Krysty turned to the woman and showed a bright, warm smile. “Such a sleepyhead,” she said with a pleasant chuckle, and Mildred joined in a moment later as Ryan made his way across the room to check on his remaining companions.
Leaning against the wall that was farthest from Doc was J. B. Dix, also known as the Armorer. He was much shorter than Ryan, wiry, rather than muscular, and lacked Ryan’s regal air. J.B. wore an oversize jacket with capacious pockets in which he kept numerous weapons and caches of bullets. J.B. was a weaponsmith of exceptional knowledge, and his designation as “the Armorer” was well-earned. He didn’t simply know blasters, he loved them. Ballistics wasn’t a science to him, it was an art form.
J.B. was a little older than Ryan, and the pair had been companions on the road for many years, dating back to the days of the legendary Trader, who roamed the Deathlands in War Wag One. The Armorer habitually wore a battered brown fedora atop his head, the shadow of its brim hiding his eyes the way his jacket hid his arsenal. Round-framed spectacles were perched on the bridge of his nose. J.B. was shortsighted, and without them his targeting ability was significantly compromised.
The final member of the group was Jak Lauren. An albino, Jak’s skin was chalk white, and his shoulder-length hair was the color of bone. Jak was a wild child, heading toward the end of adolescence and still as thin as a rake. His face was sharp, its angular planes like blades. As Ryan watched, the young man’s eyes flickered open, twin orbs of a terrifying ruby red. Jak wore a camo jacket that was decorated with shards of glass and sharp slivers of metal to prevent anyone grabbing at him unawares. Bits of razor were sewn into the collar. Jak spoke in scattered streams of words, as though his thoughts were too close to the surface to wait for formation into complete sentences. He could kill with blaster or with his bare hands, but he was most comfortable with his .357 Magnum Colt Python and the many leaf-bladed throwing knives he had secreted about his loose clothing.
“Got sicks,” Jak murmured as Ryan checked on him, pulling himself to a crouching position and wrapping his arms around his knees. He had been with the companions for a long time, and he knew the feeling of nausea brought on by the mat-trans jump would pass. He just had to wait it out.
As he strode to the door, Ryan checked the breach of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster, ensuring it was loaded as he spoke. He had another weapon—a scoped SSG-70 Steyr rifle—strapped to his back, and an eighteen-inch panga held in strapped to his leg.
“Everyone looks in one piece,” he stated. “We all about ready to move?”
There was a general groan of consent from the companions as they checked their own weapons.
“Right,” Ryan continued. “Triple red until we know what’s out there.” That said, the one-eyed man depressed the door’s lever.
FOR ALL THEIR differences in geography, most every mat-trans seemed to be the same. The compact matter-transfer chamber was usually located in a redoubt, an old U.S. military installation occupying a remote location, deliberately hidden from public view. Or in a few cases hidden in plain sight.
Warily, the six companions made their way swiftly through the bland concrete corridors, searching for working armament, ammo and food as they went. The place appeared deserted, but Ryan and his colleagues had learned never to make assumptions like that. When you assume, as J. B. Dix sometimes stated, you made a corpse out of you and me.
Dark water stains marred the gray walls and ceilings, peppered here and there with mould a lime green and vibrant, vomit yellow. Pools of water, no deeper than an inch, glistened on the floor of the corridors as the automated lighting pop-pop-popped to life when hundred-year-old motion sensors detected the companions passing through. Obviously there was a breach in the walls somewhere.
It didn’t take long to locate the exit, and Ryan and Krysty worked the door controls before cautiously leading the way outside into the balmy evening air. It was raining, a needle-thin, warm drizzle that smelled faintly of sulfur. Acid rain was a major concern. A potent rain could strip flesh from the bone in minutes.
“Nice,” Krysty said sarcastically. She tentatively stretched out a hand into the drizzle. Not even a tingle, which meant there was no acid in the rain.
“Come out and play, lover,” Krysty teased, turning around and around as the rain spattered on her upturned face, her eyes screwed tightly closed.
The one-eyed man walked out into the shower to join Krysty, reaching his big arm around her back. The others followed a moment later.
Ryan glanced up at the sky and adjusted the time on his wristwatch. “Looks like we’ve crossed time zones,” he said. “Figure we’re out east somewhere. What do you say, J.B.?”
J.B. was consulting his minisextant, But the bad weather made it impossible to get a bearing on their location. Mildred spoke up. “We’re in Tennessee,” she said. As one, the companions turned to her with questioning looks. “I read it on one of the order forms back in the redoubt,” she explained with a shrug.
Jak joined Ryan and Krysty at the head of the group and, walking three abreast, the companions made their way along a muddy track and out through a clump of overgrown vegetation. The albino pointed out some vibrant red berries that grew on one of the bushes as they passed. “Hungry?” he asked Ryan.
Ryan nodded, wondering if he should taste the berries, but Krysty was shaking her head in warning. He saw several beetles eating at the berries, their black carapaces glistening with raindrops.
Grinning, Jak shook his head, too. “Chilled later,” he explained.
Ryan withdrew his hand and advised the others not to touch the flora. “Poison berries,” he said by way of explanation.
Beyond the vegetation that masked the redoubt entrance, the companions found themselves in what looked like another shit-forsaken excuse for farmland. An old road stretched off toward the horizon, its asphalt surface cracked, the open rents bubbling with the putrid rainwater. Around the road were several fields, one containing a few gangly stalks of corn, another a regimented orchard full of dead apple trees, their pointed branches like reaching talons, black nails clawing for the cloud-dulled sky. Several cawing birds, large with dark plumage, braved the rain to swoop into the fields, picking off insects or rodents that their sharp eyesight had spied.
As Jak sprinted ahead, scoping out the area about them, Krysty fell into step with Ryan, sidling close and wrapping an arm around his waist.
“Seems like a nice place,” she drawled, looking up into Ryan’s good right eye.
“No one’s tried to kill us yet,” Ryan stated. “I could grow to like that.”
Behind them, Mildred was taking inventory of the contents of her medical kit, checking her dwindling supplies as she walked along the churned-up remains of the cracked strip of road.
J.B. and Doc took up the rear, walking beside each other, the older man swinging his lion’s-head cane with a flourish as he took each step.
Watching the road with alert eyes, J.B. said quietly, “What was going on back there, Doc?” he asked. “You seemed pretty out of it.”
“Old ghosts,” the old man replied thoughtfully, “come back to haunt me once again. Emily. My dear sweet Emily.”
Emily was Doc’s wife, J.B. knew, back from a hundred years before the nukecaust. Doc had a strange life’s journey. He had been born in the nineteenth century, and had lived the life of an academic before finding himself the subject of a cruel experiment in time manipulation. Against his will, Doc had been pulled through time by the scientists of Project Chronos, into the tail end of the twentieth century.
However, those same scientists—“whitecoats” in the Deathlands vernacular—had reckoned without Doc’s intellect, and had soon become exasperated with his continued attempts to hinder and outright retard their progress. Using the same time-trawling technology, they had dumped their irascible subject far in the future, and Doc had suddenly found himself in the Deathlands, one hundred years