Latitude Zero

by James Axler

  She began to pick her way through the tumbled rubble.

  THE TRAIL TOOK the five companions above the valley, with its insidious patches of patient quicksand. They reached what had been the main entrance to the redoubt at least an hour after Strasser and Mildred had walked there. There was a silver segment of moon floating far above them, giving enough light for them all to wonder at what seemed to be total devastation.

  "I fear that little can have survived within this maelstrom of fallen rocks," Doc said. "And if there should be a freezie center, I cannot believe it would have fared any better. Our journey has proved fruit..

  "What fruit?" Jak asked, puzzled. But nobody explained. Everyone was locked into their own private thoughts.

  Ryan had two worries. If the redoubt had ever had a gateway, could it possibly still be functioning? And a wilderness of concrete and rusted iron like this was made for an ambush.

  "Where's Strasser?" he said, hardly even aware that he'd spoken out loud.

  MILDRED WAS AFRAID to breathe. The thin cord was knotted tightly around her ankles, then brought up her back to bind her wrists together. The whipcord finally was looped around her neck on a running slipknot, so that if she tried to move to get away she would garote herself.

  Strasser had tied her with the religious pleasure of the true sadist, pulling each knot as tight as he could. The thin cord cut deep into her skin, making blood seep around her nails. After she was completely helpless he'd started to fondle her breasts, digging his long nails into the tender skin.

  "I'm a freezie, Strasser," she whispered through dry lips. "Back where I come from I tested HIV positive. Means I could have AIDS. You heard about the AIDS epidemic of 1994? Have you, Strasser? Chilled one person in eleven in Chicago. One in fourteen in New York. One in nine in some districts of San Francisco." His hand stopped moving. "Any kind of sexual contact, Strasser. All it takes. How come you stopped? Afraid of dying if you fuck me?"

  He slapped her hard across the side of the face and moved away from her, curling up against a broken wall of gray stone, deep in the recesses of the long empty redoubt.

  Eventually, despite the cramp and the discomfort, Mildred managed to snatch a few restless minutes of sleep.

  SIX HUNDRED YARDS away Ryan and the others had been readying themselves for the night. Despite the fact that all of them were gut weary, Ryan insisted on a watch.

  "Strasser could be anywhere around here, like a rat in a ruined ville. We got a place here that he can only come one way. Can't overlook us, 'cause we're high. So we do an hour on and four off. Me first. Then Jak, then Krysty, then Doc and then J.B. And then me again. Through the night."

  But nothing happened. Once Ryan came awake, jerked from sleep by the distant howling of the giant mutie wolves. But it was far away, and he quickly slipped back again into the dark, dreamless world.

  Doc touched his shoulder, finally waking him to the first pallid light of near dawn. "I heard nothing and saw less," said the old man.

  Ryan stood and stretched, easing the night's stiffness from cracking muscles. Around him the others were waking, wiping a heavy dew from their coats.

  "Saw an old vid once about a ruined city with lots of temples," Krysty said. ."That's what this place reminds me of. Think we'll find any freezies around here?"

  "Or a gateway?" J.B. added, yawning and furiously polishing his glasses.

  "Most places have the gateway buried deep. Always a chance. Have to get a real lucky ace on the line to find any live freezies."

  "What think Strasser do?" Jak asked, trying to bring some sort of order to his mane of snowy hair.

  Ryan shook his head. "Don't know, Jak. I've been thinking about it. Way I see it, there doesn't look like there's anywhere to run. He's tough enough to go cross-country and work back north. We could do it, if we really had to."

  "I fear that the future looks bleak for poor Mildred."

  "Can't argue with that, Doc. Place

  like this… The bastard could hide up."

  "Good tracking," J.B. said. "All this sand all over. Strasser can run, but he sure can't hide from us forever."

  Ryan looked around in the dawn's pearly light. "Best get moving and see if we can find some way inside the redoubt."

  IT WAS A WORLD of destruction. As soon as there was the first hint of pinkish-yellow light in the east, Strasser roused Mildred, quickly cutting through the cords with his ivory-hilted knife, pasting on his feral grin as she rolled on the floor, moaning with the pain of restored circulation.

