Kitabı oku: «Separation»

Chapter One

Black clouds of pain and despair washed over Dean as he began to surface from the mat-trans jump. Like being lost in a sea of black, brackish water that infested every pore, clogging him with filth and filling his mouth and lungs, it was a complete isolation and a slow death. Every muscle flooding with lactic acid, making any movement painful and difficult beyond imagining, he began to stir, swimming upward to try to strike the surface. There was a patina of light that washed across the thin skin far above, separating the air from the water. He moved toward the light with a determination born of the will to live.

He struck the surface, emerging from the icy thickness below into the weak light of the air above, gasping as the oxygen hit his lungs, the viscous liquid falling away from his skin, dripping off his hair.

That moment between unconscious sleep and awakening, that fraction of a second that seemed to move on into an eternity…that was the time when the hallucinations came, the time when the dreams and nightmares at the back of his brain were called forth to haunt him once more.

It was always this way for Dean Cawdor and, as he floated on the surface of the sea of consciousness, breaking for land, he drifted back to the world of his deepest fears and insecurities, the things that he dare not admit into his conscious mind.

Although not always the same in every respect, often it was always the same in essence. A younger Dean—still the same strong, resilient youth, but still a boy—standing before his mother as she told him of his father, the son of a baron, not the man who was her husband and the powerful baron of his own ville. He could still see her face clearly. Sharona—Rona to him—had once been a beautiful woman. But that was something that lay in her past. She had been ravaged by sickness. Where once she had been slim and graceful, with feminine curves that had drawn the eye of Ryan Cawdor, she was thin and gaunt, her flesh nonexistent with seemingly only skin to cover her skeletal frame. Her once-attractive cheekbones were skull-like, her eyes sunken back into their sockets, resembling burning orbs in which the fire was slowly dimming. Her lank hair hung like hanks of rope tied into bunches to be pulled back from her forehead to stop irritating skin that was beyond pale. Ghostly and gray, her once-smooth complexion had broken out with sores in patches around her hairline and her bloodless lips. Her clothes hung like rags from her body.

“But why can’t I stay with you until you buy the farm—why can’t I be with you?” he asked, hearing himself as he was before his voice broke, the high pitch sounding alien to his own ears.

“Because it isn’t safe,” she answered simply. “When I die you’ll be all alone. I’ve taught you how to survive, but a little boy alone in the Deathlands doesn’t have much of a chance. Your future lies with your father.”

“If he’s so great, where’s he been when we both needed him?” Dean asked with disgust.

Sharona’s ravaged mouth twisted into a wry smile. “He doesn’t know about you.”

Even though there was a part of him that knew it was only a half memory, maybe a hallucination as the result of the mat-trans jump, he still felt that same heart-tearing burst of emotions he’d felt when he had been separated from her.

It had happened exactly like that, and it didn’t happen the same way every time the memory haunted his dreams, but it was still the same in essence. A woman came out of the shadows and took him by the hand, gently but firmly guiding him away from his mother, who stood and watched. As he was pulled farther away from Sharona, he could see that she was no longer the tall, graceful figure that she had once been: she was bowed over by her illness, the sudden stabs of light illuminating the paleness of her face and hands, reflecting the moonlight with an equal deathly glow. Walking backward, he could feel the pull taking him away from his mother, could see her recede into the background, her eyes seeming to follow him, intense even as the distance between them increased.

And then the scenes changed, rapidly passing in front of his eyes. He was reunited with his father who had saved his life. He was in the Nicolas Brody school, then kidnapped, forced to fight for his very life in the ruins of Las Vegas as part of a gladiatorial contest for the entertainment of warring barons. He’d been rescued by his father and the group that had become his friends and family.

Since he had joined the companions, he had forged strong bonds with all of them, particularly with Ryan, his father. But there was something within him that was still empty, still missing. Sharona had taught him to survive. She was always with him; he could never forget. Yet time had pushed her to the back of his mind. She came to him in his jump dreams, and he remembered her fierce love, a mother’s comforting touch.

The light was closing in on him, the brightness hurting his eyes, burning into his retinas, becoming almost a physical force that made the blood pound in his ears as his eardrums threatened to blow. He felt his sense of balance lose any equilibrium it may otherwise have contained. His guts turned, the bile rising as he felt the wave of nausea about to crest.

Dean screwed his eyes tight, trying to block the light and failing as he opened his mouth and felt the contents of his stomach spill out in front of him, everything forgotten in the wrenching pain.

The pain of regaining consciousness.

“CAREFUL THERE, my boy, or you may tread softly on my dreams…or at least, vomit upon them, which is perhaps no more than they deserve.”

The soft voice drifted into a high-pitched giggle that faded like a last breath, indicating that the speaker may have little or no energy of his own.

