Chrono Spasm

by James Axler

  Ricky shifted himself away from the remains of the tree, stolen knife in hand. Beside him, Jak was back on his haunches, drawing himself up from the frozen ground.

  “Something’s really wrong here,” Ricky said, his breath coming fast. “Bad juju, my uncle would have called it.”

  Jak shook his head. “Not that.” He had grown up in the fetid swamps of Louisiana, where voodoo ritual and mysticism played a pivotal role among the terrified locals. Whatever was going on here, he felt sure, it was something that could be explained. They just needed to figure out how.

  Unconsciously, they felt the rippling waves of energy lashing against their bodies. It was an energy neither of them could possibly recognize, yet it was a pressure that had been on their bodies ever since they had come here to His Ink Orchard. It was the pressure of time breaking apart, piece by tiny piece while the chronovores feasted on excess chronal energies.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was like the world was turning the wrong way here, that was the only parallel that Ryan could come up with as he stood at the barrier. The sense of wrongness was so intense, and so unlike anything he had ever felt before.

  “This is it?” he asked, addressing Nyarla. “His Ink Orchard?”

  Nyarla nodded. “Da.”

  “Feels wrong, Ryan,” J.B. opined. “Like walking with fever. It feels sick.”

  Ryan kept his own counsel on the matter, but silently he agreed. J.B. had nailed in a handful of words exactly what it felt like. Like trying to shoot a blaster while hopped up on jolt.

  Absently, Doc rubbed a hand through his hair, casting it in further disarray. “I am inclined to agree with the esteemed John Barrymore,” Doc announced, “and yet I feel, too, something calling to us. Which is to say—to me, leastways. How I imagine a magnet must feel when faced with an opposing pole.”

  Mildred shook her head while Krysty stood back, as far from the invisible wall as she was able without leaving the group entirely.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Mildred told the old man, “except a little nausea. Something isn’t sitting right out there. I wish we knew what.”

  Krysty’s hair had begun to curl in on itself, making it look as if she had a head full of writhing snakes. “I feel it, too,” she admitted. “The earth here is...broken in some way.” She looked hopefully at Ryan as she said it.

  “Lot of this ground is broken,” J.B. reminded the woman. “Nukes hit all around.”

  “No, J.B.” Krysty shook her head. “It’s more than that. It’s as though something deeper has gone askew.”

  Ryan remained silent, watching the area and judging its feel. His skin was cold, but not in the way that the cool air would make it. This was the kind of cold that accompanied dread. Ryan was tough, but he was no fool and he surely hadn’t survived this long in the Deathlands by making rash decisions. He had walked away from situations before now, when the odds proved too much or the rewards too slim.

  The area loomed before Ryan like a monster of myth. He estimated that it ran eight miles square, and whatever lay at its center was likely responsible for whatever the hell it was.

  Now, as he looked out across that stretch of land, the atmosphere sparkling as if alight with fireworks, Ryan wondered if this might be another of those situations that he should just walk away from. He feared he was chilling his own people here, handing them a death sentence, leading them to a place from which they could never escape.

  J.B.’s voice interrupted Ryan’s silence, breaking his train of thought. “We’re going in?” the Armorer asked, his eyes scanning the flecks of half-seen light that buzzed through the heavens above the area.

  “I don’t see as we have much choice,” Ryan told him. “Doc would go in without us. I know he would. We can’t leave him to find out what’s in there alone.”

  “No,” J.B. agreed, “we can’t.”

  Ryan looked out into the area of land known as His Ink Orchard. The hairs on the backs of his arms were upright, his skin prickling all over. Nyarla, Ryan could take or leave. But Doc had been a companion—and a friend—for a long time. He wouldn’t turn his back on that. And then there was Jak and Ricky, one a companion for almost as long as Doc, the other a new ally but a loyal one. “The ones we leave behind are the ones that are dead”—wasn’t that what Trader had always bragged when they were moving into unknown territory?

