Northstar Rising

by James Axler

  He turned and beckoned the others forward, motioning Doc to keep low.

  "Why? Is this some sort of sport, Mr. Cawdor? Or are we under threat from hostile Indians? I speak something of the tongue of the Mescalero Apaches, you know. I spent time among them only…only the other… once."

  "Krysty. You and me go across the river. Get to the buildings and have a quick recce. We'll call the rest of you over when it's safe. Keep us covered. Questions? No? Let's do it."

  J. B. Dix unslung his Heckler & Koch rifle and steadied it in a notch of the bougainvillea. He switched on the laser-optic sight and scanned the silent buildings across the water. Jak drew his Magnum and waited alongside the Armorer. Doc had lost interest again in what was happening, and he sat down with cracking knees. He picked a tiny orange flower and inhaled the scent with his eyes squeezed shut.

  Ryan led the way.

  There was no way of knowing how deep the river was from its murky surface, nor what kind of vicious life it might contain. Ryan could still conjure up the sight of a man called Bob Duvall, who'd been a relief driver on War Wag Three. He'd bathed in a similar river up near the Darks despite Trader's warnings about caution.

  A shoal of tiny fishes had taken him. The creatures were no more than three inches in length, but two and a half inches of that was teeth. They'd stripped old Bob to the bone before he could make the bank and safety. Ryan could still recall the sight: the whiteness of washed bone and the dangling strips of mauled sinew; the fish still biting at torn slabs of flesh, while the river filled with blood.

  The screams hadn't lasted more than fifteen seconds.

  "Could try to wade it," Krysty suggested.

  "You never knew Bob Duvall, lover," Ryan replied. "We'll go upstream and find a safe place to get us across."

  They eventually came to the tumbled remains of a stone bridge, with decorative little arches, some fallen, some still standing. It wasn't difficult to jump over the gaps, though Krysty stumbled as a piece of loose rock rolled from under her boot heel.

  They followed a track winding near the edge of the forest. Between the grass and the nearest of the buildings they passed something that looked like a gigantic anthill. If the area held ants at least nine inches in length…

  Ryan didn't let his mind dwell too long on that.

  Krysty waved an all clear to the hiding trio across the river, receiving a clenched-fist signal in return from J.B.

  "Want to go inside?" she asked Ryan.

  He shook his head. "Nope. Wait for the others. Scouting ruins like this without taking all the care can bring a load of bloody grief."

  They looked around, checking the blind windows and the hidden angles, but nothing moved. The birds had disappeared, as well as the insects.

  "Look." Krysty pointed with the muzzle of her blaster.

  Ryan took a cautious few steps toward the rectangular stone block that barely protruded above the lush meadow grass. "It's a sign," he called.

  "From the Almighty?"

  "Come again, lover?"

  Krysty grinned. "Let it pass. What kind of sign is it?"

  Ryan had knelt in the grass and was cutting vegetation away with his panga. "Looks like the name of the place. Got a shit-lot of moss all over the letters. I'll scrape some of it....Yeah."

  The others had crossed the wrecked bridge and stood in a half ring around Ryan, J.B.'s eyes constantly raking the buildings ahead of them and the river and forest behind. Gradually Ryan cleared the top half of the sign: "Wendigo Institute of Botanical Research."

  "That's where all of these weird flowers and plants have come from," Krysty said excitedly. "When the nuking came, it must've blown seeds and stuff everywhere. And it's changed the climate in this big valley."

  "There's more," Ryan told them. "Incorporating the Blackwood Center for Chemical and Neurological Research, Military Division."

  "Germ warfare," Doc spit, anger and contempt fighting in his voice. "Swines. Gas and poisons, and blindness and madness. I've seen the vids. Volunteers that tore out their own eyes and devoured their own ripped genitals. Devils!"

  "Sounds like a real good place to move away from," J.B. said finally. "That sort of stuff can hang around a thousand years."

  "Make triple-muties," Jake said uneasily, looking around.

  "There's another line of letters. Below the rest. Smaller. Grass is hiding them."

