Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  Krysty turned, swinging around her Smith & Wesson, trying to get a bead on the man as he pulled Nyarla off her feet. The woman shrieked, her hands bunched into fists, her feet kicking as she tried to pull herself free. She was moving too much, Krysty knew; there was no way she could make the shot. Mildred maybe, or Ryan, but not her. Not running like this.

  Behind Krysty, another shot rang out. She flattened against the nearest tree trunk, her head turning left and right as she sought multiple targets.

  “On your knees, bitch,” the first man shouted in a gruff voice from somewhere behind Krysty’s right shoulder. Nyarla and her captor had disappeared, sinking back into the darkness beyond the open area of the copse, leaving behind the woollen blanket that Mildred had loaned her as the only evidence of their passing. Krysty scanned the trees, searching for their silhouettes in the ill-lit woods, looking for a moving shadow among shadows. She heard a scream, abruptly muffled by a man’s hand, but the trees and the faint illumination from the stars were contributing to disguising the source, the falling snow adding an extra layer of confusion. She just couldn’t narrow down their position.

  As Krysty peeked out from her hiding place, her emerald eyes darting left and right, another shot rang out close to her head. She leaped back as the bullet clipped the tree she was using for cover, kicking up a shower of broken bark just six inches from her skull.

  It was too dangerous. There were at least two of them out there, both of them armed—plus the trapped woman was a factor, too. Krysty had promised to protect Nyarla, not get her shot in the cross fire of some ill-judged scuffle over nothing.

  “Okay, okay,” Krysty called out. “I’m putting my blaster down. Just don’t hurt the woman.”

  “Na koleni,” the now-familiar man’s voice called from his hiding place. “On your knees.” He sounded close to Krysty—real close.

  “Okay,” Krysty said again, stepping out from behind the broad trunk of the conifer, her arms raised with her blaster still in her right hand, pointed into the branches.

  “On your knees,” the man repeated, peering out from tree cover just eight feet from where Krysty had been hiding. His colleague stepped forward into the clearing as well, still clutching the slender form of Nyarla; she was no longer moving.

  Holding her revolver above her head, Krysty dropped to her knees, the cold of the ground radiating through her pants’ legs in an instant. “What did you do to her?” Krysty asked. “Why is she—?”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. The armed man closer to her had stepped behind Krysty and brought the hard edge of the compact PSM down on the back of her skull. All she knew then was a blackness that seemed to overwhelm her vision of the snow with a creeping lethargy of purpose.

  * * *

  BEYOND THE CLEARING and just a little way down the slope at the edge of the wooded area, Ryan and his companions found themselves surrounded by a whole squad of the raggedly dressed strangers.

  They had turned as one to face the newcomer who had issued the snarled warning that he would chill their asses, their weapons already targeting where the voice had come from. But twelve ragged figures emerged from their hiding places in the trees, several of them pulling themselves up from mounds of snow they had used as camouflage. Each man was dressed in the thick layers that the frozen climate demanded and each one held a weapon, including several 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 the 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 Nyarla in their arms.

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

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

  Ryan shook his head. His people were compromised, so much so that he couldn’t risk a firefight at such close quarters. For now, they would stand down and wait for a better opportunity to arise.

  Reluctantly, the companions handed over their weapons to the ragged group of ambushers and were led away.

  * * *

  THE CARIBOU WAS DEAD on its feet now. It trudged wearily onward, kicking up powdery snow with each heavy step, but Symon could feel the death in the beast now, expanding through its freezing body in a black wave. Three steps later the animal sunk to its knees, its great head slumping to the snow. It let loose a withered snuffling noise as it lay there, its hind legs still standing, its chin buried in the snow, and closed its eyes.

  The man turned to his daughter, doing his best to offer her a comforting smile. “We walk from here, Elya.”

  Tarelya, eleven years old and with the same blond hair as her late mother, nodded almost imperceptibly. “I’m cold, Papa,” she said in Russian. “This is a place of death.”

  Symon Vrack found it hard to argue as he clambered down from the horned beast. The landscape was bleak and cold, ice crystals glinting on the soil, grass shoots poking through the white snow in sparse patches. Mist swirled over the land in bobbing waves like the swell of the ocean, obscuring and revealing the surrounds in a game of peekaboo. Snow was falling in a light but constant curtain, enough to blanket the ground and the lifeless trees that made up the landscape, the air cold enough to turn one’s breath into misting clouds of vapor that hung above the mouth like speech balloons in a predark comic strip. Vrack hadn’t wanted to come here, nor had the mutie caribou. When they reached the Tall Wall, the creature had bucked and complained, rearing back from the translucent barricade and stomping its feet. But the ville men were just behind them, and Vrack had urged the beast on.

  That was hours ago. How many had it been? Vrack couldn’t tell anymore. When he looked back he could see himself trudging through the snow with his daughter on the back of the mutie caribou, following the footsteps that it had already walked. Ahead, he saw himself and his daughter making their way down the snow-backed slope toward a cluster of trees, hunched over against the unrelenting wind and the falling snow. He watched for a moment as the figures continued, disappearing behind the curling mists that swept the place in frozen clouds.