  "Keep the noise down or I'll slit your throat," he whispered, kneeling at her side. "Cawdor can't be far away."

  Once she could stand, he was off and running, pushing her ahead of him. He followed some crazed logic of his own, winding and doubling between the ruins, climbing over tottering gantries and bridges of rusting metal, across chasms filled with quicksand. She realized that he was trying to find a way into the complex, but every gate and door was long blocked or fallen.

  He hardly spoke to her, apart from the occasional curse, generally accompanied by a slap or a kick. Once they stopped and he allowed her to sip from a canteen of warm, stale water. The rest of the time they moved at dizzying speed.

  "BASTARD FAST," Jak said, waiting for the others to catch up to him.

  They were on the edge of an open space. All around them rose the wreckage of the massive military complex. Some walls still stood, forty to fifty feet high, some with slitted ob-ports, shadowed slashes of blackness against the sun-washed concrete.

  It made the skin crawl to know that Cort Strasser might be behind any of the windows, squinting through the sniperscope of his SVD.

  The tracks were easy to follow, Mildred's sneakers and Strasser's boots. They were wide spaced, showing the pair was often running. Occasionally they'd vanish on bare stone, but the albino teenager would always pick them up again.

  "Way he's spinning around… we're closing in." J.B. pointed at a deep heel mark, with some water still seeping into it. "Minutes is all."

  Ryan had a sudden sense that an ending was coming near.

  Chapter Forty-One

  BEFORE THEY FOUND Cort Strasser, they stumbled over the remnants of what had once been the cryo-center. Ryan's fears proved right. The buildings hadn't been built as solidly as those of the redoubt, and the effects of the nuking and subsequent quakes had proved totally ruinous.

  Only one part had been freakishly preserved, where a roof had fallen at an angle and had protected one of the inner chambers. The five friends stood by the canted concrete roof, trying to make out what lay beneath it. There was the glint of glass.

  Doc straightened. "I do not imagine anything can have survived beneath that, Ryan."

  "No."

  The disappointment was considerable.

  "Want to go take a look, lover?" Krysty asked, sensing his disappointment. She touched him gently on the arm.

  "Yeah."

  Jak and J.B. remained outside the tumbled building, on watch against the appearance of Cort Strasser.

  "Watch that roof," the Armorer wanted. "I've seen better on pesthole outhouses."

  The fallen roof kept the interior in shadow. Ryan led the way, crawling on hands and knees under the lowest part, managing to straighten after a few feet, looking around him. Krysty was at his side, Doc also standing up, knees cracking.

  "Gaia!"

  The single word said it all. The two other freezie centers that they'd entered had been in good shape, more or less fully functioning. Here there was no suspended life, only death.

  Old death.

  The pods that had held the cryogenically treated bodies were smashed, torn apart by the angry, shifting earth. Cables and life-support systems had been ripped away and lay like a nest of torpid reptiles, all around the cracked floor.

  As Ryan moved he heard a deep rumble, as something shifted far within the complex. The roof creaked, and a light dust filtered down across his head and shoulders. He shrugged it off.

  "Don
't take too long, partner," J.B. called.

  "Be out in a minute."

  Protected from sun and rain and from the attacks of voracious animals, the interior of the large cryo-chamber was surprisingly untouched. But the purpose that it had been built for had vanished in a single microsecond, a century ago.

  Ryan leaned over one of the broken capsules, looking into the shadowed inside, and saw the torn ends of several tubes, and the plastic shroud that had once held a human being in frozen, suspended animation. The body was gone, rotted down to a distorted skeleton, the bones all wrapped in a layer of dark brown gristle and sinew. The flesh had melted away and dried into black dust.

  He reached in and took a handful, holding it out at arm's length and letting it trickle through his fingers to the floor.

  "There's God's plenty," Doc Tanner said quietly. "Such was man."

  It was good to scramble back out into the morning sun.

  "FUCK THIS."

