by James Axler
Krysty caught it and handed it back. “Thanks, Mildred. I don’t think we can afford to turn around because of me.”
“Don’t worry.” Mildred smiled, put the lighter on her lap and proceeded to start packing a joint. “Just let me know if you experience any negative effects.”
“Hey!” Hammersmith shouted. “You forgot something!” With that, he reached into a pack on the floor beside his seat and pulled out a plastic bowl with a resealable lid. “You’re gonna need these, too!”
Krysty took the bowl, popped open the lid and peered inside at what looked and smelled like two dozen chocolate-chip cookies. “Are these real chocolate chips?” There was a tinge of amazement in her voice.
“Never you mind!” Hammersmith said. “But you’re gonna need those when the munchies set in!”
“Where did you get them?” Krysty asked. “They look homemade.”
“What do you think I was doing in my office last night?” Hammersmith asked.
“But we didn’t smell any cookies baking,” Ricky commented.
“How is that possible?” J.B. chimed in.
“Trade secret, dipshits.” Hammersmith snicker-wheezed.
“Why won’t you tell us?” Ricky asked.
“Because you’re dealing with science power, rug rat.” Hammersmith whipped around and jabbed a finger at him, sneering. “Get used to it.”
Then, cackling like a lunatic, he whipped back around to face forward, pounding the wheel with the heel of his hand as if he was drumming along with a song on the radio.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Doc was in shock as Ankh led him through the underground complex that the shifters called the core. As a repurposed redoubt, the place was very familiar in terms of layout and design. A few times, as Doc rounded a corner or looked into a particular room, he felt a twinge of déjà vu at how much it resembled other redoubts he’d visited.
There were offices, armories and garages, much as there were in other redoubts, as well as barracks, bathrooms, dining halls and an auditorium. When the tour finally ended on the third level down, things got really interesting…and cold. Doc had to pull on his frock coat against the chill.
Doc was led to a nondescript door at the end of a long featureless corridor. Ankh punched a code into a numbered keypad, then the door slid open.
“This is it.” Ankh stepped aside and gestured for Doc to enter. “Your laboratory, Dr. Hammersmith. I think you’ll find that everything is exactly the way you left it.”
Doc knew he should enter the lab warily, but he couldn’t restrain his curiosity. He ambled through the door without another word.
Looking around on the other side, he did not at first realize the significance of the place. He was too dumbstruck by the level of the mess that surrounded him on all sides to wrap his head around the obfuscated details.
Cables hung from the ceiling and sprawled across the floor like enormous tangles of spaghetti. Equipment squatted around the large room in various stages of disassembly, with open panels revealing ruined circuitry, jumbles of wiring, broken probes and scorched and shattered computer monitors.
Ceiling lights flickered, and paper printouts fluttered in the breeze from the open door. Books and notebooks were stacked and spread open on counters, crates and flooring. Not to mention, there were spare parts, hand tools and garbage everywhere, scattered hither and yon with seeming abandon.
Plus, the place reeked of rotten food, urine and what he knew was marijuana. Someone—the real Hammersmith or maybe the shifters—had to have smoked a lot of marijuana in there.
Doc was just about to comment on the smell when the configuration of the room finally got through to him. Frowning, he counted the amber-and-green walls. Armaglass walls.
Six. The room was hexagonal.
“Dear God,” he muttered. His gaze fell to the floor, but it was too cluttered for a clear view. He nudged aside a fat cable with the toe of his boot, then also pushed away an open bucket full of screws, nuts, nails, bolts and tacks.
What he saw in the space he’d cleared made his heart beat faster. It took everything he had not to react visibly and clue in Ankh about the importance of what he was looking at.
“Did you find something, William?” Ankh asked from the doorway.
“No, no, not yet,” Doc replied, even as he stared down at the silver disks set into the floor. “Just taking a quick mental inventory.”
The truth was, though, that the armaglass walls, hexagonal layout and silver disks set into the floor all added up. Finally, he knew what he’d stumbled into, and how it might be connected to the Shift.
If only he knew what to do about it.
Behind him, Ankh walked into the room. “Helpers are available, if you like. Until now, we refrained from touching anything in here in case it was important, but you’ll find our people aren’t afraid of hard work on behalf of the new empire.”
“Fine, fine.” Doc made a point of looking away from the disks in the floor. Turning, he folded his arms over his chest and raised his eyebrows at Ankh. “Then, I suppose I ought to get to work, eh? Don’t want to keep destiny waiting.”
Ankh cocked his head for a moment, as if something seemed wrong, but then he seemed to shake it off and smiled. “Be sure to let us know if you need anything, Doctor. Just tell whichever attendant is assisting you, and he or she will see to it that you get what you need.”
“Don’t want to hold up the project,” Doc said cheerfully, though the truth was, Ankh didn’t expect him to work miracles with the equipment. His work in the lab was actually intended to be a delaying tactic, and then a distraction while power was seized from Exo.
But Doc’s new secret was this: he might actually be able to use what was in that room to his advantage. He wasn’t a whitecoat with mastery of predark tech, but he did know a little about the room. The good Lord knew, he’d used it often enough, along with Ryan and the others.
