by James Axler
Ahead of him, Ricky was still running, puffs of snow kicking up in his wake. Jak dived to the ground as another bullet spiraled by overhead, wincing as it struck a tree trunk at head height. Swiftly, the albino brought his blaster around, wondering if he might be able to knock one of the sec men out of the fight with a single well-placed bullet. That was all he had, he reminded himself—just one bullet.
By the tether post, the two sec men had coordinated themselves, Jak saw. One was using a longblaster to track the escapees while the other one had just mounted one of the steeds and was urging it to chase them. Take out the mounted one, Jak figured—they could hide from his ally, and maybe the sudden death of the rider would send the steed into a frenzy.
But as Jak steadied his aim, he heard Ricky call to him. He sounded frightened.
“Jak, help!”
He turned and saw Ricky just a dozen feet ahead of him. The kid seemed to be stretched, his whole body elongating as he moved forward, like a picture that had been poorly copied.
“I can’t stop!” Ricky screamed as parts of him blurred away, a series of images flashing across Jak’s vision faster than he could comprehend.
Behind him, the rifleman took another shot, sending a bullet into the snow just inches from Jak’s knee with a resounding boom. Jak made a decision then, the kind of life-or-death decision that could change a person’s destiny. He sprang from the ground and ran, his arms pumping at his sides, the blaster still hanging from his right hand. He raced forward, chasing after Ricky as his young ally disappeared in a blur.
Snow kicked up at Jak’s passing as he bolted toward the space where Ricky had vanished. And then, without warning, Jak began to blur out of existence, too.
* * *
LOCKED INSIDE HIS radiation suit, Don Nectar took a moment away from his work to listen. He had been reworking the quantum infuser of the scoop reverberator—Section 93-B according to the hundred-year-old designs he had found and begun to amend—trying to minimize the frequency of distortion to a level that might prove endurable for a human body. But as he worked, he had heard the voice calling to him from close by, like a ghost on the wind.
He stopped work, inclined his great helmet head this way and that, trying to locate the source through the thick weave of material. The radiation suit muffled outside sound, but that didn’t seem to matter. It wasn’t as if the caller was in the room with him, down here in the great subbasement where the generators whirred and clunked as they powered the time portal he knew he would need to get home. No, the call was coming from farther away than this room, and somehow closer still, just a skipped heartbeat away from him. He knew it, recognized it. The voice was like a missing part of himself, a chunk of his soul screaming out for release.
“Lost souls,” he muttered with a shake of his head. “Shall we ever know peace in our lifetime, you and I?”
Nectar turned back to Section 93-B and brought the ratchet wheel around until the teeth bit home. The voice was closer now, almost with him. That much he knew for certain.
Chapter Nine
The two sec men were hurrying toward the line of demarcation as Jak followed Ricky into the blur, their blasters raised to attack. They watched in annoyance as first the dark-haired adolescent, then his white-skinned partner, blurred through the unmarked line.
The rider on the mutant caribou pulled back on the reins to halt his mighty steed, and the beast growled in complaint, rearing back just a few feet from the invisible line that indicated the danger. “Dammit,” he gritted as he watched the snowlike blur that he suspected had once been Jak. “Lost them.” Baron Kenojuak wasn’t going to be happy about that, but there was no way he was chasing them into His Ink Orchard. No way at all.
* * *
JAK FELT WIND in his hair and his stomach lurched as if he was falling. Around him, the ground seemed to be shifting, rolling under him in a blur. He looked down, watching his own feet as they tramped through the snow. There was a disconnect, somehow the two facets didn’t join—his feet were moving normally and yet his surroundings blurred as if he was moving at incredibly high speed, faster even than a cross-country wag.
And then he tripped, stumbling over a rock jutting from the snow, falling to the ground in a tangle of limbs.
Automatically, Jak bunched up, rolling in a ball even as he struck the snow-speckled earth, the blaster clutched protectively to his gut. He came to a halt a moment later, his senses reeling from both the fall and the invigorating sense of speed that had threatened to overtake him just moments before.