Dean’s eyes hurt, the muscles around the sockets cramping. It was only then he realized that he was holding them tightly shut. He relaxed and opened his eyes slowly, slit-peering at the area around him as the outside light burned into him. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he could see that he was in the mat-trans chamber, face to the floor. The disks beneath still held the faintest of glow of the activity of the jump, giving the floor a depth that made the nausea return. It wasn’t helped by the stench of his own vomit pooled around his head.

Shutting his eyes to stem the nausea and turning onto his back, away from the vomit, Dean slowly opened his eyes again, adjusting more quickly this time to the light. The armaglass walls that enclosed the companions were white, shot through with the faintest tinge of blue. Doc Tanner was the nearest to him, which explained why he had responded to the projectile vomit that had splashed near his legs, speeding his awakening. Doc’s lion’s-head swordstick and LeMat percussion pistol were by his side. Dean instinctively reached out to grasp his own Browning Hi-Power, which he had placed by his side before the jump.

As he grasped the blaster, a head appeared above him, framed by plaits secured at the ends by beads that draped down over him and partly obscured the face. However, there was no mistaking the warmth in the brown eyes that ran over him with an expertise to assess his condition without hesitation.

“How’re you doing, Dean?” Dr. Mildred Wyeth asked, the traces of hardship etched into her skin breaking into laugh lines as she smiled.

“Terrible,” he managed to croak.

Mildred’s hand moved over his face, her thumb gently lifting his eyelid to expose more of the eyeball. “That’s very yellow there,” she said half to herself, “and you’re sweating badly. By the look of what you’ve puked, I’d say you were dehydrated, which sure as hell isn’t going to help you get over a jump that easily.”

Dean raised himself up onto one elbow, then grimaced as the chamber spun around him. “It doesn’t usually hurt this bad,” he whispered hoarsely.

Mildred turned away from him for a second. “John, have you got any water?” she asked.

“Sure.” J. B. Dix came into view. Like Mildred, he was in full control of his faculties and was walking easily, suggesting that they had both recovered from the jump sometime earlier. The Armorer handed a canteen of water to Mildred and she proffered it to Dean.

“Drink, but take it easy or you’ll just bring it back up,” she told him.

Dean took the canteen from her and took several small sips, feeling the water slide down his throat. He didn’t feel any better immediately, but he knew he would after a short while.

Mildred took the canteen. “Take it easy. Just let your balance come back before you move too much. I’ve got to see how Doc and Jak are doing. The old buzzard’s getting as near to normal as he ever does, but Jak’s still out.”

Dean nodded and watched her move toward the prone old man. Because of the immense stresses that his body had been put through during his two trawls through time, which had seen him dragged from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and then beyond into the world of the Deathlands, Doc Tanner looked far older than his actual years. At times his mind was as fragile as his body appeared to be. He had regained consciousness, but his words and laughter toward Dean were an indication that he was still severely disoriented.

Dean felt his head begin to steady as he looked around the chamber. His father was in conversation with Krysty. Their voices were low and he couldn’t make out their words, but he felt a surge of relief through his veins that they weren’t only conscious but once more unaffected by the jump. Because, despite the fact that they had so far made many mat-trans jumps with no casualties, the old technology was erratic and its residual and cumulative effect on the human body was still an unknown.

Ryan Cawdor had already shouldered his Steyr rifle, and stood erect, his muscular frame topped by the tumbling curls that were so like his son’s, the handsome face distorted by the scar that ran down his cheek to his jaw from the empty socket hidden beneath his eye-patch. Next to him, Krysty seemed small, although the woman was tall and carried her curves on a muscular frame. Her mane of Titian-red hair curled around her head protectively when her mutie sense told her of danger. At the moment her hair hung loose and free, suggesting that they were, for the moment, safe.

To one side of them, J.B. hovered near Mildred and Doc, waiting to see if there was anything he could do to assist as she gently nursed Doc back to reality. She was talking to him in a mixture of soothing tones and insulting words, cajoling him in the manner that he would expect from her as she tried to root him into his everyday reality.

Dean could see that Jak Lauren was still curled into a fetal ball. Despite the strange jump dreams he usually endured, Dean often snapped out of unconsciousness fairly easily and was very rarely as ill as he had been this time around. Jak, on the other hand, always seemed to suffer badly; his thin and wiry frame illequipped for the specific rigors of a mat-trans jump. Although in the outside world he was a strong and resourceful hunter, he was always one of the last to come around, and nearly always vomited heavily in the same way that Dean had a short while before. The youth allowed himself a rueful grin; he figured that at least he had an insight into how Jak suffered.