  Ryan took a step closer to the invisible barrier that appeared as nothing more than a film across the air, yet that he could sense as a buzz in the back of his mind. Wordlessly, his companions followed, stepping closer to that hidden barricade that cut the land and air. Whatever His Ink Orchard contained, Ryan reasoned, it had better be worth it. Jak and Ricky had better be alive.

  Beside Doc, Nyarla was yearning to step through the invisible barricade and enter the area. Yet something stopped her. She stood there, her body tensed, her fists clenched. “My father...” she muttered.

  Doc leaned close to console her. “There, there, my dear, it’s all right now. We’ll find him and your missing sibling soon enough. You mark my words.”

  Nyarla looked up at Doc and offered him a brilliant smile. “You are good men,” she said in her heavily accented English. “You help me much already.”

  Doc inclined his head demurely to show he was embarrassed but wouldn’t argue the point. Then he turned to Ryan and the others. “Well, gentlemen, ladies,” he announced. “Shall we enter this dark orchard of God?”

  Ryan dipped his head once. “We shall.” He reloaded his SIG-Sauer before addressing his companions in a firm voice, a natural leader. “Everyone stay alert. None of us like what we’re feeling here, and that’s generally a good indicator that something is royally fucked up. Keep your eyes open and trust your instincts. If you see anything that don’t sit right—”

  “Doesn’t sit right,” Krysty corrected him quietly.

  “—you sound an alert, you chill it or you wait for help,” Ryan finished. “Or all three.”

  With that, the companions moved forward in step, their weapons held ready as they entered His Ink Orchard. A road waited before them, its asphalt gray peeking through the snow that patterned across it like sawdust on a workshop floor. Walking through the barrier felt like stepping into the path of strong fan, a momentary blast of rippling air lashing across their flesh before disappearing as suddenly as it had begun.

  J.B. looked back, eyeing the desolate track they had just been on. “Nothing’s changed,” he said, confused.

  “And yet it feels as though everything has,” Doc told him. “Whatever this place is, it bewitches the instincts in ways unimaginable.”

  J.B. nodded at that comment. It seemed a reasonable enough description of something he could likely never truly comprehend.

  The snow clung to their soles as they brushed through it, while the trees remained dreadfully still. There was wind here, mean howling wind that cut against the face like a knife. Yet there came no other sounds of life, no bird calls or animal howls, nothing to suggest that the place held anything living other than the companions and Nyarla. It was eerie.

  Lights popped and fizzled in the distance, blurting from the air in random patterns, their existence measured in the fractions of a second. What it meant, Ryan didn’t know.

  “You have any idea where your father is?” Ryan asked Nyarla as they trekked across the snowy wastes.

  Nyarla shook her head and said something in Russian.

  The only direction worth taking was downslope, to follow the road.

  * * *

  THE HOUSE WAITED in the wasteland, a ghost from another time. It looked like an old air-raid shelter, a slash of metal and concrete that hugged the ground in a depression, lightning playing across its metal roof. Beside it stood a second structure, much larger with its purpose clear from a single glance. Four long lines of upright cylinders stood like eggs in an egg carton, twenty-four in all, joined together by thick cords of insulated metal. They were storage capacitors, each one standing twenty-fi
ve feet high and ten feet across, the hum of the energies they contained audible even here, a quarter mile away from them. The rumbling snake of an icy river churned behind the power plant, cutting across the frozen terrain with its mirrored ripple. The river was wide enough to incorporate the full wing-span of the crashed passenger jet that poked out of its depths like the skeleton of some great leviathan. Besides the jet, the river contained great chunks of ice, some as large as automobiles or small buildings, wending their way along its unknowable depths. Great gullies ran down to the river, carved rents in the ground as if a laser beam had been used on it. Jak wondered if that might truly be the case, lying so close to the bunkerlike redoubt as it did.