“Shit,” Jak spit as he pushed himself up off the ground, checking that the blaster was still okay. It was. He turned his head, searching for Ricky. The kid had been just a few yards ahead of him when this whatever it was had overtaken him, turning him into a human blur.
Almost as an afterthought, Jak looked at his own hands, his arms, his body. No, he was in one piece.
Behind him, the mining area was lost in a sea of fog, cold mist brushing across the ground in rapidly moving lines. The wind was picking up here, had picked up already. The sky was as dark as twilight, but there was something shimmering across it, brushes of light like bruises on the clouds.
And there was no sign of Ricky.
Jak hadn’t been able to view his passage through whatever invisible barrier he had traversed. He had sensed the passing, felt his body being drawn as if by powerful forces, like his bones and organs were being momentarily yanked through his flesh.
He sat there, blaster gripped in his hands, gazing around him at the sprawl of snow and ice and mist that went on as far as the eye could see. “Shit,” he muttered again, shaking his head.
* * *
FOR RICKY, hitting the hidden barrier had felt like being thrown from a fast-moving wag, that sudden sense of unexpected movement as the door was opened and one was shoved through the gap. He had continued to run, the guard’s shots echoing behind him, determined to stay out of their reach.
One of the bullets had cut through the...barrier, wall, field? Whatever it was, one of the bullets had cut through it as Ricky entered, clipping past him. Ricky had watched it sail over his shoulder, lunging onward across the snow-smeared ground until it was lost in the clouds of low-lying mist hugging the soil.
Ricky stopped—or he tried to. Bringing himself to a halt had proved far more difficult than he had expected. It was as if he was on a merry-go-round, going faster and faster, each revolution adding to his momentum. When he finally did stop, he did so with all the grace of a tranquilized rhino, crashing into a clutch of dark-limbed trees whose skeletal branches showed no signs of life. Somehow, somewhere, he had dropped the Heckler & Koch longblaster, but that was the least of his concerns.
Ricky sank to the ground amid the eerie copse, looking up into the sky. Either his head was spinning or the sky was; right now he simply couldn’t tell which. But as he lay there, something else crossed his vision, poised just inches above his face. It was a bullet, cutting the air and aimed right at his forehead.
* * *
J.B. WAS BEING held under armed guard, his hands and ankles shackled and he was sporting a vicious cut across his forehead. He had been brought up to the surface with brutal rapidity, had awakened to find himself being dragged by the arms through a mine shaft, his back and legs trailing along the ground. When they reached the surface, J.B. had still been woozy, so one of the sec men had kicked him hard in the shin until he jumped.
“Wakey wakey,” the sec man snarled. “You are in a lot of trouble, little man.”
J.B. looked around. They were back at the surface, himself and four sec men. The Armorer had been placed in a chair—a dilapidated swivel seat that had been recovered from the mess belowground—and two sec men watched him with their blasters pointed at his face. He said nothing, figuring words couldn’t help him right now. Instead, he assessed the blasters that the sec crew had armed themselves with.
One of the leathery-skinned men was wearing J.B.’s battered brown fedora, and he
paraded in front of his colleagues doing a mincing kind of strut. It was the same man who had shot the sec man in the tunnel. “Look at me,” the guy mocked, “the big, bad chiller of no one.” They all guffawed at that.
“You’re wearing my hat,” J.B. said, a note of warning in his tone.
“And just what are you going to do about that, little goblin?” the sec man taunted. “Strangle me, too?”
J.B. held the man’s glare, saying nothing.
“I knew Pamploma—the man you chilled—well,” the sec man said.
“I didn’t chill him,” J.B. pointed out reasonably. “You did. Shot him one right in the belly. Nasty way to chill a man, if you want my opinion. Slow way to die.”
The chiller grimaced angrily.
“My hat?” J.B. said without emotion.
With clear irritation, the sec man removed the fedora from his head, spit in it, then shoved it onto J.B.’s head before stomping away.
