As the water steamed in the basin, Tanner closed the bathroom cupboard door and stood the mirror back in place before it so that he could see himself to shave.
His face looked much older. It was his face, still, but aged, so terribly aged. It wasn’t the face of a man in his early thirties, it was the face of a man of perhaps sixty. And, as Tanner watched, his face aged further, the skin tautening around his eyes and mouth, his bony cheeks sinking, becoming dark and hollow beneath the glare of the bathroom lamp, his hair thinning, pulling back from his already high forehead. Tanner watched in horror as the skin on his cheeks showed liver spots and began to rot, and then he could see the inside of his mouth through those cheeks where holes in the flesh—his flesh—had split open.
I am losing my mind, he realized as the face in the mirror continued its ceaseless entropic march. It was the only possible explanation. People didn’t age like this, young to old in a matter of seconds. It was impossible.
His bright blue eyes seemed beady now as the hollows around them sunk, almost as though his face was pulling away. His nose had elongated somehow, but perhaps that was an optical trick, a result of his face’s withering and receding. Tanner raised his hands, pushing them against his face to try to hold everything in place, to keep from getting any older. But when he looked in the mirror he saw that his hands were just bones, the fingers of a skeleton.
“Am I dying?” he asked. “Is this dying?”
The door opened behind him, and Tanner watched over his shoulder in the mirror as Emily walked in, a vision of youthful beauty to his ancient decrepitude. “Dinner’s almost ready, darling,” she said, seemingly oblivious to the change in him.
Tanner turned, his skeletal hands still pressed against his rotting face, a picture of entropy. “My dearest,” he said, his voice sounding like dried leaves to his ears, “I fear I may be a little late.”
Emily saw him for the first time then, the change in him, and her eyes widened as she looked at her husband.
And then she began to scream.
Chapter One
Ryan Cawdor’s lone blue eye sprang open and he turned to locate the source of the sobbing he could hear. He sat on the floor of a jump chamber, and he could detect the faint hum of machinery as extractor fans whirred to clear away the lingering mist in the sealed room.
Ryan was a tall and imposing man with an unkempt mane of black hair framing his hard, scarred face. A long scar stretched along his cheek until it ended just above his left eye socket. The eye itself was missing, the evidence hidden behind a black leather eye patch. A dark pattern of stubble shaded his cheeks, the ugly white streak of scarred skin showing through.
Struggling to keep his head upright, Ryan looked at the source of the sobbing—a white-haired man just a little way across from him in the enclosed chamber. Doc Tanner was huddled in a corner, his head bowed, his shoulders heaving up and down as piteous, muffled cries came from his throat.
“Doc?” Ryan asked gently. “You okay?”
Doc looked up with bloodshot eyes, wiping at the tears that streaked his face. He appeared to be a man of perhaps sixty years of age, deep lines on his face and a shock of white hair billowing from his scalp like steam from an olden-day locomotive. He wore a Victorian frock coat over his smart trousers and white shirt. The shirt, like the coat, had seen better days. A walking cane lay on the tiled floor at his feet, an ebony stick with a polished, silver lion’s head design for its handle.
The old man reached inside his coat and pulled out a blue handkerchief decorated with a swallow’s-eye design, carefully unfolded it, then used it to dab at his drying tears. “Must it always begin like this, Ryan?” Doc asked, his usually rich baritone sounding raw with pain.
Ryan shook his head slowly, feeling the cramp in his neck muscles abate with the movement, before rising to his feet and looking around the mat-trans chamber. There were six companions in all, including himself and Doc Tanner. The other four were only now beginning to stir, dragging themselves back into full consciousness after the debilitating jump.
The mat-trans was designed to transport personnel and supplies instantaneously across the United States of America. It was a point-to-point matter-transfer device that stripped an object down to its component atoms before blasting them into the quantum ether where they could be retrieved by a receiver unit.
Traveling by mat-trans took an incredible toll on a person, causing headaches, nausea and vomiting among other side effects, but the most damaging effect was on a person’s psyche. It seemed that no matter how many times the group journeyed by mat-trans, they were still unprepared for the hideous jump dreams that it could cause. This time around, Doc Tanner, clearly, had been suffering some hallucination during the deconstruction and reforming of his corporeality.
“Deep breaths, Doc,” Ryan instructed as he checked on his other companions, feeling each of their necks in turn for a pulse. “Let it pass.”
Doc nodded, mopping the cold sweat from his brow with the handkerchief and pushing his damp white hair back from his face. “I have not had a dream quite that intense in a while,” he muttered as he slowly drew a long, deep breath.
Krysty Wroth began to push herself up into a sitting position as Ryan reached for her pulse, stretching her long legs before her and wincing as the muscles protested. Ryan’s lover, Krysty was a tall woman, curvaceous beneath the blue denim jeans and cream-colored shirt she habitually wore under her shaggy fur coat. With green eyes and pale white skin, Krysty was a breathtakingly beautiful woman, utterly stunning to look at. Her most notable feature, however, was her vibrant, flame-red hair, which fell about her face like a cascading waterfall. There was something uncanny about Krysty’s hair—it seemed to almost have a life of its own. Actually, Krysty was a mutie, and while her mutation was minor by Deathlands standards, it was plainly visible if you knew where to look, for her hair truly was alive. It crackled, it swirled, it shone and it vibrated depending on her mood. That wasn’t the only remarkable thing about Krysty, however. Besides being an excellent marksman and hand-to-hand combatant, Krysty held a secret ability in check—her ability to tap into the strength of the Earth Mother, Gaia. This Gaia power had been taught to Krysty by her mother, Sonja, and allowed her to call on incredible, superhuman strength in times of greatest need. But while Krysty could use such abilities to perform astonishing, seemingly impossible feats of might, the boost was short-lived and left her physically weak once it had passed. Like so much in the Deathlands, Krysty’s abilities were a curse as much as a blessing.
“Hey, lover,” Krysty drawled as her gaze lighted on Ryan. “I was just dreaming about you. You and me and a riverboat made for two.”
Ryan shrugged. “Mebbe that’s what’s waiting for us outside,” he said with a smile.
“Mebbe so,” Krysty said quietly, pushing her flame-red locks out of her eyes.
There was another woman in the chamber, shorter and stocky, with dark skin. Mildred Wyeth was a medical doctor of some flair. She had been born in the latter half of the twentieth century but, due to a botched operation, had been placed in cryogenic stasis just before the outbreak of nuclear hostilities in 2001. Freed from the cryo chamber a hundred years later by Ryan and his companions, Mildred had thanked every saint that her pastor father had spoken of when she learned that she had slept through the nukecaust and the terrifying skydark that followed. Sneering, the saints had to have deserted her moments after, when she realized that the people who had been killed in those early days had been the lucky ones, and that all that was left was the waking nightmare known as the Deathlands. She had no family, no friends. In time, Mildred had adapted to the shocking new reality, and while her medical skills had been invaluable, it was her Olympic-level abilities with a target pistol that had really helped her come into her own in this shockscape future she had awakened to. Mildred wore black denim jeans and a black T-shirt, with a holster at her hip that held her favored weapon, a Czech-made, ZKR 551 target pistol. A loose-fitting black jacket matched her pants. Mildred shook her head, her beaded plaits swaying about as she recovered from