Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  Mildred said nothing, but she knew the woman was lucky that the wound hadn’t gone septic. The freezing environment had probably helped keep the wound from becoming infected.

  The other women related similar stories, of how they would be made to perform sexual acts for the ville’s baron, an easily bored man called Kenojuak. Even the young teen, whose name was Narja, related terrible stories of her experiences here. Mildred had heard it all before, one way or another. Whatever the Deathlands had brought, it had managed to shove women to the very bottom of what little society remained, used as baby carriers and sluts.

  Once Kirima had finished her tale of woe and her wound was patched up to Mildred’s satisfaction, the doctor strode across the room and spoke quietly with Krysty. “You hear that?” she asked.

  Krysty nodded. “Some of it. Enough.”

  Mildred raised her eyebrows. “Figure we might have some male company sometime soon. I plan to be ready for it.”

  Somberly, Krysty nodded again. “Men with their pants down tend to be easy targets. Figure it for our chance to get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Mildred agreed. “Let’s hope so.”

  * * *

  “YOU SEE IT, don’t you, Jak?” Ricky whispered, as if afraid that his voice would disturb the bullet where it hung just inches before his face.

  “Sure do,” Jak agreed. He still had the blaster in his hand, and his grip tightened on it as he eyed the bullet.

  “It’s moving,” Ricky said, keeping his voice low.

  “Not think it...” Jak began, then stopped. He did see it, the movement was incredibly slow but the bullet was very gradually continuing toward Ricky. “Yeah, okay.”

  “How can it do that?” Ricky wanted to know, his voice rising a little with fear and frustration.

  “Not know,” Jak decided. He arguably had a simpler outlook than Ricky or his other companions, living much more in the present than even his fellow survivalists. For Jak it wasn’t simply necessity that drove him to be that way; there was something instinctive, almost feral about him.

  “Where it come from?” Jak asked, taking another step closer to the hovering bullet.

  “Don’t know,” Ricky said. “I fell and when I looked up it was just there, hanging over my heart. I’ve watched it for what feels like an hour as it ran up the length of my chest, real slowlike.”

  “Real slow,” Jak agreed absently. He was close enough to the bullet to see its markings now, close enough in fact to pluck it from the air if he had the inclination to. He wondered what that might do to the slow-moving projectile. Would it speed up, drop, or burn against his skin the way a fast-moving bullet would? Maybe it wouldn’t react at all.

  “I’m going to try rolling out from under,” Ricky said. “I think there’s room.”

  Jak was still looking at the bullet. He recognized the type, it was a 7.62 mm. Jak had loaded bullets like that before now. It was the kind of bullet a person would use for a longblaster. He had the strange feeling it had come from the sec man who had begun blasting at them outside the mine, had followed them through the invisible barrier that separated that place from here.

  On the ground, Ricky shimmied to one side, compacting the snow as he moved out from under the hanging bullet. The bullet continued to float there, following its sluggish path toward the nearby tree.

  Once he was out from under it, Ricky breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He knelt on the snow, staring at the bullet that hung impossibly in the air. “You have any clue what’s going on?” he asked.

  “Sec-man bullet,” Jak proposed, indicating the bullet. “It follow here.”

  Ricky looked at the trees, the snow and the ground-hugging mist beyond, his head reeling a little. “Where are we? It doesn’t look like anywhere special.”

  “Mebbe not,” Jak agreed, “but feels it. Figure we stepped in whole load shit.”

  Ricky nodded. “Yeah. My fault.”

  The two companions leaped back suddenly as the bullet picked up speed, whistling through the air for less than a second before embedding itself in the nearest tree trunk, its passage finally complete.

  “Wha—?” Ricky spit, kicking himself away from the impact site.

  Jak glared at the open air where the bullet had been, eyed its passage and destination point. To stop, to slow like that, then to suddenly speed up. Jak had never seen anything like it. The whole occurrence made no sense.

  He turned back to Ricky, pushing a hand through his alabaster mane of hair. They both took a deep breath. The bullet had embedded in the tree. They were safe.

