Deathlands - The Twilight Children

by James Axler

  Chapter One

  The cold fingers of fog were drifting away, out of Ryan Cawdor's brain.

  The one constant thing that someone could safely say about making a matter-transfer jump was that there was no constant thing about making a jump. Sometimes there were dreams during the period of unconscious blackness, gibbering nightmares more often than sweet dreams. Sometimes there was no sensation of time passing at all. The mind closed down and then opened up again like a parched flower during a spring rain, with no awareness that anything at all had happened-except the one certainty that the complex machine, dating back nearly a hundred years, to the last days before the nuclear holocaust devastated the Earth, would definitely have taken you somewhere different. It could be a hundred miles away, or it could be ten thousand miles to another of the so-called gateways that had been built and buried in one of the chain of triple-secure military complexes known as redoubts.

  The trouble with jumping was that you had no control over the destination. All the instructions had vanished during the nuking and the long winters that followed, and every living person who might once have known was long, long dead.

  Most mat-trans jumps left you feeling like someone had sliced the top of your skull off, scrambled the soft tissues inside, then jammed the lid back on. It also churned up your guts like you'd been strapped under a war wag going flat out across forty miles of bad road.

  As Ryan lurched back toward waking, he was aware that this particular jump hadn't been too bad.

  "Some you lose and some you draw," he muttered.

  When he'd locked the sec door on the chamber in the redoubt in Kansas, triggering the mechanism, everyone there had been holding hands, and the armaglass walls had been a virulent shade of cherry red.

  Now his hands were free.

  Several jumps ago something had gone horrifically wrong, and Ryan and his six companions had all ended in different destinations, only getting back together by a mix of judgment and luck.

  Ryan opened his good eye.

  The walls in this gateway were a dull, indeterminate shade of gray, closer to black than white.

  The metallic disks dotted across the floor and the ceiling had resumed their usual color, and the white mist that often flooded the chamber during a jump had vanished.

  Everyone was there.

  Krysty Wroth, next to him, lay sprawled against a wall, her brilliantly red, sentient hair packed tight across her shoulders, crowding onto her nape as though it were trying to protect her.

  His eleven-year-old son, Dean, was halfway across Krysry's lap, his eyes squeezed shut, moaning softly, looking like he'd be next to recover consciousness.

  Nineteen-year-old Michael Brother was doubled over, his knees drawn up in the fetal position, a tiny thread of scarlet blood at the corner of his mouth, as though he might have nipped his tongue during the jump.

  J. B. Dix, Ryan's oldest friend and armorer to the group, was also beginning to stir, muttering in his sleep. His normally sallow face was even more pale than usual. Without his glasses, his eyes looked oddly naked and unprotected. His scattergun was at his side, his Uzi clutched to his chest.

  Mildred Wyeth was next. The black doctor was breathing very heavily, her mouth sagging open, her left hand gripping J.B.'s right.

  The last of the seven friends was Doctor Theophi-lus Algernon Tanner, who was stretched out next to Ryan, flat on his back, his hands folded across his stomach, holding the gold-plated J. E. B. Stuart Le Mat blaster.

  Normally it was Doc who had the biggest problem in using the mat-trans system. Even at the best of times his brain was a touch unreliable, and the pressures of jumping sometimes pushed him a few inches closer to the edge.

  On occasion it had even pushed him completely into the abyss of insanity.

  Ryan looked at the wrinkled face, the silvery stubble showing through the leathery skin.

  It wasn't that surprising that Doc often found h'fe in the last part of the twenty-first century hard to bear.

  He'd been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14 in the year of Our Lord, 1868, and was married to Emily Chandler twenty-three years later on June 17. Had two children-Rachel, born in the second year of their marriage, and little Jolyon, born to the happy parents two years later.

  In November of 1896 Doc had been in Omaha, Nebraska. In a nanosecond he was transported to a laboratory in a discreet and heavily guarded building somewhere in Virginia, one hundred and two years later.

  It was a time of extreme fragility and suspicion in international relations, and the United States of America had poured limitless squillions of dollars into the ultrasecret Totality Project, which explored arcane and esoteric possibilities for future warfare.

  One of its subdivisions was Overproject Whisper, which, in its turn, had spawned numerous other research missions. One, Cerberus, involved the transfer of matter from one location to another, which became known as "jumping."

  Another research mission was called Operation Chronos and focused on time trawling.

  Chronos had some spectacular and hideously disgusting failures. Not many of their targets ever arrived in the year 2000 either physically or mentally whole. Some simply disappeared.

  But Doc arrived-mentally scarred, but he arrived and lived.

  However, they had picked a bad subject. Doc wouldn't sit quiet under their battery of tests and interrogation, insisting on trying by every means necessary to try to rejoin his wife and family.