Because the truth was, he was standing in the middle of a mat-trans chamber, much like the ones that had transmitted the companions all over the Deathlands and beyond.
“Aren’t you going to ask what happened in here?” Ankh kicked a metal pipe, sending it clanging into the base of some kind of diagnostic device. “How it all got to be such a wreck?”
Doc looked back at the doorway, making sure no one was lurking and listening in on their conversation. “I assumed it was Hammersmith’s doing. My doing, I should say.”
“It was his top assistant, actually. Heir to the throne,” Ankh said. “There was an accident, and she was badly damaged.”
“This is the aftermath of the accident?” Doc asked.
“The aftermath of her temper tantrum when she took off out of here. She was completely out of control, let me tell you.”
“So she ran?”
“For a while.” Ankh nodded smugly. “But now she’s come back to the fold. She wants to make amends for what she’s done.”
“I see. And how will she do that, I wonder?”
“By infiltrating and betraying your comrades,” Ankh said. “She has already set them up for the slaughter.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
When the war wag stopped for a bathroom break, not a single soul stayed inside the vehicle. They’d been on the road for four hours by then, and everyone needed to stretch his or her legs.
Fortunately, they were finally out of the Devil’s Slaughterhouse, so the fauna promised to be less lethal. And according to Hammersmith, they were less than half an hour from the core, so it was the perfect place to stop.
In fact, everything seemed to be going smoothly. They were making great time, and the wag was holding up. Hammersmith’s attitude was still cranky, but his driving had evened out somewhat. And in spite of their proximity to the core, Krysty wasn’t having agonizing seizures, just moderate headaches. The pot had really made a difference in her pain level, and it didn’t seem to be causing any negative side effects.
But as well as things were going, Jak
couldn’t relax even a little. Union’s warning continued to resonate in his head. Some kind of threat was imminent, one she wanted to save him from, though she’d told him to keep the rest of the team in the dark about it.
Jak’s tension over this warning had increased with each passing mile. Of course he had to tell his companions, but he had to do it without Union seeing him. That had been impossible on board the wag, but at least he had a shot at it when Hammersmith stopped for a break.
As casually as he could, Jak split away from Union. He saw Ryan circling a nearby hill and couldn’t follow in case she was watching, but then he skirted another hill and doubled back. He caught Ryan just as he was finishing relieving himself and approached with a finger over his lips, warning him to keep quiet.
Ryan scowled as he zipped up his pants.
Jak hurried over and whispered, very aware that he wouldn’t have long until Union came hunting for him. “Union said threat on way. Offered save me, said not tell anyone.”
“What kind of threat?” Ryan whispered.
Jak shrugged. “Won’t talk ’bout now. One personality broke ranks but silent since.”
“Okay.” Ryan nodded. “We need more information. We need to interrogate her—at least draw out the friendly personality and get more info out of her.”
“Draw out? Good luck. Is three against one in that head.”
“But one ally is still better than none.” Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer. “Let’s go round her up.”
“What about others?” Jak asked.
Ryan shook his head grimly. “They’ll figure out what’s happening soon e—”
Suddenly, a great thunderclap of an explosion erupted nearby. Ryan and Jak exchanged a quick look that said it all: there’s that threat she was talking about.
Then, without a word, the two men charged around the hill and headed in the direction of the blast, which also happened to be the general vicinity of the wag.
* * *
RICKY HAD BEEN walking toward the wag when the artillery shell came down beside it.
Hearing the telltale whistle of the shell, he instinctively turned and ran, but he didn’t make it far before impact. The resulting explosion threw him forward, facedown in the sand, then showered him with shrapnel and debris.
His back and ribs hurt, but at least he was in one piece. He’d been just far enough away, with the wag between him and the explosion, that he hadn’t become a fatality.
But that could change fast. Because shells were like cockroaches: if you saw one, more were always close behind. Not to mention whoever had fired the round.
The relative peace of what had been an uneventful drive to the core had just gone out the window.
Listening for more artillery whistles, Ricky scrambled to his feet and quickly assessed the immediate area. The wag lay smoking on its side, the passenger compartment blown open by the shell. Luckily, from what he could see, no one had been blown open with it.
In fact, the other members of the group were sprinting in from behind the nearest hills. Krysty and Mildred ran together, weapons in hand. J.B. charged around another hill with his Mini-Uzi in one hand and his Smith & Wesson scattergun in the other. Hammersmith and Union, however, were nowhere to be seen.
As for Ryan and Jak, they raced from behind a hill on the opposite side of the bombed wag, heads instantly whipping toward the swath of visible horizon up ahead.
Ricky followed their gazes and immediately got the same burst of adrenaline he always got right before a big fight. There in the distance, he saw something he’d seen a few times during his young lifetime, during his time in the bloodstained Deathlands.
It was an army bristling with weapons, every blaster barrel pointed in his direction.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Doc stood in the middle of the wrecked mat-trans chamber and looked around glumly, unable to decide where to begin.
Technically, all he had to do was clean up a little and pretend he was repairing and upgrading equipment according to Exo’s bidding. Ankh had told him that was exactly what was expected of him—that he put on a good front long enough for Ankh’s plan to come to fruition.
