Kitabı oku: «Ritual Chill»

Chapter One

Blackness whirled around, some parts darker than others, some so deep they were no longer black but something else, something to which he couldn’t put a name. Something that was sucking him in and tearing him apart at the same time: inclusion and expulsion in the same breath. Breath of what? This was just darkness: but a darkness that seemed to have sentience and life of its own.

Like a bellows that fanned flames, it seemed to puff and blow until finally it expelled him, sending him spinning upward, dizzyingly until…

He opened his eye, wincing at the light. It was, to all intents and purposes, muted, but to his vision seemed harsh and glaring. The icy blue orb watered as he blinked, slowly adjusting.

Fireblast, would there ever be a time when the mattrans jump became easier? Would there ever be a time when he could look at the opaque armaglass and the disks inlaid on the floor of the chamber, without a feeling of revulsion or nausea? Without—yes, he had to admit it—fear? Fear that he wouldn’t awaken from the vivid nightmares of the jump, fear that his disassembled being would be scattered into a dimension he couldn’t comprehend, let alone name. A fear that the solution was becoming worse than the problem.

The problem being that to escape whatever firefight they had become embroiled in, to escape whatever wasteland they had been traversing, they used the mattrans in the redoubt from which they had initially emerged. Of course there were exceptions: sometimes the redoubt had been destroyed in action, sometimes their journey had taken them far from their initial point of contact. Mostly, though, they would return to the chamber to effect an evacuation.

So where would they end up? They never really knew, only that there was a good chance it would be better than where they had recently departed. That’s if the redoubt hadn’t been damaged and they weren’t transmitted into a mass of rock or a watery grave. Which was always a possibility. But it hadn’t happened yet, and a continued existence was about riding your luck and playing the odds.

Sometimes, though, in the seconds that seemingly stretched into agonizing hours as they began to emerge from the unconsciousness of a jump, Ryan began to wonder about the effect it had on their bodies and their minds. To have your very being disassembled, scrambled and shot across vast distances before being reconstituted once more: what kind of damage did that do over time?

Ryan Cawdor pulled himself to his feet, shaky and unsteady, the world around him spinning rapidly one way, then slowly the opposite, as it gained equilibrium. He felt a rise of bile in his throat and spit a gob of phlegm onto the chamber floor, hoping it would halt the rising nausea. Breathing deeply, closing his eye, he felt his guts settle.

Around him the others were beginning to stir. Krysty and Mildred were the sharpest, dragging themselves from their stupor, climbing unsteadily to their feet and checking their weapons and themselves, in that order. J. B. Dix took a little longer, choking slightly as he came around, his unfocused eyes seemingly small and beady without his spectacles, only coming to life when he placed them on his sharp nose.

Which left Doc and Jak, always the last to come around. And, as always, Jak greeted their new surroundings with a spray of vomit, bile spewing from his guts as he tried to adjust himself to being made whole once again. His body shook with the spasms as he braced himself, on all fours, against the floor of the chamber before heaving. Watching him, Ryan wondered how much more of this the albino could take before he was running on empty, with nothing left to do except to spew himself inside out.

But what options did they have? Without this mode of travel, they would have bought the farm long ago. There were too many enemies, too many troubles behind them to stop running, even if it did sometimes seem as though they never actually moved.

Doc muttered to himself, only the odd syllable breaking surface and making sense. Sense in that it was something recognizable, not that there was any kind of logic running through his discourse. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, smearing streaks across the pale skin, a pallor like a man who was already chilled.

Mildred moved across to him, slowly, still feeling her own way out of the jump.

“I don’t know why he’s still with us,” she muttered almost to herself. “By rights, he should have crumbled to dust a long time ago.”

Ryan gave her a skewed grin. “Doc’s got no choice, like all of us. Stay with it or buy the farm. Who’d want to do that by their own choice?”

Eventually, Doc’s eyeballs turned from in on themselves and slowly began to come to terms with the world around him.

“My dear Dr. Wyeth.” His voice sounded husky as Mildred solidified in front of his eyes. “I had the most wonderful dream. That I was free—”

“You’re free now,” Mildred said softly. “At least, you’re with us and you’re okay. And you’re still alive.”

