by James Axler
Krysty leaned nearer to Ryan, lowering her voice. "Rick's been ill. Couple of times during the morning his mind sort of slipped and he was talking like he was back to being a kid, out on a summer picnic with his folks. Place called Bear Mountain. He was dozing and mumbling to himself, like Doc does every now and then."
"We always knew that these freezies were only frozen 'cause they were close to dying. I'd still like to try to find the other two cryo centers that he mentioned."
Krysty smiled. "I've already asked him about that, while you and the rest of the good old boys were out playing with your blasters."
He ignored the gibe. "And? What'd he say about them?"
"I took notes in case I forgot it. And he also talked about gateways."
Ryan whistled softly. "Been real busy, lover. Tell me more about gateways."
The news wasn't good. Rick had told Krysty, while he lay resting on his bed, that he could recall that his special area of expertise had been the gateway controls. But like many technical specialities his had been contained within a narrow band. All he knew was how to make sure the controls weren't set for a gateway that didn't exist or had suffered a major malfunction. It was an easy number and letter code, which Krysty had written down.
"Better than nothing" was Ryan's comment. "Always been worried that we might materialize inside an earthslide or under five hundred feet of water. Anything else useful?"
Krysty nodded. "One thing. But this time he's not so sure. There might be an automatic reset if you want to come back within thirty minutes to the last redoubt you left from. He thinks it was universal and applies to all gateways. Just use a gateway less than thirty minutes after you've arrived and you'll be sent back to the redoubt where you started from. But remember that Rick wasn't a hundred percent positive."
"What percent was he positive?" Ryan asked, taking the note from Krysty's extended hand.
"Bit more than fifty. Not enough to stake your life on."
"No. Not to stake lives on. Then again, if we ever needed to try it out, it'd probably be because we were one foot in the grave."
Layton Brennan leaned across the table to interrupt their conversation.
"Ryan, Uncle Edgar says you'd like to come up for some bird sky."
"In your air wag?"
The fat face creased with pleasure. "Wanna try it?"
"Yeah. Always wondered what it felt like from some old vids I've seen."
Layton beamed. "You got some steel, outlander. Most folks in the ville here'd put their pants in for the gravy-chute treatment rather than come up in the Sopwith."
"When?"
The young man looked across at the baron, who was closeted away in his own thoughts and didn't even glance up. Carla Petersen had been listening, and she answered.
"Best make it soon, Layton. Trouble's simmering in Snakefish."
"I'd really like to try the air wag, as well," J.B. said.
Carla put her hand on his sleeve. "John, it's very dangerous."
"It's not," Layton protested petulantly. "Hardly had a scrape. Well, hardly any real bad scrapes."
"When can we go?" Ryan pressed.
"Could get her gassed up in an hour. Take off a half hour after that."
Ryan glanced at J.B., trying to judge his reaction to the idea. But the Armorer's head was turned toward Carla and he didn't look up.
"Yeah. That'd be fine. Where d'you take off from? Down by the gas plant?"
"Sure thing. Sierra Sunrise Park had a big parking lot for wags. I use that. She only needs a short space to get up, up and away."
"It's a deal." Ryan felt an unusual frisson of excitement at the knowledge that he was about to do something that very few people had done in Deathlands in the past hundred years.
He was going to fly.
"CHOCKS AWAY."
"Chocks away."
"Contact!"
Mealy, the Hell's Angel with three fingers missing from his left hand, swung the propeller of the Sopwith 1 1/2-Strutter, bellowing, "Contact!" as he did so.
Several of the other Last Heroes stood around the biplane, watching intently. Ryan was in the observer's cockpit of the old air wag, wearing a pair of blurred goggles, peering out through the dust. He saw Riddler standing next to Zombie, the two men talking animatedly about something.
The leader of the bikers had stayed close to his lieutenant during the preflight preparations. A couple of times it seemed as though the fat brother was going to say something to Ryan, but Zombie was always there at his shoulder. And whatever it was remained unsaid.