  Ryan looked where Krysty was pointing. He etched at the lichen with the point of his panga, the steel making a harsh, scratching sound. He sat back on his heels to read the last line.

  "With the Shelley Cryonic Institute—Private. This is it! The place Rick mentioned. More freezies are inside there."

  Chapter Ten

  RYAN'S HIGH EXPECTATIONS began to evaporate as soon as they set foot within the ruined complex. The devastation was worse than it had appeared from the outside. Many of the roofs had collapsed under nuke-waves of shock, and rain and humidity had done the rest.

  The floors were rotted and slippery, and pools of warm brackish water had accumulated in doorways and at turns of corridors. Broken glass cracked underfoot, from the myriad windows and skylights. The interior had been totally ravaged, probably within the first few weeks of the center's destruction. It crossed Ryan's mind to wonder what kind of appalling chemicals had been set free at that time. The botanical complex had created this bizarre tropical oasis within rural Minnesota. So what could the germs, diseases, nerve gases and hallucinogens have wrought?

  The companions picked their way through the linked buildings. The huge pharmacy was ankle deep in a mixture of mossy green sludge and smashed vials and syringes, which had once contained who knew what blasphemous obscenities?

  "No freezies around here," Jak stated, shaking his mane of hair.

  Ryan wiped sweat from behind his eye patch. "Guess you're right. Still, we know the institute was here once. Let's at least try to dig out where the freezies used to be."

  A large hornet buzzed into the room, making straight for Krysty. Her reflexes were good enough to swipe it out of the air. It landed in one of the dirty puddles, swimming and whining in an infinity of crazed desperation. J.B. finally set his boot on it.

  "Hope there aren't too many of that," he said. "I don't see many good hiding places around here."

  The deeper they walked into the complex, the more the buildings seemed to have suffered. They walked out through a broken wall, facing nothing but dozens of piles of variegated rubble and a windowless rectangular concrete blockhouse, which looked relatively undamaged.

  The structure was two stories high, and above the dark green doors they could all read the weathered sign that said: Shelley Cryonic Institute. Private.

  Ryan's optimism inched up a few more notches.

  THE SEC DOORS SHOWED signs of innumerable attacks on their titanium-vanadium steel exterior. Dents, scratches and chips marked the smooth green finish. When J.B. pushed at it, the lock seemed as solid as the day it had been made.

  "Better and better," Ryan said quietly, squeezing Krysty on the arm.

  "What?"

  "If it's still locked and wired into the main nuke-power source of the redoubt, then there could still be freezies down there. Alive."

  The woman shuddered. "No, lover."

  "You mean you can't feel any life inside? That it?"

  "No. I mean, I can't. But that wasn't… I can still remember too well what happened when we tried to thaw out those other poor folk."

  "Rick made it."

  "Sure. But I kept feeling there were a lot of times that he'd mebbe rather not."

  "You think we shouldn't even try?"

  She smiled at him. "Course not. I think you always have to try. Just hope it's not as bad as it was the last time."

  "Got to get in here first," J.B. said practically.

  "You got some fresh plas-ex yesterday?" Ryan asked.

  "Yeah. Take a handful to blow this mother out of the way."

  "Do it." Ryan took Doc by the arm and led him back
among the ruins, to protect him from the blast.

  The old man followed him without making any kind of protest.

  Several minutes later J.B. joined them unhurriedly, as if he were going for an afternoon's fishing in a trout stream. He glanced at his wrist chron as he crouched at Ryan's side. "Ten seconds to go, if the fuses are still reliable."

  Ryan nudged Doc. "Put your hands over your ears, Doc, and open your mouth."

  "Why?"

  "Save you from the bang. Do it."

  The explosion came almost immediately, flat and dulled from being out in the open. Since the Armorer hadn't been able to use the confining force of the plas-ex, he'd been forced to use a lump the size of his fist. As the yellowish smoke cleared away Ryan wondered whether it might have been too much and brought the whole building down.

  But J.B. had gotten it just right.