Doc grimaced. “Is that how you define freedom? Does it not occur to you that we seem to be at the mercy of some blind idiot deity who pushes us on, even when we would wish to stop? An entertainment for Olympians who would wish us to fight the same battles once and again, for all eternity? Never resting, never stopping, always being driven on to constant, repeated combat for nothing more than their own gratification.”

“I don’t think I would have put it quite like that,” Mildred mused. “But I do wonder how much more of a battering a body can take before it just gives up. And for what?”

“Staying alive,” Ryan answered. “That’s all. Anything else is—shit, what did that old book say? Gravy.”

Krysty gave him a curious glance. “What kind of an old book was that, and what the hell did it mean?”

Ryan shook his head, regretting it as some of the dizziness returned. “It was just some old book that I found once, but I figured that what it meant was that keeping out of shit was the main thing, and anything else good was extra and should be appreciated.”

“Nice sentiment, strange expression.” Krysty shrugged.

“Yeah. But any kind of words won’t secure this shit, so let’s get to it,” Ryan replied, figuring that it was time to stop thinking and to see where they had landed.

IT WAS A SHOCK. All redoubts followed similar patterns, were designed from the same predark plans that meant the old predark sec forces could move from redoubt to redoubt and familiarize themselves with the layout immediately, know where everything was in the case of a sudden alert. Not that it had done any of them much good when the nukecaust had come, because no matter where you were, you had to surface sooner or later. And if you were sec, you were supposed to be fighting this war.

But within the fantasy world of the twentieth-century military, it all made sense: keep these things to a basic design and U.S. soldiers could live down there for as long as it took.

Which was, ultimately, good news for the companions, who could find their way around any redoubt in which they landed. Except that this time they wouldn’t have to: they already knew it.

There were many similarities, but all the same every redoubt had its differences and unique points. Some of these were to do with the specific function allotted to the base in its predark life. Some were to do with the ravages of time in the period since. It meant that each redoubt that existed, no matter how long it had been silent, still had its own specific character.

This one hadn’t been empty that long. No sooner had Ryan and the companions carried out basic maneuvers and secured the area than the familiarity of this particular redoubt impressed itself upon them.

“Can’t be,” J.B. said. “Hasn’t happened all that often.”

“If you consider that there are only a finite number of these infernal places and that the laws of probability dictate—”

“Doc, shut up.” Mildred cut across him. “Are you saying that we’ve been here before? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t get any bells ringing.”

“You haven’t been here before,” Ryan answered with emphasis. “Neither has Jak. But the rest of us know this place only too well.”

“Only too well indeed,” Doc echoed with a touch of melancholy in his voice. He began to wander down the corridor outside the mat-trans control room. He appeared to know where he was going.

“Safe doing that?” Jak questioned.

“There isn’t anyone here to harm us,” Ryan told him.

“No one, but mebbe a few memories that aren’t so great,” Krysty murmured.

They followed behind Doc, Mildred and Jak exchanging puzzled glances. No one else spoke. They merely followed the old man as he trailed along the maze of corridors, his demeanor showing a definite intent. He passed numerous closed doors and moved up a level, until coming to a closed door.

The companions held back, letting Doc enter the room on his own. They could hear the sounds of lockers being opened, the rustling of clothes and then silence.

Krysty moved forward silently, looking into the room. Doc was on his knees in front of a line of open lockers, among a pile of clothes. There were jackets, short skirts and buckskin boots. He took a yellow silk blouse and held it up to his nose, inhaling deeply before looking at Krysty with an almost infinite sadness.

“They don’t even smell of her. They don’t smell of anything at all. It’s as though she never existed.”

IT HAD BEEN A WHILE. Perhaps not that long, but it was hard to say. So much had happened to them since then that the passage of time seemed impossible to quantify. Finnegan and Hennings were gone. So were Okie and Hunnaker. Doc had been even more of an enigma. Mildred had still been frozen, and Jak still in the bayou. The corpses of Keeper Quint and his sister-wife Rachel were here somewhere, wherever they had dumped them after the firefight that had chilled them—Hunnaker, too. And Lori was lost to them. Quint’s daughter—mebbe Rachel’s, mebbe another chilled wife’s, they’d never been able to work that one out—who had chosen them over the insanity of her inbred family existence and had become Doc’s companion. The clean slate of her untutored mind provided a sounding board for the time-traveler’s tortured psyche until she had been cruelly snatched from him.