  It was then that the mouth came, emerging through the dead undergrowth.

  Chapter Ten

  With evening came unwelcome visitors. Krysty had been leaning against the sill, gazing through the thick glass through which the central courtyard of the ville could be seen. She was in tune with Gaia, the Earth Goddess, and being locked away from her like this hurt Krysty, driving a wedge of discomfort through her soul.

  Unimpressive to begin with, the Alaskan sun had dwindled to nothing outside, and the room itself had been left lit only by the gas lamps that were dotted between the tapestries. At the far end of the cell, the door began to draw back. Immediately, Krysty was on her feet, her hand automatically brushing to the place where her blaster should be...would have been had she not been disarmed. Beside her, Mildred had stood up, too, the strap of her satchel yanked swiftly over her shoulder.

  The two women looked at each other, silently wondering if this was it, if this was to be their chance at escape. Around them, the other women had tensed, watching the opening door with wary eyes.

  As soon as the door was pulled aside, two men strode into the room. Each held a blaster, the one on the left’s looking so scratched and beaten that Mildred wondered if it could even fire.

  “Back up, ladies,” the man to the right said, his yellow teeth showing through his thick beard. “Party time has arrived.”

  One of the women whimpered at that, but the two men ignored her. They were looking at Krysty, her bright red hair and statuesque figure diversion enough for any man.

  “Baron’s looking for some company tonight,” one of the men said, picking something from his teeth. His eyes fixed on Krysty. “You, strip.”

  Krysty stood staring at him, her emerald-colored eyes showing a barely restrained fury.

  “What, bitch, are you deaf?” The man laughed, taking a step toward Krysty.

  She made a show of wrinkling her nose while brushing at the air with her hand as though the man’s breath stank, which it did.

  The man reached out, his smile becoming more fixed, eyes narrowing. “I told you to strip, bitch,” he snarled.

  As his fingers touched Krysty’s arms, she stepped forward, hooking her right foot behind his. In less than a second the man had toppled over, slamming into the floor. Struggling to catch his breath, the sec man looked up at Krysty angrily from where he lay.

  The red-haired beauty glared at him, baring her teeth. “Next time I’ll snap your neck, little man,” she hissed.

  The sec man’s colleague was on her by then, jabbing his blaster at Krysty and Mildred, warning them away. “Back up, back up,” he shouted. “I got enough bullets here for all of you.”

  But did he have enough time, Krysty wondered, to shoot all of them? Not likely.

  Mildred’s hand grasped Krysty’s arm and steadied her. She knew just what Krysty was thinking. “Not yet,” she said in a low voice. It wouldn’t do to get the other captives chilled because of a rash decision now, and even if they did manage to overpower the sec men Mildred figured there would be hell to pay for anyone left behind.

  Reluctantly, Krysty stepped back.

  The sec man on the floor recovered, but he kept clear of Krysty and Mildred, gravitating instead toward two of the other occupants of the room. Mildred winced as Kirima and Narja were made to strip before being marched away at blaster-point to the waiting bed of the baron. At least they had survived—for now.

/>   * * *

  “I TELL YOU I FELT HER, Ryan,” Doc explained, “as clear as I see you there. My Emily was with us in the mine. Not standing with us, but near enough that I could feel her presence.”

  The two men had been accompanied back to the ice ville, where they were split from the other prisoners and locked in a new cell. The cell was on a lower level than their first, granting a superior view of the open area that the ville had been built to encompass. The cell was still small, however, with only a narrow slit of open window, far too narrow for a man to fit through. As well, the floor had a gentle slope to it, pitching from right to left in such a way that it made one nauseous to stand up for too long.

  With little sense of order, the sec men had endeavored to keep the two men apart, but Ryan had muscled another prisoner out of the way during the walk through the icy tunnels, ensuring that he and Doc arrived together for the lock-up ritual. They were joined this time by another prisoner, a man called Hurst, who slumped down in one corner of the tiny cell and began chewing his fingernails with some ferocity.