"Swing it again!" Layton shouted as the engine coughed and spluttered. A cloud of blue-gray smoke jetted from the side of the engine, but the propeller refused to move.
"Contact!" Mealy yelled, pulling down on the polished and varnished wooden blade. This time the engine fired, hesitantly, then with a full-throated roar. A great jet of wind blew back, and Ryan was grateful for the goggles.
Krysty and J.B. stood watching at one side of the makeshift runway. Lori had chosen to stay back in the hotel to rest. Jak had decided to go scavenging around the ville. Doc and Rick had just arrived, walking slowly together, their walking sticks tapping in unison.
Most of the instruments on the panel in front of Ryan had been adapted and altered from their original condition, and Layton had pointed out to Ryan that very few of them actually worked.
"I read they used to call this flying by the seat of your pants," he had said, giggling. "Well, if that's right, then I sure should be a great pilot. I reckon I got the biggest seat of the pants in the whole of the Deathlands!"
He turned in his seat and gave Ryan the thumbs-up sign. The plane began to roll forward slowly, ready to turn into the wind for takeoff. Ryan relaxed, checking that the straps were safely buckled across his chest.
For the first time he was able to look over at the tumbledown remnants of the theme park. It was in a worse condition than he'd imagined. Ryan knew about these places and their so-called "white-knuckle rides," that people had gone with their children and paid good jack to go on spiraling rides in miniature wags with the main purpose of being frightened.
To someone born and reared in the Deathlands, where every waking moment was tight with potential danger, it seemed a bizarre way of spending jack and passing the time.
"Here we go!" the baron's nephew yelled.
Ryan found that his mouth had gone dry with nerves. Flying was something that he'd always wanted to do, never imagining for a moment that he'd be able to do it. Now, here he was, racing along, faster and faster, the ruined buildings of the Sierra Sunrise Park smearing into one another.
"Fireblast!" he shouted, suddenly feeling the exultation of lifting off the earth.
He was flying.
It was one of the truly wonderful moments of Ryan Cawdor's life.
The wind raced by and the earth opened up under them, the sky tilting at a crazy angle as Layton banked the ancient air wag first right then left. Beneath the Sopwith biplane Ryan could see the ville of Snakefish unfolding like a living map—the houses along Main Street
and the neat gardens at their backs.
They were flying along only a hundred feet above the ground, enabling him to pick out the individual shops and homes. There was Ruby Rainer's rooming house, with her diminutive figure hanging some washing on the line. He saw her shade her eyes as they soared by.
Ryan stared at the shadow of the plane, trailing beneath them across the dry earth. He glimpsed someone walking hurriedly from the front of the Rentaroom, but he couldn't make out who it was. There'd been the glint of startling blond hair, but that was all.
The engine coughed then picked up again. The air wag dipped and climbed, soaring skyward. Ryan wasn't a great lover of poetry, but he recalled a line that Doc had once quoted. Something about a bird.
"Morning's minion, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon." That was it. The lightness of spirit was utterly wonderful.
The engine coughed, cleared, spluttered. Revived again.
Coughed once more. Died.
In the startling quiet, Ryan was aware of the wind as it whistled through the frail struts and bracing wires. Then he heard Layton Brennan's voice, loud and clear. "Oh, fuck!"
"Can't you start her again?" Ryan shouted, glancing over the side and seeing that they were out over the rough landscape of the desert, around five miles from the nearest edge of the ville. And descending fast.
"No chance. Sorry 'bout this. We're going' down, Ryan. Could be hard and bumpy. You'd better hang on real tight."
It still didn't seem to Ryan that there was any real danger to either of them. The air still floated around the plane, and the ground looked safe enough from that height. And they didn't seem to be moving very fast.
Two hundred feet.
Layton was struggling to turn the plane around and head toward the ville, where there was level ground for an emergency landing. But they were losing altitude fast.
The round, jowled face looked back at Ryan, the eyes invisible behind the goggles. The creaking of the leather flying suit was audible in the unreal silence.
"Fuel's run out. Can't have been more than a couple of gallons put in. That bastard Mealy was in charge. He's sabotaged us, Ryan!"
