by James Axler
"It's all right." Glaring at Ryan, Kate knelt by the old man.
"Need a piss."
Ryan moved away, looking out toward the cave entrance. "Thought I heard something."
"Goats. Only thing comes here. None of the sec men ever leave the compound. Too scared of the trackies up here."
Cody staggered to his feet, rubbing at his crotch. "Best go outside," he muttered.
"Don't go too far so's anyone could see you from the mines," the girl warned.
Silhouetted against the morning light, he tottered to the entrance of the derelict mine shaft, paused in the opening and looked suddenly to his left.
"Who the fuck're—" he began.
With a single sweeping blow the fourth of the sec-hunter droids opened his throat from ear to ear.
Chapter Sixteen
THE APPARITION WAS so unexpected that Ryan nearly froze. For a couple of seconds all his fighting reflexes failed him, and he simply stood there by the girl, watching Cody's violent murder.
Both the droid's arms whirled in a blur of gleaming, chromed action. The blood sprayed out in a fine mist, splattering over the walls of the old mine shaft, puddling across the uneven stone floor.
Cody was being, quite literally, cut and pulped to pieces. Shreds of flesh were being sliced away, while the hammer and pincers on the other arm were pounding and ripping, tearing out hanks of hair and slivers of skin and cloth.
All the time while the droid was busy at its murderous work, its head was turned toward Ryan Cawdor, its red eyes like glowing coals in the half-light.
The only thing that was holding the old man's body erect was the ferocity of the sec hunter's attack.
"Cody!" the girl screamed, starting to move toward the struggle.
Ryan, on an impulse, reached out and grabbed her by the arm, the coat tearing, but enough remaining to keep Kate back.
"He's dead," he said, pushing as much urgency into his voice as he could.
"No, he's still…"
But even as she spoke, the robot, its techno-sensers aware of the lack of life in its victim, stopped the flailing attack and stood, just for a moment, quite motionless.
The flayed corpse, so cloaked in its own blood and mangled skin that it was unrecognizable, slumped to the ground with a sodden, finite sound.
"Oh, Cody," the girl said in a soft, whimpering voice, still tugging against Ryan's retaining fingers. "Oh, no."
The robot blocked off the entrance to the cavern, its strange metallic silhouette throwing a foreshortened shadow toward them. Its head was nodding gently up and down, as though it were mentally approving what it had done.
Ryan didn't move, whispering to Kate, his hand tight on her arm. "One way and that's back. You want to stay and die, fine. If not, come with me. Now!"
He turned and darted toward the blackness of the runnel that opened up at their backs.
The one-eyed man didn't even bother to look behind him to see if the girl was following him. He could hear feet pattering close at his heels, and that was good enough.
From what Ryan had already seen of the ancient sec-hunter droids, he knew that they had impressive, terrifying strengths.
But they also had some major weaknesses.
Paramount among those was their inability to move fast over any kind of rough terrain and their lack of mobility in a close-combat situation.
What he didn't yet know was how good the robots were in conditions of almost total blackout.
Once he was away from the spilled daylight, the darkness shrouded him. Instinctively Ryan moved to the side of the passage, touching the rough-hewn stone with his right hand as he ran, moving slower as the floor sloped more steeply downward.
"Coming after us," Kate panted.
Ryan had already heard the familiar grating sound of the clawed feet scraping over raw stone. But in the tunnel all noises were magnified and distorted, and it was impossible to tell how far behind the droid was or how quickly it was moving.
The tunnel seemed clear of fallen rocks or debris, meaning that Ryan and Kate could move along reasonably quickly.
And so could the droid.
THE NEXT HALF HOUR was a nightmare. Even time itself became distorted.
All that Ryan knew was that he was traveling fast through pitch darkness. Not a glimmer of light showed anywhere, the only sound his combat boots pounding on the floor of the sloping, winding passage, Kate's feet close behind him.
On the couple of occasions when they stopped running for a moment, Ryan heard the remorseless noise of the droid tracking them through the shafts of the old mine.
Once they ran through water, as cold as death, splashing up over their ankles, deepening, slowing them down. It eventually came up over their knees before the passage wound its way upward again and the water receded and vanished.
Once the passage opened into a vast chamber.
Ryan felt the sudden change in the atmosphere around him, the sense of space surging above his head where there'd once been the low roof of the shaft. He could feel the wall meandering off to his right with a draft of cool air to the left.
He stopped, uncertain which way to go.
Kate bumped into him, gasping with the shock of the impact.
"What is it?"
"Passage is changed. We're in some kind of much bigger room. Higher."
"Yeah. I can feel it. What do we do?"
"Have to go around the wall. Risk going across and we get lost. Can't tell how big it is. Could be around fifty steps. Could be five hundred. Could be it has all kind of pits or traps in it."
"Sure. Droid's closing on us."
"I hear it." By now Ryan had figured that the robot had some kind of infrascopic night sight built into its controls.
The danger was that they would fumble their way around the perimeter of the cavern, while the sec hunter would simply stride clear across it.