  J.B., meanwhile, had been returned to his own cell, but that was a deliberate ploy on the part of the sec men. They held him responsible for Jak and Ricky’s breakout and, while they showed no intention of chasing after them into the area they referred to as Temno Bozh’ego Sada, they very definitely intended to punish the Armorer for his part in the escape and the death of their colleague. J.B. took the treatment solemnly, his eyes alert, searching for an opportunity to somehow turn the tables on his captors.

  “You were out of it, Doc,” Ryan told the old man as he gazed through the narrow window into the circular courtyard. “All the work down there, and it was hot in those tunnels. Would get to anyone after a while.”

  “No,” Doc enthused, shaking his head, “this was different. My Emily was close, calling to me. And the whitecoats, too.”

  Ryan perked up at that. “The ones who sent you here?” he asked. This was a new avenue for the old man to pursue. Usually his ramblings went back to the better life he had led in the 1880s, not to the terrible experiments that the scientists had performed on him in the twentieth century.

  “I cannot explain it properly,” Doc said, irritated at his own failing. “It is like...like the smell of bacon on the griddle will remind you how hungry you are. This was a sense, my dear Ryan, the sort of thing a man knows without needing to question it.”

  Turning from the courtyard, Ryan looked Doc over. Even in this icy cell the man looked every bit the gentleman in his Victorian-era clothing. Doc was an anachronism, a refugee from another time. Ryan had seen the man almost lose his sanity coming to terms with that, had watched, powerless, as the old man had been haunted by his own memories.

  “You really think it was something out there?” Ryan asked.

  “I can assure you,” Doc insisted, “there was something about that mine.”

  “The mine or the surrounding area?” Ryan asked perceptively. He was thinking about the way that Jak and Ricky had apparently disappeared, the place the locals referred to as the edge of the world.

  “The...feeling,” Doc said, choosing his words carefully, “and that is all I can really describe it as, began when we emerged from the redoubt.” He dipped his voice low when he said this last, glancing warily at their fellow prisoner. The man didn’t appear to be listening.

  * * *

  RICKY ROLLED OUT of the way as sharp teeth snapped at the air above him, barely six inches from his right leg.

  Beside him, Jak was already back on his feet, scrambling across the snow-dusted ground and bolting out of the natural enclosure of trees. “Move,” he called back to Ricky. “Out there.”

  Ricky didn’t need telling twice. He leaped to his feet, hurrying from the copse like a sprinter in the starting blocks, his feet kicking up powdery snow in his wake. “What was that, Jak?” he cried as he chased after the albino.

  “Not know,” Jak admitted as he slowed and turned, bringing the blaster to bear. He was very conscious that he only had one bullet left.

  Behind them, the mouth was turning in the air. At first glance it had looked just like that, a disembodied mouth hurtling through the air two feet above the ground, spiny teeth arrayed in four rows across its menacing grin, two sets of two like some undersea creature.

  If Jak could figure out what to shoot he would, but all he could see was that mouth, nuzzling around the tree trunks, searching for its prey. Jak watched it, the hackles rising on the back of his neck. He had never seen anything like this, a creature without a body, just a hole in the air.

  “What are we going to do?” Ricky asked breathlessly as he reached Jak’s side. “What the hell is that?”

  Jak watched the thing silently, ignoring Ricky’s squawking. He wanted to get the thing’s measure, try to figure out how it moved, whether it followed a pattern. He suspected it might be artificial, some kind of remote-controlled thing that was employed to terrify and hunt down unsuspecting intruders to this place. After all, Jak reasoned, the barricade that they had passed through had been erected by someone; maybe the same someone who wanted them to stay away from this place, wherever it was that they were.

  Amid the trees, the mouth nudged left and right, searching for something. The jaws snapped closed with a nasty clip-clopping sound, again and again, biting at the empty air. There was something more of its presence, Jak realized as he watched it. At first he had taken it to be just a mouth hanging in the air, but there was definitely more to it than that. It had a body, narrow and tubular like a worm, extending behind it in a writhing coil. The body was hard to see; it flicked left and right, more discernible by the way it knocked against the brittle shafts of the dead tree trunks than by any visual presence.

