by James Axler
* * *
NECTAR GRABBED Doc’s wrist as the sword streaked by, yanking him toward the widening portal that had appeared behind him, a portal that led into the time stream.
“Prepare yourselves for full emersion into the time flow,” Nectar growled, stepping back and pulling Doc with him.
Almost forgotten beneath the stairs where Krysty had been working Jak and Ricky’s bonds, Ryan had unslipped his Steyr Scout and brought its scope up to his eye. He was a remarkable shot, with unprecedented aim and speed. But right now he stood there, wondering what—or whom—to shoot. Doc had slipped into the fiery window that had appeared in the center of the machinery, a ceaseless and nonsensical tunnel that burrowed beyond the limits of space and into time’s hidden dimensions. Don Nectar had his hands around Doc’s throat, pulling him forward as chronal energies massed all around them, the sword he held becoming a surging flame that threatened to engulf them both.
The flux of chronal energy rippled through the room, tearing at the walls and blasting through Ryan’s body as he took the shot. Down the scope he could see, magnified and centered in the crosshairs, all of time laid out before him, a spiral of seconds turned minutes turned hours turned days, a lifetime of lifetimes. Doc and his corrupted opposite, the man known as Don Nectar, were caught in pitched struggle, Nectar’s hands reaching around Doc’s throat, the old man struggling to push him away amid the flames of time. Behind them, 1896 pulsed and bloomed, expanding to take one of them, time opening like the petals of a flower.
Squeezing the trigger, Ryan sent a single bullet through the open rent in time.
Chapter Thirty
Ryan felt the longblaster buck against his shoulder, watched as his bullet raced time itself to strike the grasping hands of Nectar as he tried to chill the source from which he had budded, a parasite come to murder its host. The bullet drilled through Nectar’s hands, cutting through the tendons in his left then out through his left palm and into the right palm, continuing onward in a spurt of blood. Wounded, Don let go of Doc’s neck for a moment, but it was enough. Krysty was standing ready, her feet anchored to the spot, reaching for Doc’s hand with the Gaia power still channeling through her with the fury of the sun.
“I’ve got you,” she breathed.
Doc leaped from the fracture in the time stream, his feet skipping across the decking of the floor as he found himself, once more, on solid ground. Standing there, as chronal energies danced all about them, Doc turned back to the rip in time, saw Emily, Rachel and Jolyon for a fraction of a second. Don Nectar was hurtling through the churning tunnel of time toward them, racing past the ages in a sprawl of limbs.
“Finish him, Ryan,” Doc urged, “before it’s too late.”
Ryan stroked the trigger again, sending another bullet down the fracture of time. But Nectar was moving too fast now; the bullet would never catch up to him. “Fireblast!” Ryan cursed. “He’s out of range.”
Doc didn’t hesitate. Plucking up the discarded swordstick, he angled it at the heart of the machinery and thrust it into the metal plating with all his might. A great cascade of energy blasted through the swordstick, channeling up its length like electricity through a lightning rod, pouring into the air in a shower of chronal fury.
Thrown back, Doc crashed into the wall beneath the stairs as the unleashed stream of time rushed up the sword.
Ryan felt himself being dragged into the collapsing portal as it began to suck the untamed energies from the air, sealing the far end of the tunnel in a rapid blur of force. His feet slipped out from under him and suddenly he was in the air, still holding his longblaster as he plummeted into the gaping wound in time.
Krysty lunged, grabbed Ryan by his ankle and pulled him back. The full force of Gaia raked through her body, and when Ryan looked back he saw her hair arrayed around her head in jagged lines, like some stylized rendition of the sun. “Hold on, lover,” Krysty said, her eyes glowing a fierce green, sparking like fireworks.
Caught up there, with Krysty clinging to his ankle, there was nothing Ryan could do other than trust her. And despite all hell breaking apart around them, that was a trust that—as ever—came easy.
Before Ryan’s eyes, the gaping portal into the past flickered, energies cascading through its depths. It was sealing even as he watched, the far end—the one that touched Doc’s past—already scabbed over like a bloody wound. Amid it all, Don Nectar seemed to be disintegrating, slivers of his body unraveling as the radiation suit burned away. He had been a shadow of Doc Tanner, an echo taken substance, no more its own life than a heart murmur.
As Ryan watched, a great burst of energy exploded from Don Nectar’s form as it broke apart, firing out of the rip in time in a shadow-dark swirl. The darkness touched everyone in the room, tearing through Ryan and Krysty, striking Doc where he lay slumped by the steps, and Jak and Ricky, who were still bound by the wall.
Perhaps a hundred years hence, those echoes would emerge in the swamps of Louisiana, where five shades of long-forgotten companions would rise and take life for a moment, just pale ghosts of what they had once been. For each person had a Don Nectar within him or her, waiting to be plucked from his soul in some bloody, scarlet dream.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE BUILDING where Nyarla and her family hid, J.B. was running from a swarm of hungry time-eaters, launching a grenade at them from just ten feet away. The charge struck the nearby wall of a building and exploded, turning another cluster of the disembodied mouths into ashes. All around, his allies were engaged in similar guerrilla strikes. But as J.B. watched, the remaining cloud of chronovores winked out of existence. He halted, breathless, as cries of surprise echoed from all about the abandoned ville. They had been ready to give their lives, but now the chronovores were no more, sucked into the closing rent of the time portal.
Above the distant military base, the lightning ceased, the time window closed at last.
“What just happened?” Marla asked breathlessly, her blaster poised in trembling hands.
Mildred shook her head. “Wish I knew,” she admitted. “Just stay ready, okay?”