The redoubt had continued to function without anyone to trouble its automated systems. Left to the efficiency of the old tech, it had continued to light and heat the underground warren and to maintain a level of operable capability. It hadn’t changed since they had left it.

Which should have given them cause for celebration. The showers and baths still worked, the water was still hot. There were still plentiful supplies and the armory was as it had been left after they had plundered it last time. Even having taken all that they could carry, there was still far more that had been left behind. The size of the armory—indeed, the size of the redoubt as a whole—had been dictated by its proximity to the old Soviet Union, and even though that threat had long since been erased, the detritus of an ancient conflict still marked its passing.

The glittering mosaic floor of the stores still beckoned with operating old tech, clothes, vids and tapes of old shows and music the likes of which Mildred hadn’t seen since her predark life.

It should have been a chance for them to rest up, knowing that they were alone and that there was little to disturb them beyond the sec doors to the outside world. They could relax and recuperate.

But it wasn’t going to work that way.

The armory, for a start. If the remains of the twisted skeleton they had encountered on their last visit weren’t enough, the distorted skeleton was now dust, disturbed from its years of rest, the warning scrawled in blood on the door now faded after being exposed to the touch of human flesh and sweat, they were soon reminded that the majority of the weaponry and ammo left in the armory was of little use to them. The blasters were too big or clumsy, or not makes and models in which any of them were proficient or comfortable. The ammo for the weapons they used was either cleaned out or not there in the first place, the only ordnance left suitable for the blasters they had dismissed.

Beyond the armory, there was enough old tech and cultural artifacts to keep them occupied for years. Except that Jak wasn’t interested, Mildred found them reminders of her past that she would prefer to keep buried, and for the others they were reminders only of the previous visit and the disasters that had ensued.

Mildred, tired of being reminded of the world before the nukecaust, asked what had happened.

She listened while they told her and Jak of their previous visit to this redoubt and their encounter with the Keeper. How he had been desperate for new blood to provide for another Keeper to succeed him, and how he and his sister-wife Rachel had clung to the companions to give them that new blood, wanting to keep them here. About how, when they had then left the redoubt they had encountered the Russian bandits who had made their way across the wastelands separating the old United States from the old USSR in the snow-filled lands that had once been Alaska.

Jak nodded recognition when they spoke of the Russian Major, Zimyanin, who had led the Russian sec in pursuit of the bandits. The name was familiar to him from the time when the mat-trans had sent them to the old capital of the USSR, Moscow, and they had once more encountered the granite-faced sec man.

But even though he may have expected to have heard all about their previous encounter, he was astonished when the facts unfolded. The fact that they had broken a dam with an old missile and flooded part of the land in escaping from Zimyanin’s arbitrary justice was something that had been unknown to him. Ryan’s description of the expression on the Russian’s face when the dam broke made Jak laugh, a short, loud bark that broke the silence. A noise he doubled when he heard how the man had been duped by another missile, this one a dummy.

It should have broken the tension, but it didn’t. They were all still uneasy. There was little in the way of useful food supplies left from their previous stopover, so they would have to move soon anyway: jump to another location or walk out into a hostile and frozen environment that had been changed by the dam burst. If they jumped, it was possible that the new redoubt and its environs would be just as hostile.

As Ryan had once read in a predark book, better the devil you knew… They’d attempt to find more supplies in the frozen wasteland before attempting a jump.

“RECKON WE SHOULD MOVE as soon as possible,” Ryan said to Krysty as they settled into the whirlpool bath that was still working perfectly. “Could make the food last a few days, but…”

Krysty shook her head, the long red tresses flowing freely over her shoulders. Despite the air of unease about the redoubt, there was no danger, and so her sentient hair remained at ease, despite the swirl of worry that surrounded her heart.

“It’s going to be hard out there. Real hard. I remember what it was like from before. But it’s got to be better than in here. It’s like there are ghosts watching us, coming down and pressing us into the ground.”

Ryan said nothing for a moment. Finally he broke the silence. “Shouldn’t be that way. We’ve chilled our share—had to, before they chilled us. Quint and Rachel were just another two. No reason they should come back, not something stupe like ghosts, but the memory…”

Krysty reached out and stroked his face, tracing the line of his scar from the empty eye socket down to his jaw. “It isn’t them,” she said simply. “It’s Hunnaker. It’s Lori. It’s being back where so much really started. And it’s being able to relax for once. We know what’s out there—more or less—and we know what’s in here. There’s nothing to keep on edge about. And when you do that, that’s when the ghosts start to creep back and you have the time to think about all the things that you don’t really want to think about.”