  Mildred stopped, surprised by the sudden flatness in Strasser's voice. They'd reached the far side of the devastated complex, moving through various open spaces between fallen buildings. The ex-sec boss had tied her hands again and had taken the lead, dragging on a length of thin rope.

  Now he'd halted, having just stepped over a low wall. Behind and below him, the woman wasn't able to see what it was that had brought him to a standstill.

  "What's wrong?" she asked cautiously. Over the last hour or so Strasser had become even more taciturn, snarling and muttering to himself.

  "Come and look, bitch!" He jerked on the line so hard that she nearly fell flat on her face.

  Mildred hopped clumsily over the wall and stood alongside Strasser. "Jesus."

  There was nothing in front of her feet.

  Six feet of seamed concrete and then space. The whole building ended as if a gigantic cleaver had sliced through it, carving down past the bedrock, leaving a hacked cliff that dropped sheer and smooth for three hundred feet.

  "I'm not going to fuck around any more. No more running or hiding from that bastard, Cawdor! No, this is it."

  "You going to jump?" Mildred asked, rewarded by a lipless smile of utter venom.

  "This is a good day to die, bitch. Before it's done there'll be some chilling. Mebbe me. Mebbe you. Ryan. The other bastard grave eaters! This is enough!" He pulled at the rope, leading her back over the parapet toward the sprawling remnants of the redoubt.

  "Where we going?"

  "To find Cawdor. And chill him."

  KRYSTY FOUND THE entrance. They'd gone a long way through the sprawling ruins finding more and more of the perilous patches of soft, clinging sand, filling every hollow and dip. Jak had been leading, still trailing the marks of Mildred and her captor, when the flame-haired woman called him to halt.

  "Hold it, there, Jak."

  "What?"

  She looked around her. "I felt… I saw something. In here." She tapped her forehead. "There is a way in, and there is part untouched."

  "The gateway?" Ryan asked.

  "I don't know, lover. Might be. I can feel deeps around us. There's a doorway over…" She looked around and pointed to a shattered corner of a wall. "Just around there."

  It had been the main weapons complex, which meant it had been built with extra reinforcements. And there was a massive sec door, standing slightly ajar. Ryan put his face to the gap and tried to see inside, but it was full dark. The air smelled stale and dusty, but he'd tasted worse.

  He touched the cool metal and it moved, feather-balanced, despite the damage all around it. Ryan eased it open a couple of feet to give them room to squeeze inside.

  There was a crackle of sound and a string of ceiling lights flickered on, showing a corridor ahead, totally bare. On the wall to his right there was a large annotated map of the redoubt.

  He whistled to himself. Generally the mat-trans units would be hidden far below the safest and most secure areas of the redoubts. If the gods smiled on them, then they could be all right.

  "Looks promising," he called over his shoulder. "I'll take a look at this plan. Keep watch for Strasser out there."

  "Want us to come in with you?" Krysty asked, peering around the sec door, her hair catching the fire of the sun.

  Ryan moved out to stand in the doorway at her side, looking around the ruins of the big redoubt, watching, from instinct, for the glint of light off metal or glass. But he could see nothing moving. Away to the south there was the stump of a tall tower. A frail bridge ran from it to a similar tower, dominating the only part of the fortress that they hadn't yet moved to explore. As far as he could see, the space below the rusted gantry was brimming with leprous yellow sand.

  "Leave one on watch and the rest can come inside with—"

  The crack of the bullet interrupted him.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  STRASSER PUNCHED Mildred in the stomach, bending her over like a cringing courtier in an old Holly vid. She puked as she fell to her knees and fought for breath. But the skull-faced man wasn't finished. He swung the butt of his rifle around in a hissing arc, smashing it against her shoulder, narrowly missing his target, her head, in his rage. Then he kicked her, his boots thudding into her ribs.

  Mildred rolled sideways, trying to protect herself, struggling to breathe.

  "Bitch! Bitch! I had him straight down the cross hairs! Put him down and the rest'd fucking run."