  Jak looked at the buildings with narrowed eyes, piecing together the picture presented before him. The network of capacitors fed straight into the low building, incongruous in their enormity compared to the little hut that they powered. As they got closer, Jak realized that the hut was much larger than he had first estimated, a single story covering an area the size of a predark field. The building had slit windows running in a line along its facade, set horizontally like old-fashioned letter slots. Some of the windows emitted a faint green-tinted glow as luminous as cats’ eyes.

  It was a crooked house, Jak thought, set here in a crooked patch of the world, protected from the rest of the planet by its invisible wall.

  “You figure someone’s inside?” Ricky asked.

  Jak nodded. They hadn’t come this far to find an empty shack.

  Pulling the stolen Colt Anaconda from his waistband, Jak hurried toward the old structure with Ricky at his side, and together they scrambled down the slope. There was a smattering of snow all about, marking the area indifferently like flies on a wound. There, half-buried in the snow, jutted the remains of an old wire fence, its struts sticking out from the ground like spokes. The fence made a noise like dropped coins as they stepped over it, and Jak saw a sign there on the its bent face. The sign showed a lightning bolt beside bold lettering exclaiming this to be a private area. Another block of lettering warned that the fence was electrified—which was to say it had been a hundred years before—with Danger of Death in bold type beneath that. Now, the fence was as dead as the trees they had seen on the slopes above, providing no protection for the building or its occupants.

  Jak and Ricky continued their march toward the shack, pacing around the vast cage of generator capacitors. The snow petered out here, giving them a wide berth where it was unable to settle on the power generators. Even twenty feet from a protective wall, the capacitors emanated incredible warmth, and Jak pulled at his jacket sleeve, feeling the heat burning against it. It was like standing beside a fire.

  The two companions traipsed past the field of capacitors, moving toward the low building itself. It was the work of a few moments to locate a door, nuzzled in the shadows of the wall facing the power plant. Jak approached first, the blaster raised high in one hand. He expected trouble, but couldn’t say why. An active power plant out in the middle of Alaska like this—it didn’t add up.

  Ordering Ricky to stay well behind him, Jak placed his free hand gently on the knob and tried the door. This close they could feel the crushing heat from the generators. It burned against them with the ferocity of a forest blaze.

  The door opened without force; it had been left unlocked. Jak’s lips pulled back in a grimace. He had wanted the door to be locked, the whole building locked, so that he could walk away without investigating it.

  With the blaster poised before him, Jak stepped into the building. It seemed bright in here after the overcast twilight outside, a series of fluorescent lights running from one end of the short corridor to the other. The corridor was painted a sort of putrid yellow color, with four square metal plates riveted along the walls at regular spaces, each one running through a gamut of safety procedures in thick, black type. The safety procedures concerned the generator housings, but the detail meant nothing to Jak.

  Besides the metal warning plates, the corridor was bare, just a single box left propped against one wall close to the far end where a door waited. The box was made of cardboard, and its top had been torn away to reveal its contents. Jak paced warily forward and peered within, but the box appeared to be empty now other than a handful of screws, each no longer than Jak’s little fingernail.

  Jak took another step forward, checking the door at the far end of the abbreviated corridor. The corridor reminded him of an air lock; he’d once been in just a little space between the main building and the generator plant that could be locked when not in use. The door was painted a pinkish red and had a small square window in its center a short way above the handle. The window was made from thick doubled glass and featured the familiar crisscross pattern of black lines where strengthening wire ran through it.

  Jak peered through, eyeing the area beyond. It showed another corridor, this one wider with gray walls that featured two colored stripes. The stripes had peeled and faded over time, leaving an eczema-like pattern across the walls where they had once been. Like the first, this corridor appeared empty. Jak tested the door and was unsurprised to find that it, too, was unlocked.

  Jak and Ricky hurried down the corridor, checking the rooms that flared from it before making their way into the next corridor. There were signs guiding one to the visitor’s desk, inquiries, control center and other esoteric names that meant nothing to either of them. The atmosphere was charged, an unseen energy rippling through the whole complex.

