James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem

by Dark E

  "How about it, Mildred?" Ryan asked. "You want to hang back?"

  The woman thought about it for a moment before replying. "I suppose. If it'll help Doc."

  "Your presence will be invaluable," Jamaisvous said.

  "Okay, looks like it's a trio," she said.

  "Tell you what, Silas. Since you're taking two of my people, how about loaning me some of your sec crew in exchange?" Ryan asked.

  Although he didn't look pleased at the notion, Jamaisvous nodded curtly. "I can spare an extra set of hands, but only one. If this creature is indeed developing a taste for human blood, we shall need to be vigilant. El Morro is quite large-in this case, a minus rather than a plus. Luis will accompany you."

  "Good." Ryan looked over the group of friends. "And I am sure the others in Old San Juan will see it as a neighborly gesture."

  "When are you leaving?"

  "Tomorrow, midday."

  "I shall inform him of his new assignment. Our stores here are limited when it comes to weaponry, but please take along extra ammunition and any other survival supplies you think you might need. Where are you starting the hunt?"

  "Don't know yet. Soto said he'd show us the way to where he thinks a nest of chupacabras might be hiding."

  "Then, I will bid all of you a good-night. Dr. Tanner, if you want, we can discuss my plans for you in greater detail in the morning."

  "I am looking forward to it. I shall see you at breakfast."

  Jamaisvous strolled out the way he came.

  "Still don't trust that bastard. Be on guard, Mildred. Especially for Doc."

  "Of course, Ryan."

  "All right. Dean, you'll stay with Doc and Mildred-"

  "The hell I will!" Dean exclaimed.

  Ryan's face fell into a stoic frown and he gave his only son a cold glare.

  "What did you say to me, boy?" Ryan said in his quietest tone of voice.

  Dean knew that tone. Feeling the contents of his stomach turn to stone, the boy stood his ground and repeated himself, only without voicing the annoyance or anger in the reply.

  "I said, 'the hell I will.'"

  "That's what I thought I heard. What makes you think you have a choice in the matter?'' Ryan asked.

  Dean continued to stand his ground. "I'm tired of getting left behind. I can protect myself."

  "Yes, you showed keen judgment back in Freedom," Ryan retorted. Dean didn't look pleased at being reminded of how he'd ended up as a bargaining chip for the flamboyant Beck Morgan, who'd been serving as the mall's baron in charge. Morgan had snatched the opportunity of Dean's being incarcerated to force Ryan and the others to serve as sec men, supplementing his own weak task force.

  "Not his fault. Was mine," Jak said simply. "Dean backed play. Caught us both. Baron let me go work while kept him. Knew you'd feel stronger about kin."

  "I would have done the same for either of you," Ryan replied.

  "Yeah, but baron didn't know."

  "True. All right, then. Mildred, looks like you and Doc are on your own here with Silas. Dean's coming along. And Doc, there's more here than meets the eye... Don't know much about that man. He wants your help, but mebbe what he wants is to make some use of you. Use that could leave you worse off."

  "Thank you, my friend," Doc answered, and lifted a hand in farewell as they moved off. His mind kept repeating Ryan's words like a mantra, "Make some use of you... worse off," a mantra that sent his thoughts tunneling back through time....

  Maryland, Virginia Redoubt, 1999

  CHAN HAD SEEMED unsurprised when he glanced up and greeted Doc, until he had a delayed reaction with a shocked double take.

  "Greetings and salutations, Chan, my boy," Doc replied easily, stepping closer to the seated man. "I see they still keep you on the night shift."

  His approach sent Chan skittering to his feet. The small man nearly lost his footing as the wheeled chair he'd been sitting in rolled away from the desk. Striving to regain his composure, he gasped out, "Wh-what are you doing here?"

  Doc made a waving "bye-bye" motion with his right hand. "Leaving, I hope."

  Chan frowned, taking in what Doc was wearing. "Aw, shit, Doc. Where did you get the sec gear?"

  "I liberated it, just as I plan to liberate myself."

  "Not again. You can't be serious."

  "I am deadly serious," Doc replied flatly, all humor and warmth erased from his voice as he stepped closer to the technician's workstation. "Now, I am hoping you will just pretend I am not here while I borrow your keyboard to access this computer and make a few entries and corrections into Operation Chronos's temporal guidance array."

  "You want to make a chron-jump, Doc? That takes time."

  "Time? Do not speak to me of time, you twit!" Doc said with a sneer, suddenly losing all patience. "What I have no 'time' for is useless debate!"

  "I can't let you do this," Chan replied as he scooted over to the panic button mounted on the far wall of the control room. Such buttons were mounted in flip-top Plexiglas boxes and scattered throughout the redoubt in case of emergency. "There's no telling what you might screw up. Besides, you haven't been prepared."

  "None of us have been prepared," Doc replied. ' 'I sure as hell was not prepared when I was sucked up into your little science project."