But Doc wanted to do so much more. He was surrounded by devices that, if operating correctly, could enable him to escape. As much as he hated the side effects of travel by mat-trans, he knew it could whisk him away to another location far from the Shift.
The mat-trans could also make escape possible in a less direct way. If tampering with the mat-trans had given the Shift its metamorphic properties, perhaps further tampering would provide some degree of control over the region’s transformations, just as Exo hoped. Such control might stir things up enough to give Doc the diversion he needed to break away from the shifters.
There was just one problem with these possibilities: Doc lacked the mastery of the tech that he needed to make them happen.
Stepping over scattered parts and debris, Doc made his way to the control panel set into the wall. Clearly, it had been modified; he could tell that much by comparing what he saw with his memories of other mat-trans control panels. Sections of the panel had been pulled apart, circuit boards reconfigured and rerouted, new dials and switches wired in. A digital readout had been attached above the main panel, and a keyboard had been stuck to the panel’s front edge.
It was all, oh, so familiar, yet very different from all the other mat-trans panels he’d seen. If only he understood the purpose of the modifications and how to manipulate them.
Perhaps, it occurred to him, guesswork would be sufficient. Maybe fiddling with these new controls would cause enough mayhem that he could get away without being stopped.
Or it might blow up the mat-trans and kill Doc in the process. That was possible, too.
Doc reached for one of the jury-rigged dials, then hesitated. “Hell’s bells.” Should he wait and see how Ankh’s plan played out instead? Though Doc had zero faith that Ankh was any more benevolent than Exo, perhaps he would at least keep his word to help Doc regain his freedom.
Doc pulled back, realizing it would be better to err on the side of patience, but then, on impulse, he shot out a hand and tweaked a single dial, turning it a few degrees clockwise.
He held his breath, but nothing happened. There was no detectable change in any of the equipment in the room, and the fizzing in the back of his head didn’t get any stronger.
Doc turned the dial again, with the same result, then flipped one of the jury-rigged switches. Still, nothing changed.
Next, he pressed a red button in the upper-left corner of the modified keyboard. Again, there was no change in the mat-trans chamber.
At first. After a moment, though, lights in the floor flashed to life. The bright circles they cast were visible around the silver disks—those that weren’t completely buried by debris.
At the same time, a shrill squealing erupted throughout the room, so high-pitched and loud that it drove Doc to cover his ears with his hands. Then the digital readout above the control panel lit up, displaying the number 30 in red digits. As Doc watched, the number counted down to 29, 28, 27, 26, 25…
Heart racing, Doc jabbed the red button on the keyboard again, holding it down hard. The countdown, squealing and lights all shut off at once, leaving him surrounded by silent stillness once more.
A moment later, he heard someone clearing his throat from the direction of the doorway.
Turning, Doc saw an unfamiliar face, a crimson-skinned shifter male wearing gray coveralls and an ancient black baseball cap with a yellow letter P embroidered above the bill.
“Hello?” Doc attempted a casual smile and tone, as if there’d been no squealing, lights and cryptic countdown a moment ago. “May I help you?”
“Other way around.” The mutie’s voice was low and raspy. “Ankh sent me. I’m your assistant now.”
“I see.” Doc nodded. “And your name is…?”
“Fixie,” the shifter said. “I fix things.”
Doc narrowed his eyes, wonderin
g how much the taciturn mutie had seen and heard before announcing his presence. “And you just got here, I take it?”
“More or less.” Fixie shrugged. “Where do you want me to start?”
Doc decided against pressing the issue. Interrogating Fixie about what he’d witnessed might just make matters worse. “That depends. Do you have any experience with the technology in this room?”
Fixie tipped back his baseball cap, then took a long moment and looked around the mat-trans chamber. Finally, he nodded slowly and returned his gaze to Doc. “You might say that. Did some work with the previous Dr. Hammersmith back in the day, until I got fired.”
Doc tried not to twitch, though Fixie had just identified him as not being the real Hammersmith. It was obvious, of course, though Doc had tried not to worry much about it; as long as deluded Exo kept calling him Hammersmith, it seemed the other shifters were prepared to accept it.
“How did you get fired?” he asked evenly.
Fixie stared at him for a while as if sizing him up. “Because I tried to talk him out of activating the modified device while it was pulling from an intermittent power source. I warned him it could cause sporadic and unpredictable effects.”
Doc was surprised to hear so many words tumble out of Fixie’s mouth and further surprised that he seemed to have some technical expertise. “But he ignored you?”
Fixie shrugged. “Too much wacky weed. That or too much ego. Mebbe both.”
“Okay.” Doc hiked a thumb at the control panel he’d been fiddling with before Fixie’s arrival. “Over there. Let us start with that.”
Fixie pursed his lips and nodded. “Good choice.” Then he gave Doc a funny look out of the corner of his eye. “What should I call you anyway?”
Doc thought for a moment, then smiled. “Theo.” It was something no one called him anymore, a name abandoned in the mists of history. Maybe now, as he tried to take charge of his own destiny for a change, was as good a time as any to blow the dust off it. “You can call me Theo.”