Less than a hundred feet.
It was now obvious that they couldn't hope to reach Snakefish. They were going to have to put down among the dips and hollows of the mesquite desert.
Ryan guessed they were down to twenty or thirty feet. As they dropped lower, their speed seemed somehow faster. And for the first time he realized that they were in serious danger. The lightly built plane, with its frail fuselage, would crumple like paper when they hit. Unless Layton was good enough or lucky enough to put them down easy.
The fat young man could have been good enough, but he wasn't lucky.
"Here we go!" he shouted.
The wind had died away, and there was a faint crackling as the undercarriage brushed through the low scrub. Ryan readied himself, one hand on the release buckle of his harness, knowing that death in any crash could often come from being trapped and burned.
They were moving appallingly fast. Quicker than he'd ever been. Or so it seemed in those last blinking seconds before the impact.
Layton managed to get one of the wheels down, but it dug immediately into the soft sand, making the air wag slew around. The tip of the propeller snagged a boulder and the whole craft lurched sickeningly forward onto its nose.
Ryan's head was filled with the noise of splitting wood and snapping wires. He thought he heard a scream, but it could have come from him.
He was enveloped in darkness.
Chapter Thirty
RYAN HADN'T SLIPPED completely into the stygian depths of unconsciousness.
Despite the crushing force of the impact, he'd managed to brace himself. The straps across his chest held him tightly, making his ribs creak. He found himself dangling, upside down, with something warm and sticky running down his forehead, over his face, behind the broken glass of the goggles and into his good eye, blinding him.
His nostrils were filled with the overpowering stench of spilled gasoline, and he could feel the chill of it, soaking through his pant leg. His right ankle was twisted and held in place by some part of the plane that had been rammed backward in the crash. And he could hear someone moaning.
Apart from that sound, there was a deathly stillness. His ears had been battered and deafened by the racketing of the engine, and only now was his hearing slowly returning to normal.
He became aware of the pit-pat of dripping liquid. With an effort he lifted his right hand and pulled off the goggles, wiping cautiously at his good eye and wondering where all the blood had come from. If it was his, he wasn't surprised that he felt no pain. He knew from experience that the body had some strange and effective defense mechanisms when inflicted with a major injury.
His vision cleared. "Oil," he said quietly. Thick oil had oozed from a ruptured part of the air wag's engine.
"Time to be moving," he muttered.
Now that he could see, Ryan realized that the middle of a tangle of broken wood and varnished fabric wasn't the best place to be if the oil ignited and fired the gas that had splashed around. Even in that dire emergency, Ryan's logical fighting brain told him that there couldn't be that much fuel, since the plane had crashed because of a lack of gas.
He couldn't see anything of Layton, but he could hear the man groaning.
"I'll get you out," he called, but there was no response.
The buckle opened easily, and Ryan clung to what had been the front of he cockpit, swinging himself carefully around and down, dangling for a few moments with his feet scraping the air. The drop was only a short one and he let go, landing and rolling onto his knees. His ankle was cut just above the top of his boot, but he'd been able to pull free without difficulty.
Ryan stretched and straightened, automatically checking himself for any injury. Apart from some stiffness in his neck and a little blood from a cut lip, he'd gotten away almost scot-free.
The plane was tipped on its nose, the propeller splintered and snapped into several pieces. Strips of wire hung to the ground, black against the sun. They reminded Ryan of the clusters of crepe paper that had been pinned to so many front doors of Snakefish, to cry out the homes of the recently dead. The wings on the starboard side of the air wag had been sheared off and lay a few yards from the rest of the fuselage.
Then he saw the pilot.
Layton's immense weight had thrown him forward in the crash, snapping the seat belt like rotted canvas. He'd then pitched sideways, his hips gripped by the collapsing walls of the cockpit. He was pinned upside down, his head only a few inches from the dirt. Blood darkened the front of his flying suit and flowed over his face in a steady, gurgling trickle, crimsoning the earth beneath him.