  Doc had hoped Chan wouldn't push it to the limit, but knew now he had no choice but to pull the Clock pistol from where he'd hidden it behind his back in the waistband of his trousers under the white sec-man cloak. He shakily raised the weapon and pointed it. While he was familiar with handguns, the more destructive and powerful guns of this future age left him a bit breathless, especially since this was the first time he'd actually threatened a fellow human being with such a weapon.

  "Please, Chan. I beg of you. Let me be. This is my risk and my risk alone."

  "I can't, Doc. You know I can't," the man replied. "Just like I know you can't use that gun. You're not a killer, and the sound of the shot will bring everybody running."

  "Logic, Chan?" Doc asked.

  "And emotion," Chan replied. "An unbeatable combination."

  "This gun could be silenced," Doc pointed out, seeing Chan's face fall for a millisecond as the possibility ran through the man's mind.

  "Why?"

  "Why indeed?"

  "Put it down, Doc. This attempt, it's suicide."

  "Well, I had to try," Doc replied mildly, letting his shoulders slump and assuming the air of a beaten man before coiling every muscle and springing forward, plowing bodily into Chan and crushing him against the wall before grabbing the technician's clothing and pulling him in a sprawl to the lab floor. Having abandoned using the gun, Doc managed to maneuver himself on top of the younger man and he pressed his advantage as best he could, covering his struggling adversary's nose and mouth with one hand while trying to maintain his balance with the other.

  "Ow-damnation, boy!" Doc bellowed as Chan bit down on the fleshy inside of his unprotected hand. Doc pulled away the injured limb, slinging drops of blood from the bite. His mouth and nose free, Chan sucked in a needed gasp of ah- before lunging up and confronting Doc once more. Bending upright as best he could at the waist with Doc's weight on top of him, Chan looked him in the face.

  "You tried to kill me!" the Asian accused.

  "No, I did not!" Doc protested. "I just tried to render you unconscious. If I wanted you dead, you would be shot, you idiot! Get it through your mind, son! I am a desperate man!"

  Chan lowered himself back on his elbows, sighed, and then sprang up a second time, managing to lean forward even farther and whack his foe bluntly in the nose with his forehead. He was rewarded with a cracking noise as Doc cried out in pain a second time. Taken by surprise at Chan's ferocity, Doc slid sideways, staggered by the head butt.

  Chan wasn't in much better physical shape than Doc, but he was more of a natural brawler. The advantage Doc held over the technician was his desperation. He knew if he didn't succeed in this second attempt to go back home, undoubtedly it would b
e his last time unaccompanied into a mat-trans chamber.

  Doc swung a punch with his right fist and caught Chan full in the jaw, causing both of them to cry out in agony from the pain of the blow.

  "Shit, Doc!" the smaller man hissed, a trickle of blood pouring from his mouth where the older man's desperate blow had loosened two of his teeth.

  "I do believe I have broken one of my fingers," Doc replied mildly, flexing his hand even as he prepared to swing another punch with his left.

  The second blow caught Chan in the upper part of the face, above the nose and around the forehead. He fell and landed flat on his back on the floor. Finally, to Doc's relief, the man was unconscious. Doc's hands were singing a duet of pain as he sat at the computer, activating the operating software that was linked with the time-trawl hardware. The only sounds in the room beyond his own two-fingered typing were the usual ambient noise of the computers and a raspy breathing from Chan.

  Then, an alarm Klaxon went off, screamingly loud and disruptive. A metallic voice said, "Warning! Intruder alert within the matter-transfer control room."

  Doc knew the pair of scientists couldn't have returned from their break so soon, and Allan's unconscious body was hopefully still slumbering in his bed, the covers pulled high...so what had tipped them off? Doc looked up, craning his long neck and pointing his chin skyward, and saw the sec camera staring down at him, a small red activation light winking on and off.

  At some point during his fight with Chan, the overhead video camera had seen the straggle.

  Doc supposed he should be glad for his keepers and their lack of subtlety. If they hadn't hit the alarm, he wouldn't have heard them coming in time to try to make a stand.

  He picked up the chair he'd been sitting in and ran over to the control keypad for the vanadium steel security door to the room, swinging up the solid metal legs in a sideways arc and smashing the plastic casing. The liquid crystal display went blank, and there was a smattering of white sparks from the inside wiring of the number keys.

  Having retrieved the Glock, Doc fired a series of bullets into the door's mechanism as well. The pistol had a slight kick, but he had braced himself instinc- tively before pulling the trigger. The gunshots were horrendously loud in the confined area of the control room, but when combined with the shrieking of the alarm, they seemed inconsequential.

  Rolling the chair to the computer, he sat back down and began to type even faster, hoping in his haste he wouldn't make a mistake. Recalling the commands from his scholar's trained memory, which had observed, organized and stored away during previous stints watching and learning in the mat-trans rooms, he was able to bring up the proper entry screen for the time-trawl settings on the computer monitor.