  The doors had peeled back on their concealed hinges like wet cardboard. The reinforced concrete had been cracked just above the doors, bringing down the faded sign. But the main structure didn't seem to have been damaged.

  "I confess myself somewhat at a loss," Doc said as he peered at the wrecked sec doors in confusion.

  "Someone lost key," Jak explained, which seemed to satisfy the old man.

  "Worth leaving a guard?" J.B. asked. "Bang like that'd be heard from here to the Lantic and back."

  Ryan hesitated. Their party was so small that to reduce its size at all would be to greatly weaken it. And they hadn't seen any signs of recent humanoid life around the region.

  "Stick together," he said, leading the way into the entrance hall of the cryonics center.

  EVERYTHING WAS functioning perfectly.

  It was an uncanny time capsule, sealed in 2001 and not disturbed until this moment. The lights were steady, pitched at a moderate level. The air-conditioning hummed quietly away, keeping the air clean, cool and circulated every forty-eight minutes, as per regulations for United States Government buildings.

  There was almost no dust, and no trace of the green lichen that had seemed to stain everything in the area. They walked across to a desk marked Reception.

  Krysty smiled. "Gaia! I swear I expect to see some nurse or doctor in a white coat come out to ask us what we want and would we mind leaving. It's just like being in an old vid."

  Under a sheet of curling plastic was a staff rota for January 2001 and a red-typed notice giving the details of the final hasty evacuation. Filled with mistakes and showing all the signs of having been circulated at the shortest possible warning, it gave details of how all the automatic servo-systems should be switched away from Manual.

  As soon as the state of emergency ends, the entire center will revert to all normal procedures.

  "Never did," Ryan said.

  "Let's go see if we can find some freezies," Krysty suggested.,

  The building was just about the best preserved that any of them had ever seen. Yet oddly, there was very little there to interest them. It was obvious that the cryonics complex had been fully staffed and functioning right up to the last moment, and that it had then been successfully evacuated. But it was such a sterile environment that nothing personal remained. It wasn't like a hospital with living patients, more like a totally disinfected laboratory.

  The brittle pieces of paper tacked to boards didn't cast any light on what had happened or how people had been feeling. Someone was selling a '94 Chevy, and someone else had some rabbits for sale; there was a dance in the cryo-tech's quarters on the next Friday; the local branch of the Seventh-Day Adventists was holding a doughnuts-and-coffee morning to raise funds for some child with leukemia; a woman named Medina was selling her precious record collection and wouldn't refuse any reasonable offer.

  "The trivia of living and dying," Doc commented. "They shouldn't have planned anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow was the yesterday you worried about— No, I fear that I have that a tad incorrect." He shook his head sadly.

  Ryan caught Krysty's eye and rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. Doc kept showing tiny signs of recovery, then he'd go plunging all the way back down into the abyss.

  "Look," J.B. said, pointing to a sign that hung at the far end of one of the corridors. "Seen it before."

  Ryan remembered it too—in the redoubt where they'd met Rick Ginsberg: Cryo. Medical Clearance 10 or B Equivalent Only Permitted.

  "Down there," Ryan said.

  "Hope the freezies don't go triple-fucking crazy like last," Jak muttered. "Dreamed bad. Real bad."

  Ryan fervently hoped that as well. Remembering the nightmare scenes in the last cryo-bunkers made his mouth go as dry as neutron bones.

  They continued onward until they encountered a sec barrier that would once have been manned by armed guards. Now only the silken whisper of a crumbling spiderweb stretched across the wide passage. Beyond it stood a pair of doors marked Air Lock—Do Not Enter.

  "If there's any freezies left, lover, they'll be through there." Krysty's hand dropped automatically to the butt of her blaster.

  The tension was so strong it could almost be tasted, prickling on the tongue. With the exception of Doc Tanner, all of them were wrestling with bad memories.

  Chapter Eleven

  NOTHING HAPPENED for several seconds after J.B. pressed the manual control on the air lock doors, and Ryan had a momentary, claustrophobic vision of being trapped between the ponderous, rubber-edged panels. Then there was the familiar hissing sound of equalizing pressure and the slight discomfort around the inner ears.