As they picked a cautious route around the perimeter of the open area, they crossed three side passages. All were lower and more narrow than the main one they'd been following, and there was a feeling of dead air in them, as though they might finish in a dead end.
The idea of being trapped in the bowels of the mine, with the sec hunter closing steadily and inexorably, was something Ryan didn't much care to think about.
"Can't we hide? Never find us."
"No, Kate. Pick us up by body heat or our breathing. Even the heartbeat in this silence. Got to keep on going."
The draft was stronger from the far side, and Ryan finally felt a fourth side passage. This time it was much wider, and he could almost see a glimmer of light in the darkness.
"It's closer!"
The tone of the droid's feet had changed as it reached the large chambered cavern. There'd been a moment's hesitation as the creature considered its options, methodically balancing and weighing each one until it reached a thoroughly logical conclusion.
It picked the straight and direct route across, moving fast toward its preprogrammed target. Ryan Cawdor.
"FRESH AIR," Kate said. "We must've gone clean through and out the other side of the mountain."
"No. Don't think so. More likely we've circled. Lower, I reckon. These are still old workings. No smell of mining going on."
They'd stopped about two hundred yards along the passage. From the sound behind them, the droid had only just left the large chamber, but it was undoubtedly closer.
"Come on," Ryan urged.
"Exhausted."
"Stay here and die. I won't save you. Can't save you. I stay and I get chilled as well. You got to keep moving."
"Please."
There was a break in the girl's voice, but Ryan ignored it. The Trader used to say that if you tried to be kind to someone you often ended up being downright cruel.
"So long," he said.
"Wait for me."
He turned around carefully, knowing how easy it would be to totally lose his bearings. "This isn't a fucking game, Kate. I won't wait now or anytime. You u
nderstand me?"
"Yeah."
The killer robot sounded much closer.
AHEAD OF THEM, Ryan could see a very faint gleam of light, a shimmering, silvery phosphorescence, like the moon under water.
He turned, pausing, and detected a flicker of metallic movement.
"Fireblast!"
"It's closer."
"If it had any sort of laser blaster, we'd have been dead meat an hour ago. Got to get in near to do its work."
"What're the lights?"
"Got to be good news, whatever they are. Must mean people and ways out."
"MUSHROOMS," Ryan spit with disgust. "Bastard mushrooms."
The fungi covered a patch of the mine shaft at least a hundred yards long. They ran up from some stagnant pools of dark water, a few inches deep, spread over the slightly curved walls and up over the tunnel roof.
Each individual mushroom was less than a half inch across, pot bellied, all glowing with a cold, unearthly light.
Kate glanced back, seeing the strange mechanical stride of the robot, now extremely visible.
"Can you shoot it?"
"Can try if worse comes to worst. Bit like attacking a war wag with a spitball."
The gap was less than eighty paces.
Over the past few minutes the floor of the passage seemed to have become smoother, making it easier for the droid to narrow the distance between them.
Ahead was a sharp corner.
Ryan set off, Kate close behind, running at a steady jog that he hoped might open up a lead for them again.
Around the corner, the distilled light from the fungi was weaker, but still bright enough for them to see that the shaft grew wider again, running straight as far as they could make out.
"Big pool in the middle," the girl panted, "right across. Hope it's not deep."
The surface of the water was totally flat, like oil, but mat. It didn't reflect anything at all, as though it had sucked all the light into itself.
It was about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of them.
Veins of colored minerals streaked the walls, silver, speckled pink and ultramarine. And a deep, rich yellow.
The strange pool was only fifty yards ahead.
When Ryan realized what it was he slowed down, holding his arm out to warn the young woman.
"Stop," he said.
"Why? Can't be deep water."
"Not water at all. It's a fireblasted hole!"
Chapter Seventeen
"A HOLE?"
Now that they were almost on top of it, the young woman could see that Ryan's guess was correct.
There'd been some sort of subsidence, perhaps into a lower level of the old workings, or perhaps an earth shift at the time of the saturation nukings a hundred years before. It was surprisingly smooth-sided, as though cut with a keen-edged blade.
On either side of the passage a small section of the lower wall had also crumbled away, making it impossible to get by.
There were no convenient pebbles to lob into the hole to find out how deep it was, and no light to penetrate more than a couple of inches into the blackness. It might have been only six inches deep.
Then again, it might have dropped vertically for a gut-churning thousand feet.
Ryan's guess was that the chasm might be nearer the thousand feet than the six inches.
The more important statistic was the distance from one side of the hole to the other. Eight feet wasn't very much, about three good strides for a man of average height.
Less than one hundred inches.
At the time that the world blew apart, the long jump record was held by Andy Burne of the United States, and it stood at thirty-two feet and one inch.
Four times as wide as the hole in the tunnel.
Right at that moment, eight feet seemed awfully long.
"No," Kate said.
"Up to you." Ryan looked behind them, hearing the steady, rhythmic pounding of the droid's feet on the stone.
"Too far."
"Sure." He ignored her, taking a half dozen steps back up the passage, toward the sec hunter.
"What're you doing, Ryan?"