  “Come,” Symon said, grabbing his daughter’s arm. “We will not die.”

  Tarelya looked at her father hopefully as he half pulled her down the slope. Behind them, the disembodied mouths were biting at the air, teeth chattering as they ate the flashes of light that sparkled in the atmosphere with charged static. Symon suspected that those mouths could bite through a person’s arm or leg if he or she remained still long enough to be reached. He had already lost his son Evan on the trip here; he would not lose his daughter, too.

  Seeing where her father was looking, Tarelya peered back over her shoulder. “Are they still there?” she asked. “I don’t see them.”

  “We march quickly,” Symon told her, “like the guards. To keep ourselves warm.”

  Tarelya nodded, recalling the guards in the ville and the way they had looked at her. That had been the last straw for her father. He was a fisherman by trade, not an especially successful one but proficient enough to feed himself and his family. The winters were harsh here, but then so were the summers. Her father would joke sometimes about how many pairs of socks he wore in the summer—“Six or seven, at least until the sun sets.”

  But three months ago the Tall Wall had come to them, cutting closer to their cold little house than it had ever come before, like a terminator line during a solar eclipse. It had eaten into space, stealing land, consuming it, leaving it just beyond reach. The stories of His Ink Orchard had been clear enough—to enter it was death, to go beyond the Tall Wall was to invite death. And no one had ever returned.

  Symon had upped stakes and moved h
is family, searching for new fishing grounds. Instead he had found the ville, with its despotic baron and his appetites, coupled with the near-infinite weaponry to enforce his will. Symon had tried to barter with the man, but they had taken his rifle and they had committed him to the mines while his two daughters had been taken away. It broke Symon’s heart. When he saw the scars on Tarelya’s back he had determined to make a break for it. His Ink Orchard was the only place to hide. No one would dare follow a person in there willingly; no one would be so foolish. There was no escape once the barrier was crossed; it was suicide. But even suicide was preferable to seeing one’s daughters worn down by forced labor or used as a slut.

  “Where will we go now, Papa?” Tarelya asked.

  “There,” Symon told her. “The trees. They offer almost no shelter, but almost none is better than none at all.”

  Around them, the air fizzed with ghost colors, sparking through the mist like fireflies, each spark another meal for the bodiless mouths that roamed His Ink Orchard.

  Chapter Five

  The companions found themselves force-marched to a settlement like no other. The hunters had disarmed them before tying them up, giving them enough movement that they could walk but ensuring that no one could run away. After Nyarla had escaped them earlier, they were taking no chances. After being disarmed, the companions were made to gather around a small wooden cart while they awaited the arrival of other captives, who were subsequently brought into the open by a second group of men.

  The group was comprised of twenty hunters, though they had lost two of their number to the companions during the scuffle outside the redoubt, plus the third man who had been chilled by Jak in the tree line overlooking the wolf trap. The strangers hadn’t taken those losses well, beating Jak while the others were tied.

  The hunting party included four riders on the mutie caribou, two of which had been recovered from where they had been left wandering close to the hidden redoubt. The caribou appeared to be drowsy, ill-tempered animals, and they took a lot of prodding and urging to keep moving. They also stank with a musty, damp-fur smell. Out here in this frozen wasteland, they were probably the only animal large enough to carry a human, Ryan reasoned as he watched their riders heel and curse them to movement across the snow.

  The strangers had collected their dead and their wounded—the man who had been trampled by the caribou was still alive, albeit delirious with pain and blood loss. He had been rolled onto the back of one of the hulking caribou, his broken limbs bent at angles that should not be possible for a human body.

  The hunters had also hauled the wolf’s carcass onto the back of a wag. It looked smaller in death than it had in life, its thick fur flattened now and clinging to its cooling corpse.

  The wag had two wooden wheels and a yoke in front which Ryan, J.B. and Doc had been strapped to and told to pull. It was hard work, the wolf’s carcass was so large it drooped from the back plate of the wag’s bed, and movement was made more difficult thanks to the short ropes that had been used to tie the companions’ ankles, forcing them to shuffle rather than take full strides.

  “Only a fool would make a tied man drag this thing,” J.B. grumbled as the three of them hauled the wag up a steady incline. But the hunters didn’t hear, or if they did they deemed response unnecessary. Instead, they simply marched alongside, shouting orders in a combination of Russian and English that sounded like a man clearing his throat, their blasters poised to threaten anyone who stepped out of line.

  Nyarla had lost her blanket and shivered profusely as she strode along with the others of the group. She had been unconscious when the party had left the chilling zone, but had soon revived after a few slaps across the face from one of the well-wrapped hunters. Warily, Mildred had stepped in and assured the man that such brutality was unnecessary. “She’s awake,” Mildred insisted. “But she won’t regain her senses if you keep hitting her like that.”

  The man had drawn back his hand into a fist as if to hit Mildred, but he reconsidered the action when Nyarla muttered something coherent for the first time in a quarter hour. “You—carry her,” he had growled at Mildred. “If she slows us down I shoot your face.”