  "Not another jump?" Doc queried with no more than mild curiosity.

  "No," Krysty replied, patting him reassuringly on the arm. "Just going through the doors to see what's there."

  "Who's there? What's there? When's where? Where's where? Men's wear. I swear." He stopped and looked at the puzzled faces of the others. "I do beg your pardon. Slight malfunction of the frontal lobes."

  The second set of doors moved back silently, and they could all taste the chilled flatness of recirculated air.

  "Anything, lover?" Ryan asked.

  Krysty shook her head, her blazing hair swinging across her face. "Not a thing. Whatever lived down here once, lives here no longer."

  "Cold." Jak shuddered.

  "Think we'll find any freezies in here?" J.B. asked. "Complex was secure. Looks like they just switched it to auto and walked away."

  The corridors were spotlessly clean and free from all dust. Doors lining both sides opened onto sparsely furnished offices. A long list of warnings and regulations was posted on a double pair of swing doors at the end of the corridor. Most were linked to the importance of keeping all germs at bay by wearing the right clinical uniforms.

  "Not worth it," Krysty said quietly. "If any freezies leave with us, we'll be taking them into Deathlands. A few specks of dirt before then won't likely make a lot of difference."

  A long way off, dulled by the thick walls, they could just hear the persistent sound of a security siren blaring the warning to guards long, long dead that there were unidentified and illegal intruders within the complex.

  Noncorporeal Section. The sign was above yet another set of doors.

  "What the dark night does that mean?" J.B. asked.

  They all stared at it in silence. Finally Doc Tanner answered the Armorer's question.

  "Without a body, Mr. Dix. A section for people who no longer have a body. A peculiar concept, I must admit."

  "Just arms an' legs," Jak suggested, cackling with delight at the bizarre idea.

  "Or heads," Doc said.

  It was heads.

  They walked into a huge control room, at least eight thousand square feet, that was packed with all kinds of sophisticated monitors. It made the control consoles for the gateways look like kiddie toys. But it wasn't the banks of comp-displays and flickering monitors that caught the eye first—it was what lay behind them, ranged along the back wall, each in its own Plexiglas capsule.

  Heads.

  At a rough count Ryan figured on close to
a hundred: white, black, brown and yellow, and all the shades in between. All had been severed with a surgical neatness across the center of the throat, the lower section submerged in a viscous liquid. Wires and tubes trailed from each neck into a box of light green plastic, which in turn was connected to its own individual control console. Ryan assumed that the consoles would all be linked to the master boards.

  There were old heads with strands of hair pasted thinly across leathery scalps; young faces, with teeth that gleamed in secret, wolfish grins; men with clipped military mustaches; women whose hair was bound up in thin nets to keep it from the preserving liquids.

  "Gaia," Krysty breathed. "This has to be the…the ultimate nightmare."

  "They dead?" Jak asked.

  "Depends on what you mean by death," Ryan replied. He was so disappointed that he could almost taste it. This wasn't what he'd imagined and hoped for.

  "I knew of this kind of experimentation," Doc said, sounding more like himself. "To freeze the entire body wasn't proving that successful. We saw the failure rate last time. Microsurgery meant they could always graft a live neck back onto any convenient corpse."

  "You joking me, Doc?" Krysty asked. "Old head on a new body?"

  "Indeed, yes. Easier, I think. The head and brain are kept wired and nourished. My guess is that the capsules are filled with liquid nitrogen or some such."

  "Sick fuckers," Jak hissed as he went to sit in a polished swivel chair at the main desk.

  None of the others took any notice of him as they walked along the rows of severed skulls.

  Each head bore a coded reference, a string of numbers and letters. Ryan wondered who they were. From what Rick had told them about freezies, they must all have been special. The U.S. government had frozen only people of ultraimportance, and most of them had been scientists—military scientists who had contracted some terminal illness and had been deep-frozen, like so many sides of mutton, to await the new Jerusalem, the age of enlightenment when their diseases could be cured by medical advances.