  He stopped as quickly as he'd started, turning away from her and slinging the rifle over his shoulder. Strasser glanced through the window, but the wide square below the ob-port was deserted. At the impact of the bullet, a yard to the left of Ryan's head, they'd all taken cover.

  "You really came close to the big chill, bitch," he said, steadying his breathing. "Knock into me like that and—" He shook his head. "Now the game's all changed."

  "LEAST WE KNOW Skullface's still around," J.B. commented, flattened against the inside wall of the redoubt. He pushed back the brim of his fedora and looked around, smiling a little to himself. Now that the trigger had been squeezed, the Armorer was at home in his own world.

  Ryan looked around the corner of the door, trying to work out where the shot had come from, quickly deciding it could only have come from the farther of the two towers. From there Strasser could dominate the whole area, ready to pick off anyone that tried to make a move.

  The one thing that genuinely puzzled Ryan was how his old enemy could possibly have missed him at that range. He knew the Russkie rifle and what it could do. The shot couldn't have been more than two hundred yards, maybe less. Yet the bullet had gone well wide. The most likely explanation had to be that Cort Strasser was injured, damaged a wrist or a shoulder when his raft crashed over the fall.

  Behind him, Doc was looking at the main sectioned plan for the redoubt. "This brings back so many splinters of my poor old memory," he said. "It appears that the fortress was abandoned before Armageddon and the opening of the last seal that brought the silence. The silence between heaven and earth."

  "Is there a gateway shown, Doc?" Ryan asked.

  "Project Cerberus," the old man whispered in his deep, resonant voice. "A part of the Overproject Whisper. A small segment of the brutish, terminal Totality Concept."

  "Doc," Ryan said, smothering his own impatience at the old man's rambling.

  "Yes?"

  "The gateway. Is there anything on the map showing a gateway?"

  He continued to look for any sign of Strasser, while behind him Doc was tracing his bony forefinger around the plan.

  "Ah, here we are. 'Mat-trans Department. Closed red. Entry forbidden to this section to all but B sixteen cleared personnel.' That's it, my friends, and it appears to be almost directly beneath us. Just two, no, three floors below."

  "Better check," Jak said, starting to move toward a closed door to their far right.

  "Better chill Strasser first," Ryan replied.

  "Yeah," the teenager agreed.

  MILDRED COULDN'T decide whether any of her ribs had been broken.
Breathing hurt, but the blood that flooded her nose didn't make it any easier. She coughed and spit out a clot of red-black blood onto the pale stones near her face.

  "Shut the fuck up," Strasser growled, turning from the ob-slit to face her. "I'm trying to think."

  "What's to think about?" she asked. "One way or the other it's time for the last train to the coast, isn't it?"

  He sighed and knelt down, touching her face, his voice like a fingertip over black velvet. "Yes, madam, I think it probably is. But I'll not make that ride alone."

  He stood up again, the riding crop dangling from his belt. There was still no sign of movement from below him. Slightly to his left he could see the spider-thin bridge of tilting iron over the drop to the quicksand lake.

  "Yeah," he muttered. "That'll do fine."

  The voice was familiar and echoed around the long-abandoned fortress. Ryan, just within the heavy sec door, could hear every word.

  "Cawdor! I know you're there. I'm real tired of this running."

  "What're you suggesting, Strasser?" Ryan shouted, still hoping to bring the other man out into the open, where he could put one of his scarce caseless rounds through the angular skull.

  "You and me. End it. One time pays all. What d'you say? You got the balls for this, Cawdor?"

  J.B. touched Ryan lightly on the shoulder. "Agree. Get him in the open and I'll chill him. Best way to end it."

  Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess so."

  Krysty was on his other side, looking at his face in the semidarkness. "No. No, lover. Please don't do it!"

  "What?"

  For a moment he thought the woman was going to slap him.

  "Don't fuck with me, lover!" She spoke with cold, bitter anger. "You're going to go out and face him, aren't you? Just because he challenged you. Said you didn't have the balls for it. Why do it? Do what J.B. suggests and end it safe."