  As they turned a corner in the latest of the brightly lit corridors, they came to a manhole set in the floor. The manhole was open, its cover propped against the wall beside it, a key-tool resting there on the floor. Jak halted, peering down into the manhole. There appeared to be a second complex below, lit in muted colors, a red tint washing through what he could see of the space there. A similar set of corridors seemed to run through the subterranean level, but these were more like tunnels, with low ceilings and pipe work running along their walls in thick lines.

  As Jak peered into the red-lit space, he heard a noise coming from farther down the corridor, a brutal clanking of metal against metal. Ricky turned at the noise, which was coming from ground level.

  Jak looked at him before peering down the corridor. A set of double doors stood there, yellow and black stripes running diagonally across their center. The friends paced toward the doors, their weapons at the ready. A sign on the wall featured arrows and directions: For Operations Center follow Green Stripe.

  Ricky looked at the peeling paint on the walls, spotted the stripe of green leading to double doors.

  “Operations center,” Ricky read in a quiet voice. “Straight ahead.”

  Once again, the noise came from behind the double doors, a clanging of metal striking metal, loud enough to be heard even through the closed doors. Ricky flinched but Jak remained calm, the blaster held rigidly in his hand.

  “Come,” Jak whispered, trotting briskly down the gray-walled corridor to the yellow-striped doors.

  Close up, they saw that the doors featured two metal handles that stood out like bars. Evidently, the metal had once been wrapped in some kind of rubberized material to insulate it, but it had largely rotted away and in its place blue strips of insulating tape had been wound over and over. The doors were hinged to open either way, like saloon doors. Jak placed one hand on the left handle and pushed. The heavy door swung open without a sound, revealing a well-lit area within.

  Jak stepped swiftly through the gap with Ricky following an instant later. Inside, the room was loud with the regular sound of mechanical movements. They stood on a railed catwalk overlooking a vast control area full of machinery and comp systems. Arrayed along three walls in an incomplete square, the machinery glowed with vibrant colors and computer screens flashed with information. A figure stood at the center of the network, wearing a thick radiation suit made of a bright yellow rubberlike fabric. The suit incorporated a wide helmet that sunk down over the shoulders with a view plate in i
ts center and twin filters placed to either side of where the wearer’s mouth would be. The suit was linked to the central machine by way of a vast umbilical cord, its flexible metal-link tube running across the floor and then back up into a feeder unit buried snugly amidst the flashing machinery.

  For a moment, Jak and Ricky watched as the figure manipulated the dials on several machines, flipping switches and testing the gauges. Beside the figure stood a flat, wheeled cart on which was spread a selection of tools, including a wrench, a hammer and three different sizes of screwdrivers. A toolbox was open on the lower tier of the cart, and the man in the protective suit leaned down to pull something from it. He emerged a moment later with a rivet gun, glancing up through the glassy visor of his headgear to where the two companions stood by the doors of the room.

  “You can’t come in here,” the man in the radiation suit announced. He had a rich voice that, although muffled, carried with ease across the room, despite the chuntering of the machinery.

  Warily, Jak walked across the catwalk, toward a feeder ramp that led down into the sunken workstation area. “Where here?” Jak asked in a loud voice.

  “Your weapon,” the man in the suit replied, indicating the blaster. “You can’t have that in here. It’s too dangerous. You must put it away.”

  “Must and will—not same,” Jak warned the man, still holding the blaster high. He was standing at the midpoint of the incline now, a line of metal plates that led down to the work area where the figure in the protective suit stood. “Now,” Jak repeated, “where here?”

  Without warning, the man in the radiation suit thrust his right arm forward as if punching the air. Jak didn’t even see what it was he threw, he just felt the object strike him full in the chest, knocking him from his feet. Jak crashed back into the railings that lined the catwalk, and Ricky watched as he flipped over the side in a sprawl of limbs.

  Without hesitation, Ricky leaped over the railing after Jak, plummeting straight to the floor of the control room. He lay slumped on the floor, the Colt Anaconda hanging loosely in his right hand. He was unconscious—or worse.