The other people on the snow-covered streets were waiting for what would happen next. But nothing did. Without any warning, the chronovores’ plague through time had ended.
* * *
IN THE OPERATIONS ROOM of the Operation Chronos facility, the crackling aftermath of the closing portal vibrated the air like a low bass note.
“I think this whole place is going to blow,” Ryan stated as he looked furtively around the room.
Doc stood exhausted at the edge of the humming machinery and so did Krysty. Her Gaia power had finally abated, having lasted much longer than she had ever known before. As ever, its passing had left her weak as tissue paper, and she stood there hunched over and disoriented. Beneath the metal stairs, Jak and Ricky were just now waking up, their bonds half removed by Krysty and Ryan before the battle between Doc and Nectar had kicked off.
“You two okay?” Ryan asked, swiping the sharp edge of his panga across Jak’s remaining bonds.
“Okay,” Jak admitted. “Tired, like I awake for weeks.”
“Mebbe you have been,” Ryan said, handing his panga to Jak. The albino could free Ricky. Ryan wanted to check on Krysty.
Ricky was only just waking up, struggling to remember what he had seen. “That guy in the rad suit...?” he began.
“He is gone,” Doc told him, leaning unsteadily on his swordstick, its blade back in the hidden sheath. “As if he was never here at all.”
The old man was staring at the smoldering ruins of the time machinery, wondering if this had been his last chance to return home.
“We should get going,” Ryan told him. Krysty was in his arms with her arms around his shoulders. She looked limp, as if she had no strength left in her.
Doc nodded. “He was me, was he not? A little sliver of me, like a reflection in a mirror.”
“We’ll discuss it outside, Doc,” Ryan said, urging his exhaust
ed companions back up the staircase.
Before long they had trekked through the military building and made their way to the doors that Ryan and his team had entered by. The lock remained broken, and when they stepped through the doors they were surprised to find that the building had sunk almost ten feet, leaving them to clamber out of the mess that remained. There was no more lightning in the sky above. The generators were burned out, their metal shells black with smoke where they had expelled their last iota of power.
“The whole place looks dead,” Doc said as he clambered up the slope.
“It’s melting through the snow,” Ryan said. “By this time tomorrow it’ll probably be gone entirely.”
“And there goes my gateway home.” Doc sighed.
Ryan looked at the old man, unable to express what he felt. They had all left their homes behind, one way or another, trading them for the endless roads of the Deathlands. The fact remained that they were alive, and that was a fact worth clinging on to.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” Doc said sadly.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Ryan reminded him as they walked away from the sinking remains of the military facility.
Epilogue
This much Don Nectar knew for certain: Tanner had been right. He was a shade, a shadow, a heart murmur mistaken for life.
Whatever the time scoop technology had done to Doc Tanner, it had glitched in a way that had created an afterimage, and it was that image that had been spit out in the hidden facility in Alaska, far away from the great workings of Operation Chronos. The facility had been nothing more than a B unit, a place to check data, out of the way of the Washington politicos.
Who knew how time trawling worked? Who could say what rogue data was created when a person’s form was shunted into the time stream? What had happened to Doc Tanner had happened against his will, and it had generated a sliver of rogue data that had mistakenly thought itself a man. A glitch in time called Don Nectar.
Now, as Nectar was wrenched apart, absorbed once more by the time flow, he wondered how many other Don Nectars had been created, how much rogue data still existed, searching for the host body that would join with it to make it whole and let it go home. A legion of shadows, each one a tiny sliver of what Doc Tanner could have been.
Nectar closed his eyes as time’s river washed over him, buzzing through his body with all the power of the chronal waves.
This much he knew for certain: traveling through time always came with a cost.
* * *
THEY MET in the snow-dusted plains of His Ink Orchard, close to the ruined mines. Ryan spotted J.B. and Mildred by the fire they had set to keep warm. The sun was rising once again, making its slow trek over the horizon where it would wait ponderously for the rest of the day.
“We were under attack by crazy things,” J.B. told Ryan. “Thought we were going to die when suddenly the bastards winked out of existence as if they’d never been. That was your doing, right?”
Ryan nodded. “We had a little something to do with it, yeah.”
Beside him, Krysty was brushing snow from her red-gold hair. Her strength had returned, her normal strength that was, but she would ask Mildred to check her over before they returned to the redoubt and its mat-trans, there to locate a new destination and perhaps a new destiny.
Ricky was annoyed he hadn’t seen J.B. in action in the gladiatorial ring. He idolized the weaponsmith, even if he wouldn’t come right out and say it.
Searching through her voluminous bag, Mildred produced his and Jak’s blasters and other weapons, easing the DeLisle off her shoulder. “You have to learn to pick up your toys after playing,” she chided Ricky.
Ricky knew she was kidding and he laughed.
The area that had once seemed to be beyond the edge of the world was returning to normal. Snow fell in its usual pattern, straight down without stopping; and the barricade that Nyarla and her father referred to as the Tall Wall had come down without so much as a hint that it had ever been. The bubble of ruined time—the chrono spasm—had healed, the untamed energies returned to wherever they had come from, the chronovores disappeared. Doubtless, the muties remained, but that was the twisted nature of the Deathlands.
Doc turned to his companions, a look of concern on his lined face. “I am famished,” he said. “Wherever we wind up next, let us stay long enough to find ourselves a decent meal. Mayhap, roast chicken, so delicious you can smell it a room away.”
Ryan smiled. The man had lost almost everything and yet still—somehow—he carried on. He was an inspiration to them all.
Gradually, the seven companions returned to the redoubt and made their way back to the mat-trans and whatever lay beyond. Whatever it was, they would face it as they always had—together.
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781460307083
Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library
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