  Mildred nodded, grimly accepting the cruel terms of the proposal.

  From what Ryan and the companions could guess, there appeared to be three other prisoners with them as well as Nyarla. All three were men in their thirties or forties, underdressed for the climate. One looked as if he had been dragged out of bed, as he wore no shoes, wincing with every barefoot step on the frozen ground. The hunters cuffed him across the back of the head when he complained, and so he fell silent and merely sucked breath through his clenched teeth with each icy step as his toes turned blue.

  As they trekked the two miles to the group’s base camp, the snow eased, its flurries turning to just occasional white spots that spun through the air like dandelion seeds. Ricky was shivering as they marched. They were all cold, but he had never known weather like this in Puerto Rico, had no idea that such extremes of cold could exist.

  “Why would anyone want to live here?” Ricky asked Krysty as they marched, keeping his voice low.

  Krysty was walking with Jak at her side, an arm around his back below his ribs, helping the albino keep pace with the others following the vicious beating he had been subjected to. “People will live anywhere,” Krysty told Ricky. “They can’t help themselves. Humans have such a capacity for adaptation that they will keep pushing themselves well beyond what you might expect.”

  “You’ve seen places like this before?” Ricky asked, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

  “We’ve traveled all over,” Krysty replied in a whisper. “Been here in Alaska four or five times.”

  Ricky nodded, looking around at the icy landscape in the dim light cast from the stars. Everything out here looked blue, the snow retouched by the indigo sky. Landmarks were few out here, just the odd cluster of trees marking the points between characterless bushes, the odd rock poking up through the frozen soil. Now and then, the companions’ trek took them past the tops of old buildings, buried now beneath the carpet of snow, preserved by the ice.

  Their brief journey took them in parallel to a sheer drop that fell away from the roughly marked path they followed. Even from up here, they could hear the crashing waves, and when J.B. peered over the side he saw great chunks of ice floating in the water.

  “Must be a forty-foot drop,” he told Ryan in a low voice. “The impact would likely break a person’s back, and anyone who survived would freeze to death in five minutes.”

  A lot had changed in Nome since it had served as a military town on the northwestern tip of Alaska a hundred years earlier. The nukes had ruptured the land, casting it adrift with great fissures. What remained of the once-proud town had become frozen in the ice, whole buildings lost beneath snowdrifts that had formed a hundred years before during that awful nuclear winter. Ryan and his companions were indifferent to the starlit remains of a destroyed society; they had seen worse and they doubtless would again, assuming they could survive this encounter with the ice hunters.

  They trekked over an icy incline, Doc using his swordstick, which his captors had overlooked, to help his aching body climb as he, Ryan and J.B. drew the wag behind them. There, over the incline, they saw their destination. It looked like a glacier sliced in two, one-half missing to expose a sheer wall of ice that towered eighty feet into the night sky. Even in the dim light, they could make out the shadowed rounds running up its face at regular intervals, a honeycomb of caves burrowed into the ice behind which ancient buildings waited. There were fires flickering in those caves, the pulse of flames shimmering like specters. The glacier stretched back in the darkness farther than the companions could make out, weak flames like trapped stars burning in the ice.

  To one side of the ice wall sat another sheer drop, a great rent in the frozen earth that stretched across twenty feet or more. As they drew closer, Ryan spotted simple bridges had been constructed across the cha
sm, two made of wood struts and a third no more than a rope stretched taut with two guide ropes running along above it. There were vehicles crouched at the base of the glacier, several wags like the one the companions had been enlisted to pull, and a couple of dilapidated trucks, their scarred paintwork showing rusted metal. There were also around a dozen caribou penned in a corral, a wooden roof and free-standing wall to one side where they might shelter from the elements when the weather got too wild.

  “It looks beautiful,” Ricky whispered as he stared at the twinkling facade of the glacier. “Like a tower block made by Mama Nature.”

  “Gaia works with a soft touch,” Krysty agreed, “painting pictures across the landscape in ways we can only wonder at.”

  Voices and cooking smells wafted from the strange settlement as the companions drew closer, shouts like a party coupled with the grunting of animals, shrieks of joy or terror. At the base of the eighty-foot-tall structure several men patrolled in bored resignation, dressed in the thick ragged outfits that the hunting party had worn, their faces wrapped with scarves. They carried longblasters in their mitten-covered hands, the mittens featuring a furry trim across the tops to keep out the cold.

  “Nothing like a warm welcome,” J.B. muttered as they approached the frozen ville. “And this here is nothing like a warm welcome.”

  This close to the strange ville, the companions could see ladders running up the sheer ice wall, placed helter-skelter along the glistening facade.

  A voice called from behind Ryan, J.B. and Doc, ordering them to halt. They did as they were told, bringing the cart to a stop and resting their weary arms against the crossbar of the yoke with a sense of relief. Ryan turned to his side, eyeing Doc and the sec man, who waited just a few feet behind him.

  “How you holding up, Doc?” Ryan asked, keeping his voice very low.