know is going to be there."

 

"I guess that means we won't miss anything."

 

Both men laughed, and Ryan knew that was because they felt all jumbled up inside, and because they were relieved to have lived through yet another mat-trans jump. He ran his hands along his weapons as he glanced around for the others.

 

Mildred lay curled up next to J.B., almost in a fetal position. Jak lay by himself, bleeding from his nose, his eyelids flickering.

 

"You awake, Jak?" Ryan called.

 

"Yeah. Talk too loud."

 

Ryan moved his blurry gaze on, finding Dean sprawled on the other side of Krysty. His son looked like he was breathing okay, but his tan color was paler than normal. He held his Browning Hi-Power in his fist. "Dean?"

 

"Yeah, Dad. Just don't make me move yet." Dean's voice sounded like a dry croak.

 

Doc had thrown up, and a pool of bile sat on the floor beside him and smeared one sleeve of his frock coat. The old man's eyes were open, but only the whites showed, threaded through with red veins.

 

Albert rolled over like a fish flopping on a bank, then threw up a bilious mess.

 

"What a stench," J.B. complained. "We're going to have to get out of here just to get some clean air."

 

The thing that struck Ryan the most was the cold, however. It seeped into his bones, coating the exposed skin. He ran a hand up to his head, hoping that massaging the back of his neck would relieve some of his headache. Then his fingers touched the ice crystals in his hair.

 

He pulled his hand down in wonder and stared at them. He couldn't stare long, because they didn't last long. Hardly had he time to draw a breath than they were gone, leaving only wet traces against his palm and fingers.

 

"J.B., how long have you been awake?"

 

"Didn't check the chron."

 

Ryan ran his fingers through his hair again, finding more ice crystals. He glanced around the metal disks of the mat-trans unit's floor. Little patches of ice gleamed against the vanadium. "Give me a guess."

 

"Ten, fifteen minutes mebbe."

 

"You notice how cold it is in here?" Ryan asked.

 

"Sure. Hard to miss."

 

Fear put a surge of adrenaline through the one-eyed man, giving him the strength to haul himself to his feet. "You think it's getting any colder?"

 

J.B. glanced at him, then noticed the frost on his glasses. "Mebbe, now that you mention it. Just figured it was my blood feeling thin after the jump. Don't always know how bad you really feel until after you start moving around. Kind of wanted to put that off for a bit."

 

Swaying slightly, his sense of balance still affected by the jump, Ryan put his hand against the armaglass. Burning cold pressed against his palm, cold enough to make his teeth ache in sympathy. He breathed out deliberately, watching as a plume of fog spilled out against the armaglass in front of him. "That's not white paint," he told the Armorer. "That's ice caked on the armaglass outside. We're frozen in."