  In the end, the faceless military scientists got rid of him. They sent him forward in time, to the heart of Deathlands, where he came close to death before being rescued by Ryan Cawdor.

  Michael Brother was also one of the tiny number of successfully trawled victims of Chronos, helped into the dubious future by Ryan and the others.

  In the late 1900s he'd been taken as a baby into a closed-monastic order near Visalia in the Sierras. He'd spent all of his life as an oblate within the serene community of Nil-Vanity, then was sucked away by Chronos into the late part of the next century.

  Mildred was also from the past.

  But time trawling wasn't responsible for her being stuck in Deathlands.

  Born in 1964, Mildred had become one of the country's leading experts on cryogenics and cryosur-gery, the science of medical freezing. Ironically, at the age of thirty-six she'd gone into hospital for routine minor surgery.

  Which had gone wrong.

  She'd been frozen, deeply unconscious, not long before the missiles darkened the skies of the world and civilization came to a grinding halt.

  Not with a whimper, but with a megabang. ' During the exploration of one of the concealed redoubts, Ryan and his friends had come across Mildred, sealed away, her life-support system powered by a long-running and reliable nuke generator. And they had brought her back to the land of the living.

  "Feel sick, Dad."

  "Hang on, Dean. Just try to sit up and keep your head still. If 11 pass."

  J.B. was also coming around.

  His first movement was to fumble his fingers over the stock of the Uzi, then reach down for the Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun on the floor.

  "Not too bad, as jumps go," he said, his voice sounding hoarse. "You okay, Ryan?"

  "Yeah. Wasn't a bad one."

  Krysty sighed and opened her emerald eyes, turning to Ryan and giving him a lazy, jump-stoned smile. "Hi, lover. Once again we made it with nothing worse than a nauseous headache."

  He stood, reaching a hand down to help her to her feet. The heels of her dark blue Western boots skidded a moment, but Ryan steadied her.

  Dean and J.B. were also up, stretching, easing the kinks out of their spines.

  Michael was
coming around, his eyes blinking fast, his head shaking from side to side. "Hey," he said, "I

  don't feel too bad. We did jump, didn't we?" He looked at the sludge-colored walls. "Oh, yeah. They were red last time, weren't they?"

  Only Mildred and Doc were still unconscious.

  "Can't feel much." Krysty closed her eyes and took a dozen slow, deep breaths. "No. Air tastes like it generally does. Flat and... There's a kind of bitter, chemical smell to it, though. Least it's not corpses Like the last place."

  Mildred sneezed, making them all start. "Bless me." She shook her head, the tiny beads in her plaited hair clicking softly against one another.

  "All right?" the Armorer asked, never a man to use three words when two would do the job.

  "Think so." She looked inward for a moment. "Yes. Not too bad. Must be one of the better jumps. I suppose we really have... Walls were that screaming red last time, weren't they? Not sure this gray's much improvement."

  Now everyone was up but Doc, who slept on, oblivious to the six friends gathered around him. Mildred put her index finger against his throat, checking his pulse. "Slow but not that slow," she announced.

  J.B. was examining the walls of the gateway chamber. "You notice this, Ryan?"

  "What?"

  "Sort of careless built."

  Ryan looked more closely and saw what J.B. meant. The sheets of armaglass didn't quite match up, and some kind of sealant had been pushed into the gaps.

  One of the walls was cracked, and two of the ceiling disks were actually hanging loose.

  "Yeah. That's the first time I've ever noticed anything like that."

  "Last year's loving, bitter, still remains," said a familiar deep, resonant voice.

  Ryan turned. "Doc's on his way back out of the darkness," he said.

  "There is no memory of her here." Doc's eyes bunked open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, gradually returning to focus on the walls and the six faces looking down at him. "Upon my soul, my dear friends, I wondered when we seven would meet again. And here we are, but not upon a blasted heath. A bastard wreath. Last teeth." He struggled to sit up, helped by Mildred and J.B. "Have we successfully completed our jump? I see we have, from the change in hue. But I confess that I fed less sickly than is usual at such moments. Perhaps I am finally building a tolerance to such events."

  "We all feel better than we normally do after a jump." Ryan looked around. "If we're all okay to go, we can take a look at where we've finished up."

  He didn't need to tell them all to draw their blasters.

  Coming out of the gateway was one of the potentially triple-red scenarios in Deathlands. But this time was oddly different.

  Chapter Two

  Normally there was a small anteroom immediately off the actual mat-trans chamber. The size varied a little from redoubt to redoubt, but they were usually somewhere around ten feet square, plainly decorated, mostly unfurnished.

  This time it was simply a cave, roughly hewn from bare stones, a dull gray rock lined with narrow seams of shimmering green quartz. The ceiling was less than eight feet high, and the walls were only about six feet apart. Other than a patina of very fine dusty sand, it was empty.

