Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  SURVIVAL INSTINCT

  Remnants of humanity have managed to regroup after a global nuclear showdown that decimated the planet. But life in Deathlands is a far cry from actual living. And the survivors must believe they’ll find something better, because surrendering to the inhospitable forces of a nuked world means giving in to death. Or worse.

  HELL FREEZES OVER

  Fear and human depravity permeate the frigid air in a once-dynamic Alaskan city. Ryan Cawdor and his group of survivalists go on red alert the moment they set foot on the forbidding tundra, but regardless, they find themselves rounded up by cannibal coldhearts. The companions quickly discover there’s a fate much worse than becoming food. Dangerous new experiments are taking place in a long-abandoned military base and, in the bitter heart of the frozen North, new horrors reach out to poison their hope for a better tomorrow.

  Their clothes dusted with snow, twelve ragged figures emerged from their hiding places in the trees

  Each man was dressed in the thick layers that the frozen climate demanded and each one held a weapon, which included semiautomatic pistols and a pair of Kalashnikov AK-47s with their stocks removed. At the back of the group, Ryan saw Jak, held tightly by a man dressed in rags with a pair of night-vision goggles visible above his scarf. Jak stood limply, as if dazed.

  “You want to try it?” the man with the goggles snarled. “Be my guest. All the more food for us after we’ve chilled you.”

  As the man spoke, two more figures clambered down the slope from the copse of trees, carrying the slumped forms of Krysty and the girl in their arms.

  Outnumbered and with his colleagues’ lives in danger, Ryan ordered his team to stand down.

  Ricky looked agitated, shooting Ryan a furious look. “We can take them,” he whispered.

  Ryan shook his head no. His people were at risk, too much so for him to start a firefight at such close quarters. For now, they would stand down.

  And wait for a better opportunity to arise.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Freedom Lost

  Way of the Wolf

  Dark Emblem

  Crucible of Time

  Starfall

  Encounter: Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords

  (Empire of Xibalba Book I) Dark Resurrection

  (Empire of Xibalba Book II) Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Palaces of Light

  Wretched Earth

  Crimson Waters

  No Man’s Land

  Nemesis

  Time...is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion.

  —H.P. Lovecraft &

  E. Hoffman Price, Through the Gates of the Silver Key, 1932

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  This much he knew for certain: traveling through time always came with a cost.

  Don Nectar knew all too well the cost of sailing passage on time’s stream. He had lost so much to get here. He had lost everything he had ever been.

  He had been a family man once, with a wife and children, a house that was more than just walls; a house that was also a home. He recalled these things only vaguely now, they seemed so distant to him that it was as if he was recollecting only a story he had been told, and he could no longer put the faces in place.

  This much he knew for certain: his wife had been beautiful and he had loved her very much.

  But the details—it was like trying to discern a painting through the fog. The details, the subject matter, all of it lost in the blur, nothing now but an abstract pattern of darkness and light. That was an apt description of his whole life—no details remained.

  He couldn’t remember how the journey through time had begun, nor where. He suspected that he had been forced on the journey, for why would a man give up so much—his whole life—for so little reward, simply to visit Hell? Perhaps it had been a punishment, he pondered, perhaps a sentence for some great ill he had been responsible for somewhere in the great forgotten past.

  Perhaps he had killed a man.

  How would he know? How could he remember? Even if he was told, would the details stick in his memory or would they simply fade away as everything had faded away, a broken thing that no longer made sense, a watch that could no longer tell the right time no matter how many times one wound it.

  Don Nectar looked at the equipment before him, as he had a thousand times before. The days became weeks, and, conversely, the weeks days. The time machine would take him home, would fix the things he had lost from his Swiss-cheese memory.

  This much he knew for certain: each time he engaged the machine, it sliced another chunk of his fractured soul away.

  He would cry sometimes, when he realized how far he still had to go, when the futility of the whole exercise seemed to bear down on him with too much weight, some bastardized Atlas struggling beneath the weight of all of muddled, muddy time. Each attempt that he ran the time machine it spit debris into the atmosphere, shards of ruined time that clung to the surrounds in craters, like pockets of some gas that was heavier than air.

  Things had stepped through the time window
, too, things that should never have been, things that lived and fed and consumed. Things that made no sense outside the sense of the distilled time he had captured and purified. Don Nectar had studied the things. He was a man of learning, an authority on several disciplines of science; though he could no longer remember where he had obtained such knowledge, where he had studied. The creatures lived as parasites who fed on time, consuming the frayed edges where his bold experiments had caused pockets of chronal collapse, where the chrono spasm wouldn’t cease.