J.B. watched him go then slyly peered around the little camp. There was no sign of Jak or Ricky, which could mean they got away. J.B. hoped so—his own chances were looking pretty slim right now.
* * *
EVENTUALLY, RYAN and Doc were relieved of their task and accompanied back to the surface along with their fellow prisoners. They had worked the mine for more than twelve hours straight, shoring up the walls and digging through the rubble, and Doc was almost doubled over from exertion by the end of their unforgiving shift.
“These bones cannot take much more of this punishment, my dear Ryan,” he said as they pushed a cart to the surface. Doc leaned against its handles, Ryan noticed, using it to prop himself up.
The cart featured a bent wire frame and had been half-filled with ammunition and rubble along with a handful of recovered blasters. There were four blasters in total, but two of them were in pieces and the barrel of the third looked as if it had been crushed. The ammunition was in similar condition, and Ryan reflected that the haul was hardly worth the exertion involved; had the ice dwellers not used slaves, the mine would have been abandoned long ago.
When they got to the surface, Ryan instantly spotted the state that J.B. was in. The cut on the Armorer’s forehead had dried, but it left a mean red streak that had run right down his face. Ryan checked himself, tamping down the urge to go to his friend.
“It appears John Barrymore has been busy,” Doc observed quietly, stretching the painful kinks out of his back muscles as he leaned against his swordstick.
Ryan looked all around, his lone eye roving across the heads of the exhausted prisoners-turned-miners. There was no sign of Jak. Or Ricky. Where were they?
* * *
JAK PULLED HIMSELF back to his feet and forced himself to take a step. Mist was billowing all around, and he had no idea which direction he had come from. He was a tracker, with senses like a wolf—he shouldn’t get confused by a little mist like this. Yet, Jak had to admit he was lost.
He looked around. The ground showed a patchy quilt of snow, clumped here and there in high drifts, while other parts of the ground remained free from its white pattern, showing instead the glittering lines of icy blades of grass.
Trees were dotted here and there, their branches bare, a whole line of them poised on the horizon like jurors waiting to pass sentence.
Above, the sky showed slate gray with only the barest hint of the sun’s illumination, like those few minutes before dawn when the sun was still crouching just below the horizon. Within that muted sky, Jak perceived flashes—and they were just flashes—of color, popping in and out of existence like fireworks. He had seen radioactive glow before, and it reminded him a little of that and also the deranged patterns he had witnessed during travel via mat-trans. Whatever it was, it spoke of energies unrestrained, darting in and out of existence in the blink of an eye.
“Ricky?” Jak called, risking attracting the sec men.
There was no reply.
“Ricky?” he called again, louder this time.
Once again, no response.
Jak eyed the ground, searching for evidence of his friend’s passage. It should be easy enough to spot, tracks in the snow.
Jak was right—finding Ricky’s footprints wasn’t hard. Turning himself to face them, though, that was a whole other experience. It felt almost as if he was underwater, in those murky swamps around where he had grown up in Louisiana. Water with so much crap in it weighed on the body as one tried to swim through it. But here, it was the air.
There was something going on here, something Jak was only subliminally aware of. It was like everything was taking longer, even the most simple movement of his body to follow Ricky’s footsteps.
Following the prints, Jak trudged up toward a cluster of half-dead trees. Their branches hung limply at their sides. Jak pushed on, shoving one of the scrappy-looking branches aside and spotting Ricky lying faceup in the snow, gazing at the air above him. For a moment, Jak took him to be looking at the sky, and then he stopped, realizing what it was Ricky was staring at.
A single bullet hung in the air above Ricky’s head, just six inches from his nose and pointed in the direction of his face.
* * *
RYAN, DOC AND J.B. joined the other prisoners on the long trek home, their muscles aching from a hard day’s work. J.B. was made to walk behind the other prisoners, his wrists and ankles still bound, leaving him just enough rope to walk but not to run.
