by James Axler
He began to weep. Lori put her arms around him, hugging his frail body as he sobbed uncontrollably.
For a moment, everyone avoided eye contact. It was Ryan who broke the silence.
"Best we move."
"Yeah," said J. B. Dix.
* * *
The door to the gateway opened smoothly. The anteroom was filled with chattering banks of computers and ranged equipment that hummed and whirred. Red and green and amber lights flickered. This was the cleanest and apparently best-preserved gateway control room that Ryan had seen.
Above the small panel of numbered and lettered buttons by the side of the chamber door, there was a notice that Ryan had seen before. Up in the Darks, where it had all begun for them.
"Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans."
This time there was no small room between the controls and the actual gateway. There was a massive door of vanadium-steel at the far side of the room.
"Blasters ready," ordered Ryan, taking out the SIG-Sauer pistol, steadying it, his finger firm on the trigger.
Everyone drew rifles or pistols and ranged around Cawdor as he reached for the door. In the humid heat it felt cool to the touch. To the right was a green lever, pointing to the floor, with the word Closed printed on it. Ryan grasped it and tugged it upward, toward the Open position.
When the door was only a couple of inches ajar, Ryan eased the lever back to the neutral position, pressing his good eye to the slit and squinting both ways along the corridor that ran outside.
"Anything?" asked J. B. Dix.
"No. Pass the rad counter."
The Armorer handed him a small device, like a pocket chron, that measured the radioactivity. It cheeped and muttered quietly, showing no more than a minor surface level. There were places scattered throughout the country where it would have howled out the danger. These hot spots were often near cities or towns where there had been either missile complexes or communication centers.
"Safe?"
"Yeah."
Hennings was at his elbow as the door hissed open the rest of the way.
"Fucking hot, Ryan. Help sweat some of Finn's fat."
"Careful the sun don't fucking burn you blacker, Henn," replied the stout little man.
"Cut it, you two," snapped Ryan. "Come on. Keep tight and careful."
Nobody needed telling where to go.
Ryan led the way, as always. Then came Krysty, light on her feet, two paces behind. Hennings was third in line. Doc, with an arm around Lori, was in the middle of the group. Finn was last but one, with J.B. bringing up the rear, about ten paces behind everyone, constantly turning to check that nobody was trying to come up behind to cold-cock them.
The corridors were a pale cream stone, seamless, curving slightly to the right. About four paces wide, and about twelve feet high. Lighting was contained in recessed strips. There were no doors on either side.
"This a redoubt, Doc?" Ryan asked.
"Perchance not, Mr. Cawdor. Not all of the gateways were built within the large storage redoubts."
The corridor wound on. Ryan's guess was that it was going to come a full 360 degrees. Every now and then they passed beneath what were obviously defensive barriers, locked away in the ceiling. And every thirty or forty paces they walked under the cold gaze of small vid cameras, set in the angle between wall and curved roof.
"Nobody?" called J. B. Dix from the rear.
"Not a smell or sight of 'em," Ryan replied.
"There's nobody," said Krysty Wroth, voice utterly decisive.
"Sure?"
"Sure, lover," she said.
In the century after the nuclear apocalypse many parts of what had been the United States were disastrously contaminated by all forms of nuclear poison. Chem clouds, bitter winter, acid rain and lethal doses of radiation had all combined to produce a multitude of genetic mutations. Muties came in all shapes, sizes and forms.
In many cases their names gave clues as to what they were like and how they acted.
Stickies had strangely developed hands and feet that enabled them to grip almost any surface. They were hard to kill.
Sensers were able to see into the future, mainly in a very limited and often inaccurate way.
Doomies could only feel when some disaster was going to happen. They could rarely be specific, but their premonitions were generally correct.
Crazies were... well, crazies were plain crazy.
Krysty was a kind of mutie. Ryan had found it difficult to handle when he first became aware of it. After they'd first made love. She had mixed talents. Her long hair was slightly sentient and seemed to move of its own volition. She could often sense trouble, in the way that a doomseer could. Also, she had unusually keen sight and hearing.
But her greatest attribute was generally hidden. Her late mother, Sonja, had always drilled into the girl the key phrase: Strive for Life. She had come from a settlement called Harmony, which had a reputation as a sanctuary, as peaceful hamlets were called. Krysty had been taught there by her mother, and by two good men, her uncle Tyas McNann and his friend Peter Maritza. They had taught her to respect the Earth Mother, Gaia, as she was called, after the Greek goddess of the earth.
Though it exhausted her, Krysty was capable of disciplining her mind and body to such an extent that she could unleash a terrifying physical strength.
It wasn't just humans that bred muties.
In his thirty or so years, Ryan had encountered just about every kind of genetic perversion that a diseased mind could imagine. Fish and fowl. Insects from the locked rooms of a dying nightmare. Animals and snakes and birds. All distorted into obscene parodies of their original forms.
Ryan believed that this odd circular redoubt was devoid of life. Krysty just confirmed his suspicions. The air tasted clean and untouched. Once you'd smelled death, you never forgot it. Not ever.