  The facility had been built to survive that, of course. When Nectar had arrived, the place had almost burned down, its walls alight from the trauma of his time shunt. He had survived, running out into the snow. And, later, he had damped down those fires with the snow, finally putting out flames that had raged for days. He felt unable to leave then, so he turned his attention to the machinery, employing all of his extensive knowledge to repair it, all the while struggling to remember just who he had really been. He felt like a shadow, a thing without true substance, just a mockery of a man. He had lost so much.

  Once repaired, the machinery could open windows into other eras, provide smooth passage through the time stream, navigating its ebbs and its flows. The colossal generators towered before him, their low humming shaking his body within the radiation suit, feeling like a young colt yearning to break free of its reins. He gave the wrench another quarter turn, watched as the displays ran through their start-up sequence again, the towering generators shuddering against the thick gloves of his radiation-wear. The dials whirred in slow rotation, each one following the proscribed path that would assure the traveler a clear window into the past. It hadn’t worked yet. But it had to, it had to.

  This much he knew for certain: to return through time was the only goal he could have. To have any other would be to dilute his purpose, and without that determination the project would never be completed and he would die here in the Deathlands, having never seen his wife again. His mind was already too altered to allow himself the luxury of being distracted. He needed to focus to survive and to succeed in his escape through time.

  Each endeavor, each time he got closer, it brought a little more disruption, turning the region all around him into a pockmarked mass of broken ages, of time spilled from the stream. To think...that time was a physical thing, to be molded and shaped. And dumped.

  The voice called to him through time, his wife calling him home for dinner, as it had called every day since he had arrived in this place all those years-weeks-seconds ago. But there was another voice this time, one that spoke with the fractured resonance of the time displaced, just like him. He couldn’t mistake that sound, it was the sound of his own voice when he caught himself cursing aloud the time machinery. The words seemed to filter to him from a distance, weaving through the air and into his skull, a poisoned arrow targeted straight for his brain.

  For a moment, the lost time traveler known as Don Nectar cocked his head, trying to hear through the protective layer of his radiation suit. The words were lost. It was like trying to comprehend someone through the taffeta layers of a dream. But the sense of the speaker was clear in his mind’s eye. It was the missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that would turn the machine on its axis. He felt sure of it.

  This much he knew for certain.

  Chapter One

  It felt like a gut punch, the kind that the bullies would hammer into Ricky’s stomach when they had cornered him in the back alleys of his hometown of Nuestra Señora. He slumped to the floor, grimacing against the pain, his arms clutched to his sides. J. B. Dix had told him that it could be bad, but he hadn’t realized how bad it would be. Ricky Morales was sixteen and, unlike his six traveling companions, still a newbie when it came to journeying via a mat-trans.

  “The kid gonna be okay?” Ryan Cawdor asked as he reentered the mat-trans unit, checking the safety on his SIG-Sauer blaster. He was a tall and imposing man with broad shoulders and a mane of curly black hair that fell to his collar. His bronzed face bore a long scar down the right-hand side, white and hairless, that ran from the corner of his eye all the way down to his mouth. His missing eye was masked by a black leather patch, the thread fraying a little along its stitching. He wore a heavy fur coat over a dirt-smeared shirt and dark undershirt, combat pants and scuffed boots, more durable than stylish. Ryan wore one other item, too, an item he had carried with him since the companions jumped to a redoubt in Canada called a Diefenbunker. There Ryan had traded his beloved Steyr-SSG scoped rifle for a Steyr Scout tactical model which was now slung across his back.

  The son of a benevolent baron on the East Coast of the Deathlands, Ryan had grown up in luxury, only to have that life cruelly snatched away when his psychotic brother, Harvey, had tried to expunge the bloodline so that he could take the barony of Front Royal as his own. In the resulting struggle, Ryan had lost his left eye to Harvey’s blade, and he had been set on a path to travel the Deathlands, eventually finding a home with Trader and his war wags.

  Over the years since, Ryan had amassed his own family of sorts, one whose ties ran deeper than blood and who traveled together searching the Deathlands for a better tomorrow. Ricky Morales, a handsome Puerto Rican kid from the port of Nuestra Señora, was the newest addition to Ryan’s companions, and the only one of them who hadn’t become accustomed—yet—to the devastating effects of mat-trans travel on human physiology.