  Michael Brother ran his finger down the stone. "Still got the marks of the chisel," he said. "Looks like it was done only yesterday."

  "Must've been one of the last redoubts to be built before skydark," J.B. suggested.

  Nobody had ever known how many of the massive military fortresses had been constructed during the last years of international tension before nuke-day came and went. When Ryan had ridden with the Trader they'd been lucky enough to come across several.

  One in the Apps had contained several mothballed war wags on which the Trader had based his whole operation. Another, one hundred and fifty miles north

  of the ruins of Boston, had contained enough stored tanks of high-octane gas to keep them in jack for years.

  All that was known was that the chain of redoubts had been a part of the Totality Concept and they'd been constructed under conditions of the utmost secrecy. Despite the whining of the pinko conservation-ists, the government had compulsorily taken over huge sectors of the country, including thousands of square miles of some of the most favored, most beautiful and most isolated national parks.

  The irony was that the eventual war was so sudden and apocalyptic that the redoubts proved to have absolutely zero military significance and most showed signs of having been rapidly evacuated in the last few weeks of what remained of civilization and order.

  By traveling from gateway to gateway, Ryan and his companions had located many more hidden redoubts, in varying stages of preservation or destruction.

  But they'd certainly never come across one that looked like it was still being built.

  Not until now.

  "Look here, Dad!" Dean had gone ahead, through the crudely carved doorway into what would normally be the control room for the entire mat-trans operation. There would be rows of consoles and banks of comp desks, with dancing gauges and flickering dials and lights. All were powered by a hidden nuke gen, pulsing away in the deeps of the fortress.

  "There's something seriously wrong here, lover." Krysty had followed the boy through, pausing and looking around her in disbelief.

  "It's just a hut, Dad."

  The walls and ceiling of the building were bare rock, with the same thread of emerald quartz running through it. But it was barely a quarter the size of the normal control room. There were comp consoles, but only twenty or so, mounted on makeshift tables, some with broken legs propped on red bricks.

  "The air," Mildred said, sniffing. "Not like it usually is, either."

  Ryan breathed in, half closing his eye. The woman was right. It didn't have that dusty flatness that recirculated air normally had. This was bitter and sharp, like a vaporized acid-rain storm.

  There were loops of multicolored cable draped all over the place, with junction boxes and ends of sprayed bare metal. It was amazing that the gateway was still functioning after the best part of a century- though it crossed Ryan's mind to wonder whether this mat-trans unit might actually have been rebuilt within the past few years. If so, it was a staggering thought and opened all kinds of unsuspected possibilities.

  J.B. was walking slowly around, reaching up to touch the rock overhead, examining his fingers. "It's dry. This couldn't have run if it had been damp."

  "These portals to the outer world are unlike any that I've ever seen. They resemble nothing more than an ordinary door on a frontier outhouse."

  Doc was exaggerating a little. But only a little.

  The familiar vanadium-steel sec doors, weighing hundreds of tons and operated by a complex system of gears and counterweights, weren't there.

  There was a single wide door, with an ordinary handle like you might put on a garden shed. It was made from wooden planks, some of them warped and crooked, with a length of one-by-four nailed across to hold the thing together. Once upon a time it had been white, but the paint had dried and flaked, like build-Ings in a desert ghost town.

  The strip lights overhead were harsh, and at least a quarter of them had malfunctioned.

  "I don't get it." Ryan shook his head. "This isn't like a mat-trans unit. It's like some handyman got a load of bits and pieces that fell off the back of a wag and he just put them all together and found he'd built a gateway. But the damned thing worked. Got us here all right."

  "Mebbe we should leave right now. Could be safer." J.B. tapped on the door with the butt of the Uzi. "One-armed baby could knock this down."

  "Why not open it?" Dean asked, "Least take a look outside, huh, Dad?"

  "I guess..."

  The door wasn't even locked.

  The boy simply turned the handle and pushed, and it opened, revealing a dark, constricting passage.

  "Wait," Ryan snapped. "Don't go rushing into that like a double stupe, Dean. Could be anything out there."

  "A most maleficent odor," Doc commented, applying
his swallow's-eye kerchief to his protuberant nose. "Like touching your tongue to tarnished brass."

  Mildred laughed. "Nice one, Doc. Know what you mean. It isn't that deathly medical smell from the other redoubt in Kansas, but it isn't normal."

  Ryan went to the door, pushing past Dean. The place was so small and cramped that there hardly seemed to be enough room for the seven of them.

  Once again, the contrast with other complexes they'd visited was stark. Instead of the wide corridors, with antiseptically clean concrete walls and high curved ceilings, this was more like the mouth of a tunnel built by gnomes. There were no lights and not a sign of the usual ob-vid cameras.