“So mebbe the sooner we get on the move, the sooner we have things to deal with and the sooner this feeling will go.”

“You got that, lover.” She pulled him toward her. “But while we are here, do you remember what we did the last time we used this bath?” Her hands probed beneath the surface of the water, reaching for him. “Oh, yeah, I reckon you do.” She smiled.

“Right…” Ryan moved in close, his hands reaching down under the water for her.

It wasn’t just sex, it was making love, connecting in a way that they hadn’t been able to for too long. They had the space, the privacy and the time. What was more, the intensity drove away the demons, banishing them to some area far away where they could no longer disturb or intrude.

It was only afterward, when they had finished, and had left the bath, that Ryan wandered into the gym that led off the bathroom. While the bath drained as noisily as it had on their previous visit, and Krysty dried herself off, there was some memory that had come back to Ryan and was bugging him. It was only when he looked over at the closed door and expected to see a length of green ribbon that he remembered: Quint had watched them when they were here before and had left the ribbon by accident. He wore it in his long, tangled beard. Krysty had found the length that time. And now Ryan had expected to see it once again, even though he knew that was impossible.

He was still standing naked, staring at the door, when she came out to him. Following the line of his gaze, she knew what he was seeing in his mind’s eye.

“Do you think Doc’s right?” he asked simply. Then, when he noticed Krysty’s puzzled stare, he added: “What he was saying in the chamber, about us repeating ourselves time and time again. Back here, waiting for it to start over just like last time…”

“But it’s not the same, is it? There’s no Quint, no Zimyanin, and the landscape outside is different after the dam broke. We’ve got Jak and Mildred. So it’s different. But there are some things that are the same, that are always the same. There’s always some bastard who wants to stand in our way, or pick a fight with us. So we fight. Either that or let them chill us, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to buy the farm yet.”

“True enough,” Ryan agreed, putting his arm around her and pulling her close so that he could feel her warmth, reassure himself that she was real even if his fears weren’t. “But don’t you remember that one time we wanted to head to where Trader said there was a place we could settle and build a life without having to fight?”

“Yeah, and look how much we had to fight when we were looking. No more or less than we have to fight now. Mebbe it doesn’t even exist. Mebbe it’s like that place Mildred told us about once, that was in an old book. Erewhon. Even heard of that myself, back in Harmony. Supposed to be where everything was perfect.”

“So where was it?”

Krysty fixed him with a stare. “Know what you get if you take the letters in Erewhon and put them in a reverse order? Nowhere, Ryan. And mebbe that’s what Trader’s place is—just somewhere in your head that you can try and make.”

“But the disk. If we could ever have cracked that comp code, then—”

“Then mebbe it was only the plans for some so-called perfect place, like all the ideas that those stupes who started the nukecaust ever had. Plans, not a real place. And if it was a real place, mebbe it was standing then but not now.”

“So there was no point in searching?”

She shrugged. “Depends what for. If it’s for something solid and tangible, then mebbe not. But if it was for somewhere we could settle and make that place ourselves, then mebbe.”

“Then every time we land somewhere, there’s always a chance. If only it wasn’t for those stupe bastards who just don’t get it…”

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN an opportunity for them to get some valuable sleep before they stepped out into the frozen wastes, but no one was in any mood to sleep easily in the redoubt that night. The sense of unease that had permeated the air like a poison gas got into their dreams, making them wake from nightmares. Some never got as far as the nightmares: Doc stayed awake all night, staring at the ceiling, trying to will himself into sleep but failing as the images tumbled around his head. Lori became mixed with Emily, Rachel and Jolyon. His love in the new century entangled with those of two hundred years before. All lost to him now, like everything. Like his very sanity. Even if only from the things he had witnessed since being shot forward into a post-nukecaust world. Let alone the horrors of being dragged from his own time, subjected to whitecoat experiment, then discarded like a broken doll.

By the time morning came, and most had groggily awakened from their disturbed slumbers, Doc was no longer sure if any of this was real. Was he really here or was he still in a cell, taunted and tortured for the benefit of a twisted science?

Even worse, was he still back in the nineteenth century, in a padded cell, raving and delusional while his beloved Emily wept for him?

For, if he were truly mad, how would he know?