Cautiously Ryan stepped closer, ready to throw himself clear at the first flicker of golden fire among the wreckage.
Now he could catch words, muttered in a low monotone.
"Sorry 'bout this, Dad. Going down. Hold on tight. Mom, we're going in."
Ryan reached out a hand and pulled away a jagged section of one of the wing struts. Then he could see the injury. The cockpit glass had shattered when Layton's bulk was crushed against it, and some of the shards had buried themselves deep in the rippling walls of the young man's stomach.
Ryan had seen enough abdominal injuries in his thirty-five years or so of living to be able to tell major from minor, serious from terminal.
Layton Brennan wasn't going to be seeing another sunset. Even if Ryan had been able to get him out of the wreckage without worsening the wound, it would take a skilled doctor to patch up the gashes.
Ryan looked around. They had come down in a dip in the ground, and he couldn't see how far they were from the ville, but he could hear the noise of some sort of wag and one of the Heroes' hogs moving his way. Obviously the watchers in Snakefish would have seen them losing altitude, swooping lower and never rising again. But rescue wasn't needed for him, and it would come way too late for Layton.
The muttering faded, and the baron's nephew quivered once and died. The blood continued to drip from his forehead for several more seconds and then that, too, stopped.
"EDGAR'S NEAR a breakdown," Carla said angrily. "All this at once. Too much for him. You've got to do something, John!"
J.B. scratched the side of his nose. "Not that easy. Seems like the Motes have damned near the whole town on their side. We got the firepower. Sure, we could probably chill those bikers, mebbe even take over the ville. Then what?"
"We're moving on, Carla," Ryan said with a quiet finality.
"They murdered Layton and tried to kill you, as well. Nearly made it."
Ryan nodded. "I hear what you say, Carla. But you have to realize that this isn't a game. Not some idle story in an old vid. There's no half measures in real life, Carla."
"How d'you mean?"
"I mean that if I kill Mealy I have to kill Zombie. An
d the rest of the chapter. And the Motes. And Dern. And any of the ville's folk who back them. It'll be full-out bloody war."
The woman sat slumped in a chair in the bedroom shared by Krysty and Ryan. The others were there, except for Lori, who'd gone out an hour earlier.
"So, you're just going to walk away."
"He who doesn't fight but walks away lives to walk away another day," Doc said.
"Just like that," Carla muttered bitterly, standing up and walking to the door. She turned to look at J.B. "I was wrong, John. Wrong about you. And I'm real sorry for it."
"Yeah. Me too, Carla. But there's some things a man just has to ride around."
His last words were overlapped by the sound of the closing door.
LORI STILL HADN'T reappeared by late afternoon. When Ruby brought up a tray of her coffee with some pecan cookies, Doc asked her if she'd seen the blond teenager.
"Mebbe I have and then again, mebbe I haven't, Doctor Tanner." There was a curl to her lips and a leer in her eyes as she spoke.
"I would be most obliged if you could see your way clear to elaborating that statement, my good woman."
"How's that?"
"I mean that I'd like you to cease your petty-minded prevarication and tell me where the girl is!" Doc roared.
"Oh, land o'reptiles! I just heard someone say how she heard someone else talking 'bout how they seen the young lady walking out with Apostle Joshua Mote, down by the temple of the Lord's own anointed ones. But it might just be…"
The words trailed away as Doc stared at her balefully. Without another word she turned and left the room. Doc took his Le Mat from the top of the dresser and spun the chamber thoughtfully. "I believe I'll take a short walk."
"Guess I'll come with you," Ryan offered. "Let's go."
"YOU KNOW what we could find?" Ryan asked as they walked down Main Street
.
Doc stopped midstride, digging the ferrule of his swordstick into the trampled dirt at the edge of the road. "We've known each other for some time, my dear Ryan, have we not?"
"Sure."
Doc stared into Ryan's face, the old man's eyes steady and unblinking. "There are times when I confess that my brain wanders a bit and slips a notch sideways. Or backward. But in general, would you say that you concluded that I was a cretin?"