  Sweating now from the exertion and nerves and the double layer of clothing he wore, his brow glistening with perspiration, Doc typed in the destination date as that November day of 1896, along with the exact moment the "eye of God" appeared in the sky before his daughter. While Doc might not have been certain of the precise second, all of the essential information regarding bis trawl was already stored in the computer's data banks, and as such he was able to time his planned reentry as best he could to the very instant he was first sucked away. In essence, he was attempting to superimpose himself upon the scene.

  The date in place, Doc closed down the time-trawl data banks, retaining the translation code the computer had offered that he would need to program by hand for his destination when he entered the gateway site itself. The code was more complex than the ones he'd seen for using the gateways to travel from one location to another. He imagined that extending the process to include the opening up of a temporal doorway accounted for the extra series of numerals.

  The intercom speakers crackled into life a second time, struggling valiantly to be overheard against the whooping of the alarm. ' 'Tanner, this is Welles. Halt what you are doing immediately and open the control-room door or there will be terminal repercussions. If we have to blast our way inside, we might damage the gateway controls, and if that happens, you won't ever be able to go back."

  Doc ignored the voice. "Lies," he murmured to himself. "All lies."

  He raced into the anteroom between the armaglass gateway and the control room, stripping off the security uniform. He held the pistol he'd taken from Allan out from his body for a second, pondering whether to take it along or not, and finally thrust it down into the front of his trousers and belt, hoping the weapon's safety would stay in place and he wouldn't be blowing off the Tanner family jewels.

  Pausing before the gateway keypad, Doc tapped in the needed code, bringing it up from where he'd stored it in his short-term memory and taking grim confidence in knowing he'd remembered the sequence perfectly. The small display on the control pad of the gateway blinked twice after he thumbed the enter key and began counting down. Doc looked away, knowing time was short, and lifted the rubber and metal handle of the heavy armaglass gate to the six-sided chamber.

  The door swung open easily and he stepped inside, pulling it closed behind him.

  The curtain of mists fell down like water through a drain, swirling, twirling, growing thicker and whiter, obliterating all sight and sound. There was a queer sensation of being pressed upon with a giant hand, and his ears popped as if he'd made the transition from a higher to a lower altitude. Doc tried to speak, but couldn't. The last thing he remembered before falling into unconsciousness was how the metal plates on the floor of the chamber felt hot against his cheek, while the other side of his face was as cold as freshly fallen snow.

  Doc AWAKENED to find he was inside another chamber. The code had proved wrong. He hadn't gone back in time, but instead had been shuttled down the line to another one of the multitude of gateways that dotted the United States as part of the project.

  "Fuck!" he screamed, and Doc's current state of mind could be easily guessed by the usage of the vulgarity. The curse was one of the few he rarely, if ever, used, but none other seemed to sum up his situation as perfectly. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

  Then he realized the color of the walls were exactly the same shade as the ones he'd just departed. Yet, he'd been told no two gateways were alike and all had different colors of armaglass. Rather than number them, one of the design engineers had hit upon using colors as a security measure. If someone transported into a chamber and didn't know the location from the color, the jump would be quickly recognized as unauthorized.

  Doc realized he hadn't even left. He was still on the floor where he'd started from, and the stolen pistol was cutting into his stomach something fierce.

  The door of the hexagonal chamber swung open and there stood a squad of the security men, a frowning Allan among them.

  "Dr. Tanner, consider yourself under arrest," one of the men announced.

  A hundred retorts went through Tanner's mind, ranging from "On what grounds?" to "I would rather be under arrest than under attack." He used none of these.

  "Fuck," Doc said again, raising his hands.

  Then, Welles pushed his way through. "You're finished, Tanner."

  "Nonsense. I barely got started before ending up back here in your charming company."

  "We rerouted your signal," Welles revealed. "Chan was able to stagger up and do a bounce back on the chronal-nav guidance computer. You went one way, hit a wall, came screeching back. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars."

  "So, my computation and calculations were correct."

  "Yes. Still, you couldn't wait, could you? We trust you and this is the result. I ought to have you shot where you stand."

  "You would not dare. I am too important to your little project."

  Welles stroked his double chin. "For now, Tanner. For now."

  Chapter Eleven

  "Why here?" Mildred asked. She was taking in the tropical breeze from the open balcony and enjoying the feel of the ah" on her bare shoulders and neck. She was dressed in a midnight-blue summer dress with white collar and trim, a scavenged piece of attire Ja
maisvous had obtained for her from one of the boutiques still intact in Old San Juan. She had refused the gift at first, but then decided she was being silly, and why not spend a day feeling feminine?

  She was surprised to find Jamaisvous alone. Doc was nowhere in sight.

  "Why here?" Mildred asked a second time, turning to face Jamaisvous.

  "Why not?"

  "Rude to answer a question with a question."

  "Then I will attempt a compliment. You look most beautiful, Dr. Wyeth."