"Stay here you get chilled. You saw what the techno-mutie did to Cody. Ripped him into a bloody pulp. Not me."
Kate glanced into the pale light that silhouetted Ryan, saw the remorseless stride of the robot toward them.
"Can't," she whimpered.
"So long."
He powered himself into a short sprint, digging in, knowing that the coat and everything he carried would hinder his jump. But there just wasn't the time to strip off and throw his gear across before risking the leap.
For one dreadful splinter of frozen time, Ryan thought that the young woman was going to try to grab at him as he made the jump.
But she didn't.
He didn't risk taking off on the brink, in case the rock there was loose or undercut. Nor did he look down, keeping his eyes fixed on the far side, looking for a good landing.
He cleared the chasm by five or six feet, dropping as his feet hit, going into a rucked shoulder roll. He landed upright and turned to watch Kate.
Face paper-white, fists clenched, she was standing rooted to the spot. Her head kept moving, peering over her shoulder at the droid, then back to the hole and then up to Ryan's face.
The sec hunter was less than fifty yards from her, its pincers opening and closing, the knife blades rubbing against each other with the soft whisper of death.
"What's wrong?" Ryan yelled, making Kate jump. "Got a chill wish, you cowardly fucking bitch!"
It did the trick, rousing her from the catatonic terror that kept her paralyzed.
"Catch me, you bastard!" she shouted back.
The robot was thirty yards from the young woman, arms stretching out to welcome her into its embrace.
To make the jump, Kate had to actually move toward the advancing nemesis, and her nerve nearly deserted her.
Ryan had stepped to the edge of the hole, glancing down into it, feeling the bone-cold chill of the damp air that seeped up from the depths below him. He braced himself, ready.
It was going to be a close call.
Kate gasped at how near the droid was.
Twenty yards.
She took three strides toward it, then her nerve failed her and she spun around, made a stuttering start and flung herself into space.
Eight feet wasn't so long. When you had the chromed angel of death at your heels, it was an infinity.
Ryan's brain told him Kate was going to fall short of safety. Survival meant letting her go down, rather than risk his own life.
At the same time his reflexes pushed him into a crouch, arms out, fingers reaching for her.
Kate's mouth was gaping in a soundless scream of utter terror. She reached for him with both hands, stretching, desperate.
Once before Ryan had been in a similar situation, when he'd been much younger, and he'd tried for both hands then.
And a good friend had slipped from his grasp and died. In Deathlands, living often depended on lessons learned.
Ryan ignored Kate's right hand. He reached with his own right hand and grabbed at her left sleeve, fingers tightening like steel bands into the material. His left hand clamped on Kate's left forearm, giving him a double hold.
There was the sound of cloth ripping, but the coat sleeve held and he was able to take her weight. Kate's legs dangled into the void, her feet kicking against the stone walls, scrabbling to find a purchase. And failing.
"Don't struggle," he hissed. "Just keep still and limp. I'll get you up."
Ryan was half kneeling, his own weight thrown backward. He gritted his teeth and heaved, straightening his back, using the strength of his thighs to pull her up. The young woman came out of the hole like a cork from a bottle, knocking him over, falling on top of him.
"Thank…"she began.
But Ryan wasn't interested in her gratitude. His eye was filled by the looming figure of the killer droid, now only a couple of r
obotic steps from the brink of the drop.
Maybe it would just keep on walking, its attention so fixed on its prey that it never noticed the shadowed hole.
But its makers were too clever for such an obvious mistake.
It paused, marching on the spot, its red eyes turned downward.
Ryan watched as it slowly extended a foot over the drop, like a nervous bather testing the warmth of the water. There was a whining sound, as though extra gears were being engaged, and the leg began to protrude, telescoping across the hole. The claws also lengthened, becoming at least nine inches from base to needle tip.
Kate was breathing fast, gasping with shock. "Can it…" she began.
"Hope not. Too far."
The droid's leg reached out, balanced delicately, moving a little from side to side. Its head was also turning, as the creature examined the options available to it. It finally decided that it was beyond its capabilities to get across the hole.
The leg retracted and the sec hunter stood motionless, ruby eyes fixed on Ryan.
Its programmer, probably dead for a hundred years, must have had a macabre sense of humor. Thwarted of its prey, unable to get at Ryan, the android slowly lifted its right arm, raised the center of its knife blades and gave him the finger. It then turned and slowly strode off in the opposite direction, vanishing into the silvery glow of the phosphorescent mushrooms.
"And fuck you, too," Ryan said, bolstering the SIG-Sauer.
Chapter Eighteen
IT TOOK SEVERAL minutes for Kate Webb to recover sufficiently for them to carry on through the old mine shaft.
After the robot had stomped off into the blackness, the sound of its feet echoing for more than a minute, Kate sat and wept, her shoulders shaking.
Ryan watched her for a moment. "It's gone," he said. "Can't get at us."
"What if it finds a way around?" she sobbed.
"We'll be long gone. Come on."
She stood, wiping her eyes on her torn sleeve. "Yeah. And thanks for…"
But Ryan was already moving down the passage into the darkness.