  “I vouch that the young gentleman will be fine,” Doc Tanner opined as he stood protectively over the youth’s clenching body. Doc was a tall man, scarecrow-thin with a shock of gray-white hair on his aged head. His face was lined, and his penetrating blue eyes spoke of years of wisdom. His clothes, like his manner, were throwbacks to another era, a gentler time when life ran at a slower pace. He wore a black frock coat, a white shirt that was stained with grime and sweat, narrow breeches that clung to his rangy legs and black knee boots.

  Though he appeared to be at least sixty years old, Doc Tanner’s history was far more complicated than that. Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on Valentine’s Day, 1868. He had married his beloved Emily in 1891 and they had lived in wedded bliss for five years, raising two children—Rachel and Jolyon—before Doc’s life changed forever. In 1896 he was time trawled from his own era by the twentieth-century whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Proving to be a difficult subject, Doc was hurled forward in time to the Deathlands. The effect of this forced time travel on Doc had been twofold—firstly, it had prematurely aged him, transforming his body into that of an old man; and second, it had fractured his mind, leaving him with a sometimes tenuous grip on his sanity. Over time, and with the patient help of Ryan and his other companions, Doc had managed to regain much of his sanity—or at least, as much of it as any man who had lost so much could—and become an invaluable asset to the survivalist band.

  Inside the green-and-yellow-striped armaglass-walled mat-trans chamber, Doc was leaning on his ebony swordstick, peering at Ricky as he shuddered on the floor. “The lad’s strong, my dear Ryan,” Doc assured the one-eyed man with a knowing smile. “He has the constitution of youth of his side.”

  Ryan nodded, pushing the magazine of 9 mm Parabellum bullets into the housing of his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster. “Lot of good it’ll do him if he can’t stand up.”

  “I...can stand...fine,” Ricky mumbled, struggling to pull himself up off the floor.

  Doc reached down, taking the youth’s arm in his strong grip. “Slowly, son,” he advised. “There is no need to rush.”

  Ryan watched as the handsome young man brought himself to his feet. He was struggling to stand up straight, sucking at his teeth as he drew each breath. Mat-trans jumps were bastard-hard on a man’s constitution, Ryan knew, plucking at the guts and cross-wiring the brain’s synapses so that a person was beset with a deluge of nightmarish visions. The other companions had become either used to or resigned to it by now, after dozens of trips. While jump nightmares and nausea were nothing to get compl
acent about, Ryan and his companions knew that they would pass in time. Ricky, however, wasn’t as experienced. Ryan stepped over, placing one arm around the youth’s back to keep him on his feet.

  “I’ve got him,” Ryan told Doc.

  The teenaged Ricky Morales had traveled with Ryan’s group for only a few weeks. Ryan was still adjusting to having the kid on his team, another person to worry about when the bullets started flying or muties came sniffing for blood. Ryan had lost companions before, and the most heart-wrenching loss had been that of his own son, Dean, who had been a few years younger than Ricky when he had been spirited away by his mother, Sharona. A recent encounter with Dean had ended badly.

  Ryan’s other companions had been less affected by the trauma of the mat-trans jump. Jak Lauren, who had vomited, as usual, had already exited the chamber along with Ryan’s lover, Krysty Wroth, and his most-trusted ally, J.B. When the one-eyed man had given the all-clear, they had gone in search of supplies on this floor of the military redoubt.

  The remaining member of the group, Dr. Mildred Wyeth, was sitting just outside the door of the mat-trans, running an inventory of the medical supplies she carried in the satchel at her hip. She wore camou pants and a drab olive shirt, and her hardy jacket hung from the back of her seat. “If you all need a proper doctor,” she called through the open door, “you just shout. I’m doing a two-fer-one flu jab this week, special offer, friends only. Get ’em while they’re hot.”

  Doc smiled at her as he stepped from the mat-trans chamber. “You’re in a chipper mood, my good Doctor,” he observed.

  Mildred shrugged, her beaded plaits clacking against one another. “What can I say? No one likes a grump.”

  Doc nodded, accepting her point.

  Like the old man, Mildred was a time traveler of sorts, albeit one who had spent a full century in the sleep-induced coma of cryogenic freezing. In the twentieth century, Mildred had been a medical doctor who had been researching cryogenics. She had also been an expert shot, whose skill with a pistol had earned her a silver medal at the last ever Olympic Games. What should have been a routine surgical procedure in December 2000 had turned problematic, and the decision was made to place Mildred in suspended animation until a solution could be applied. A few days later, the world Mildred knew came to a dramatic end when the escalating hostilities between the United States of America and the United Soviet Socialist Republic had reached their peak, resulting in a nuclear war that had unutterably changed the face of Earth forever.