  Beside him, Ricky saw the thing, too. “You think it’s some kind of stealth tech?” he asked quietly, fearful of attracting the mouth thing.

  Jak had seen stealth tech before, and he could see how Ricky might think that was what they were witnessing. The body was like a shimmer in the air, as if a lens had been placed over his eye, subtly changing Jak’s view of the environment. But if it was stealth tech, why would anyone leave the mouth showing? Unless maybe it was broken, a faulty circuit in the thing’s makeup.

  With a blurt of warning, Ricky knocked Jak aside. Above them, a second mouth had shimmered into existence, cutting through the air on a rocketlike path toward the two companions.

  Jak spun on his heel, bringing the Colt Anaconda around and aiming at the mouth where it writhed across the snowy ground, widening as it neared him for a second time. But before he could shoot, the impossible mouth launched itself from the ground, butting against Jak just above his left hip and knocking him from his feet.

  The albino went crashing to the ground and the blaster sailed from his grip. Before he knew it, the mouth was hurrying across his body, bearing down on his face. Though he couldn’t see it, Jak could feel this one’s body as a weight against his torso. The mouth snapped at his face, and Jak reached up without thinking, clutching the thing behind its jaws where he estimated its throat had to be. The jaws snapped closed an inch from his nose, four sets of teeth clacking together with a hollow finality.

  * * *

  IN THE ICE VILLE, J.B. was thrown back into a similar cell to the one he had occupied the night before. The sec men had worked him over for his part in getting their partner Pamploma chilled. They had used their fists and feet and short clubs to pound him, but J.B. had taken the beating in grim silence. If anything, the feel of the men’s short attack had brought a little sense back to his frozen limbs.

  He had lain in a daze when another figure had emerged from the icy tunnels wearing a towering fur hat, with dark hair that stank of oil. The man had spoken quietly in a voice that had a hissing quality like a snake’s. “He has spirit, this one,” he whispered. “I hear his friends stepped beyond the edge of the world.” He laughed, sending a brutal kick into J.B.’s aching ribs. “This one lives until tomorrow,” he informed the
others.

  The man with the oil in his hair said something more as he left, but J.B. couldn’t make sense of it, the words half-lost as he strode down the ice tunnel away from the cell. Behind him, two sec men worked the stopperlike door, wheeling it back into place and sealing J.B. inside. He hadn’t eaten, had hardly slept and he had been worked and beaten close to the limits of his endurance. J.B. lay on the cold floor and smiled grimly. He had until dawn to figure out a way out of here.

  * * *

  PIOTR HAD LED Symon and his daughter to a small group of buildings located at the foot of a gradual slope. “You have to be careful around here,” he warned the newcomers. “Watchers come out sometimes, hunt in packs.”

  “Watchers?” Symon asked.

  “Clockwatchers,” Piotr told him with clear distaste. “Just be glad we found you first.”

  “Ha,” the woman—whose name was Marla—laughed. “If the watchers had found you, you’d be slap-bang in the middle of getting fed to Old Father Time by now.”

  Symon could make no sense of the woman’s words, and reasoned it was best not to pry. Though tight-knit, this group seemed friendly enough. For now, maybe they could provide shelter from the elements and any sec men who might try to follow. They’d be mighty pissed about the stolen caribou; Symon figured that much for certain. Maybe even enough to follow him and Tarelya past the Tall Wall after all.

  When they reached the base of the slope, amid swirling snow flurries that danced on the air, Symon and Tarelya saw the buildings lined up as dark humps blanketed by snow. The buildings were the tired remains of a twentieth-century ville and many had been repatched, great sheets of metal slapped in place, bolted there with great braces and rivets. A frozen river stood static to the side of the farthest building, a bombed-out artillery tank lurching in the ice, stuck fast with its turret poking down toward the riverbed.

  Overhead, sparks flitted across the sky, bringing with them a sound like crackling electricity, making the air charged. It was like standing by an electricity pylon, a palpable sense of motion that churned from the air.