It was only about three minutes later that they reached what looked like the main doors. The corridor opened to a room about ten paces square. The walls showed faint shadow-shapes, squares and rectangles, where pictures or notices had been hung. But the entire complex was clear. Whoever had been there when Armageddon came had done a good cleaning. Nothing remained, not even dust. It was all hermetically sealed, waiting for human beings to return.
"There's no control panel," said Finn. "Not like the others."
The walls around the doors were smooth and clean, lacking any kind of opening mechanism. Ryan looked to Doc for help.
"I confess I'm baffled. The individual design of some of the gateways was outside the scope of the Cerberus people."
"Blast it. Got some grens." As usual, J. B. Dix was direct in his thinking.
"I suggest caution, Mr. Dix," replied Doc. "Some of these main entry ports are highly sophisticated. If we were to fail to blow it open, then we might find we had permanently closed the building's only exit."
"So? What do we do?" asked Ryan. "Feels warmer here than anywhere."
"Got to bring fresh air in every now and then. Been going for a hundred years, give or take. So some outside air and humidity leaks in. I am of the opinion that the controls for this might be in some hidden master unit."
"In the big fucking fire!" swore Hennings. "That mean we can't get out?"
"Wait," said Lori, pushing past them all and walking slowly, fearfully toward the dully gleaming great doors.
"What's she going to do?" hissed J.B. "Lean her tits on it?"
"Shut up, Dix," warned Krysty. "Looks like the kid knows something we don't."
About six feet from the portal, Lori hesitated, then took two more long strides forward, her little spurs tinkling.
At first nothing seemed to happen.
Then like a metallic giant unclenching his fists, the doors began to slide ponderously back, letting in a waft of humid air that made all seven of them gasp. The doorway was nearly forty feet wide, and when the doors finally stopped moving, a stretch of corridor, around two hundred paces in len
gth, was revealed. At its end was a steel wall with an ordinary-sized door set in it.
"Come," said Lori, stepping briskly forward, followed by the others with varying degrees of reluctance.
On the right-hand wall someone had neatly stenciled the word Goodbye.
"How d'you know just to walk up to it like that?" shouted Ryan, his words ringing out above the echoes of boot-heels.
Turning her head over her shoulder, Lori answered, "Back door out home. Quint show me. Earth slip and cover it. Look same. Eyes see us and open door. Eyes of dead men."
"Mebbe boobied, girl," called Hennings, running past her, stopping at the door and pushing cautiously at the handle. "Locked!" he bellowed.
"No," said the girl, moving him aside and taking the handle in her right hand. She pulled it slowly toward herself.
It was unlocked.
Henn followed the tall blond girl out into the daylight. Ryan came next, with the others at his heels. He stood on the threshold of the building, staring out. The light was oddly diffused, with shifting green shadows moving in the doorway. He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs, tasting the air, savoring it like a connoisseur.
Ryan Cawdor had visited many parts of the continent. He had walked the cracked avenues of New York City, through the groves of whispering vegetation with poisonous flowers and berries on every corner. Gazed across the oily brew of chemicals to the charred stump of what had once been a mighty statue. Something the locals mostly called Libberlady.
He'd been in the cold and ice of the north and down in the glowing rad-crazy wastes of the southern deserts, where chem clouds flamed from east to west. If J.B. was right, and they were in the southeast, then it was new territory for him.
"Some ozone," he muttered. "Can taste gas. Mebbe in the ground or water. Fireblast, but it's hot and wet here."
Already he was sweating, a trickle of perspiration running down the small of his back. From habit he glanced behind him, seeing to his surprise that virtually all of the gateway was below ground. Creepers twined all about the shallow concrete single-story building, covering it with an impenetrable mat of gray-green foliage. His first guess was that this superb natural camouflage was the main reason the gateway hadn't been entered and despoiled.
"Here we come," said Finnegan, staring out at the unbelievable landscape around them.
Krysty shuddered. Within the deeps of the limitless swamp that stretched all around them, she sensed a slow stirring.
It was not a good feeling.
Chapter Two
The blind woman sat trembling on a large wooden chair, leaning against the high quilted back, arms folded across her breasts. She wore a thin cotton dress, with a dark brown stain on the right hip. Her right hand fiddled with the slim silver knife, sheathed on a cord around her neck. Every few seconds her pink tongue flicked nervously over her dry lips.
All around her, in the lobby of what had once been the Best Western Snowy Egret Inn of West Lowellton, near Lafayette, Louisiana, men bustled about their business. Not one of them looked directly at her. If Mother Midnight had been summoned by their lord, then it was best to avoid any entanglement. The scar-faced woman was notorious as one of the most cunning of the witches. The magicians of the day were known as houngons, and were frightening enough. But Mother Midnight was one of the dark wizards, called bocors.
Cross her, and she might wish you dead. Might touch you on the cheek with a long fingernail and whisper the single word, Thinner. That had happened only a month ago to tall, strapping Stevie King. Slowly but surely, he began to waste away. Within twenty days he died, shriveled to less than eighty pounds.
And now something had gone wrong. All through the bayous the whisper had gone out of a disaster at a ritual. So the baron wished to see her.
Her sensitive nostrils caught the sharp scent of marijuana, and she turned toward the sound of steps, hearing them stop near the chair.