From what Ryan could gather from what little the sec men let slip, Jak and Ricky had fallen off the edge of the world. The more he listened to their conversation, conducted as it was in fractured Russo-English, the more he realized that “the edge of the world” was an actual place to these people, and he figured it for the area beyond the mines where he had seen the lights playing across the sky.
“It makes a perverted kind of sense,” Doc agreed when Ryan ventured his opinion in a low voice. “You may recall that John Barrymore described our arrival point as farther than any map reached.”
Ryan nodded. That didn’t exactly answer the question about where his missing companions were now, however, but perhaps it gave an idea of where they had headed to escape the clutches of their brutal jailers.
One thing came across loud and clear from the sec men’s guttural conversation. None of them had any desire to follow the missing prisoners beyond the edge of the world. They seemed to view it as an area of supernatural activity, something that one of the men described as Temno Bozh’ego Sada. Ryan had come across those kind of superstitions before. The Deathlands was a breeding ground for ignorance and idiocy. Having a bunch of inbred Inuits figure a place for the world’s end didn’t surprise him any more than that Jak would see such a place as a viable escape route.
The question was whether they were coming back—if that were even possible. Ryan might not buy into the superstitious mumbo jumbo these meatheads were spewing, but he still figured a place like this Temno Bozh’ego Sada likely got its rep because no one came back from it. For now, at least, it was down to him, Doc and J.B. to figure a way to free Krysty, Mildred and Nyarla, then get out of this mess alive. Unless, of course, the women had already gotten their own plan in place.
* * *
WHILE THEIR MALE companions toiled in the mines, Krysty and Mildred had spent their whole day locked in the twelve-by-ten cell with its draped walls. They, along with the other women who shared the cell, remained largely undisturbed; the only time the mighty wooden door was rolled back was to allow an elderly woman entry to bring food. The food was simple fare, tough day-old bread, unrecognizable vegetables and cured meats that had been cut in tiny slivers that were barely large enough to taste. Between them, the eight women who shared the cell had perhaps enough food to adequately feed three.
“One thing’s for sure,” Mildred said grimly as she chewed on the bread, “at least neither of us is getting fat while we’re here.” Neither Mildred nor Krysty would touch the meat, fearing it was human flesh.
With little else to occupy them, Mildred had t
aken up her scant medical supplies and looked over the other occupants of the room. Along with Nyarla, three more of the women were under twenty, one dark-haired girl just barely fifteen. The girl had a little puppy fat to her face, and sported a vicious scar down below her chin where someone had tried and failed to hang her. Why this had occurred the girl wouldn’t reveal, and she shied away from Mildred’s ministrations. Mildred suspected that she had been treated savagely all her life, such was the level of fear showing from her demeanor.
While Mildred checked over the women, all of whom were suffering the initial results of hypothermia, Krysty examined the door in the daylight. It sealed the doorway entirely, acting like the stopper on a jar of jelly, which meant that it couldn’t be forced from within, at least not by a normal human. Krysty wondered whether her other strength, her Gaia power, could move the door. There was only one way to find out, and only one chance to do so. Now was not that time.
The eldest of the other women in the room was a twenty-five-year-old named Kirima. She had the dark hair and wide features of an Inuit, with slim body, long legs and remarkably slender hands. Though distrustful of the newcomers at first, she soon opened up to them after Mildred had cleaned a wound she revealed on her neck hidden by her long hair.
“The men come,” Kirima explained, “and they make us do things, whether we want to or not. Some of the girls haven’t minded so much, some of the men are quite nice really. But a few are just bastards, brutes that want nothing more than to hit and fuck.” She pressed her hand against the little patch of material that Mildred had affixed to her neck with some scavenged medical gauze from her bag of supplies. “That’s how I ended up with this. Bascha couldn’t get it up so he cut me open with his knife. Blood turns him on.”
Mildred thought about the wound that she had just dressed. It was a slight wound, long and designed to bleed for a long time without healing over. Even when she had dressed it, the wound had still been weeping. “How long ago was this?”
“With Bascha?” Kirima asked. “Two days, I think.”