"He will see you now, Mama Minuit."
There was not the usual respect in the young man's voice, and the woman tasted fear on her own tongue. The baron ruled over a vast area of the swamps, all around Lafayette. Apart from the renegades, every soul for fifty miles around paid dues to Baron Tourment. Even the Cajuns, deep within the Everglades, would not cross him.
She stood and reached out a feathering hand for guidance. The Best Western had been the headquarters for the baron ever since she could recall. But he moved from room to room daily, fearing assassination. The hand that gripped her fingers was soft as a girl's, and she could smell scent.
"This way. There is a step, then another."
She wasn't going to ask why she'd been summoned, in case she got the answer she dreaded.
She wasn't going to ask.
"Why does?.." she began.
"He will tell you."
"Oui," she said simply.
The carpet was soft beneath her sandaled feet, muffling their steps. Her sense of direction was excellent, but even she lost track of the twists and turns of the endless corridors. Twice they passed clunking machines that made ice for the baron and his army. Once they stopped, and she heard the thin whining of an elevator. They went up one floor, then along more corridors. They entered another elevator. As her bare shoulder brushed against the sliding metal door, she felt the faint whipcrack of a static shock. Down a level.
She realized that the young man holding her hand was teasing her. Playing some cruel jest by taking her a winding way, making the darkness around her into a bewildering maze.
"How far?"
Ignoring her, he quickened his pace, dragging her behind him.
"How far, friend?"
"Soon." There was a measured pause. "And do not think I am your friend, Mother."
Then, clear and distinct, her ears caught the sharp click of a gun being cocked. She winced in the expectation of the shock of a bullet. But nothing happened. The man at her side giggled, feeling the sudden tenseness of her hand.
"That is not his way. Not a swift death."
"I know it," she replied, her voice shriller than she'd intended.
The last public execution had been around the beginning of the year. An old man who'd stolen a chicken for his family and had been caught by the sec men.
They'd stripped him, his pale, sagging belly almost concealing the shrunken genitals. Poured gasoline over him and ignited it. The flame was almost invisible in the bright sunlight. He'd capered and jigged, his hands beating at the fire. The leader of the baron's sec men, Mephisto, had handed the old man a can of water, which he'd immediately poured over his own head.
The water had been boiling hot.
Smoke and steam had mingled in a deadly halo about the old man's skull. Layers of skin had come peeling off like discarded decorations at Mardy. Careful not to sully his immaculate white suit, Mephisto had splashed his victim with more gas, flicking a match to light it. The cold liquid had streamed over the man's body, over his groin and his legs. The flames, with the more beautiful blue tint to them, had danced all over. The pubic hair had scorched; blisters burst out by the hundreds.
Mother Midnight had seen none of this, relying on one of her followers for a description. But she'd smelled burning hair. Roasted flesh. Heard the mewing and gagging of the old man. The hiss as Mephisto poured more boiling water over the fire.
Flames and water.
Flames and water.
Flames.
"Come on," snapped the young man, jerking the witch from her reverie.
She was pulled into a room and was left alone. She coughed, trying to establish the size and shape, but the sound was muffled, as if large drapes hung everywhere.
"The ritual of the bird, Mama?"
He used the Creole French that she always used in her ceremonies, rather than the anglicized patois of his followers. His voice was deep and resonant with a pleasant amiable tone to it.
"It was bad, Baron. Real bad."
"Everyone leave us."
There was a scurrying of feet and a jost
ling in the doorway as if too many people were trying to get out at once. The woman heard the door close, then silence broken only by a susurrating creaking sound. Leather and wood and metal moving against each other, under tension.
Mama Minuit had never seen Baron Tourment. She had spoken many times with him. Even made love with him. Her body knew his dimensions. All of them.
She knew that he was immensely tall. Three inches over seven feet. Though his fingers were like steel, his body was weak, the knees and hips unable to fully support him. To compensate, he wore a clumsy exoskeleton of steel struts and bindings around his lower torso and legs. His hair was short and curly. She also recalled that his penis was about twice ordinary size, thick and long, like the forearm of a young child. He had thrust remorselessly between her wide-spread thighs, tearing her, so that blood gushed over her legs and belly.
She had never conceived. Nor had any woman he had ever serviced. But she knew that the baron still lived in hope of a son and heir.
"I heard of the red-wing slain. Falling into the flames to perish."
On an impulse she dropped to her knees, conscious of him looming over her. She could smell his body. Musk and soap, mingling.
"I have never seen the like."
"You put out the eyes?"
"Yes."
"And released it clean? It was not harmed? The wings were unbroken?"
"Yes, lord."
His breathing was slow and steady. The only other sound the woman heard was the surf of her own blood seething through her ears.
"It fell to the fire and was consumed?"
"I have never..."
"You have said that."
"Forgive me, lord."
"For what? There was a ripple in our world, and you asked for the strangers' ritual to be performed. It has been done before. And it will be done again. This time, it went... I am disappointed, madame, I am very disappointed."
"It proves what I had said. There had been signs before. When there has been a great tide or the earth has shaken. The insects, the snakes and the birds. All behave in..."