“Yes, yes, it all becomes clear now. Once more unto the breach, my dear friend, once more unto the breach.”

“Yeah, still a crazy old coot, but at least crazy like normal,” Mildred said with satisfaction as she stood and moved away from Doc to close in on the still-prone Jak, who was twitching as the first vestiges of consciousness began to stir within him.

Doc’s eyes, surprisingly clear and piercing considering his state a few moments before, met Dean’s.

“A strange world, is it not?” he asked simply.

“Sure is, Doc,” the young Cawdor replied.

He moved his gaze to watch Mildred bend over Jak, with J.B. waiting patiently near. Continuing on, his eyes rested once more on his father and Krysty.

He had the strangest feeling. Something had been eating at him from the back of his brain. Something that had to do with family and the feeling that he had to search for something—or someone. It had been there before the sudden breaking of light and the wave of nausea had washed over him to wipe out everything.

But it was gnawing away, trying to make itself known again.

THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY. The companions adopted standard tactics for exiting the chamber and securing the immediate area. Because of the opacity of the armaglass and the function making soundproofing thickness a necessity, it was always hard to tell if the area immediately outside the chamber door held any threat. So it was a matter of course to adopt triple-red status until safety was revealed.

From that point it was simply a matter of sweeping through the corridors to ascertain their status. A simple task in this instance, it seemed that the redoubt had been unoccupied for some time and the entrance had either never been discovered or breached by anyone from the outside. Because of that, the redoubt was still as fully stocked as it had been before the nukecaust. The companions were able to sleep easily and comfortably for the first time in ages, and also to shower and change their clothes. For Mildred, it was an opportunity to restock pharmacy supplies. For J.B., the chance to replenish stocks of ammo, grens and plas ex. The kitchens allowed them to plunder some self-heats. The canned food, which combusted with enough heat to warm the food on opening, was far from ideal. But when it was difficult to find any kind of game to hunt, self-heats came into their own and kept the companions fed until they were able to find something more palatable.

“ARE WE READY TO HEAD OFF?” Ryan asked as he shouldered the backpack containing supplies plundered from the redoubt, one of several such bags they had filled from the well-stocked base.

He was greeted with assent from the companions, who hoisted their own loaded backpacks and shouldered their newly cleaned and refilled weapons.

“Let’s hope that the reason we’ve found this undisturbed isn’t because the entrance is under a ton of rocks,” Doc commented dryly.

“You don’t even want to go down that road, my friend,” Mildred said before adding, “Not that you could, if it was under a ton of rock.”

Her good humor reflected how the companions felt. After two days’ rest in perfect peace, and the added bonus of a shower and a change of clothing, they felt more than ready to face what may lay ahead.

“Okay, let’s get going,” Ryan stated.

They made their way in line through the echoing and empty corridors of the lower level to the elevator. Having already tested the car during their brief stay, they knew it could carry them to the top level. They entered the elevator and traveled up in silence. Leaving the car as it came to rest, they walked briskly along the winding corridor until they arrived at the final set of sec doors, which was all that separated them from the outside world and whatever it may hold.

Ryan, at the head of the line, paused before initiating the procedure that would open the door. As did the rest of the companions, he scanned the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, searching for any sign of stress that may have resulted from earth movement, indicating that the door could be in any way impeded.

It was Mildred who voiced the general opinion. “Doesn’t look like there’s any problem so far—this tunnel looks as smooth as the day it was built,” she said softly.

The sec door began to rise, a cool breeze wafting in through the widening gap. As the viewing space increased with the ascent of the door, they could see that the redoubt was positioned at the summit of a small hill. A road twisted its way down the incline of the slope until it reached the edge of a beach, then veered off to the left behind the circumference of the hill. The beach was short, leading into a stretch of water that was about two miles long before hitting an island that looked to be only a few square miles in size. Beyond the island, the sea stretched toward the horizon.

“They didn’t exactly try to hide this one, did they?” Doc commented.

“I don’t know,” J.B. mused. “Facing away from the mainland, would anyone have come around this side of the hill? There’s only that island and not a lot else.”

“Yeah, I can figure that before skydark, but what about after? How come no one coming down the peninsula has searched this out, especially as it’s so open?” Mildred asked.

Krysty shrugged. “Could be—if there are no villes near—that no one wants to come down the peninsula, even if they’re in search of shelter. After all,” she added, looking out to the sea on either side of the hill, with only the distant coastline to break the view, “it’s not as if this is even much of a peninsula.”

“Best to wait to see what it’s like when we get around the other side,” Ryan said. “Keep on triple-red, and string out. We’ll follow the road.” He looked around. “There isn’t much cover for us or for anyone wanting to attack us, so I guess we should be okay as long as we keep alert.”

The one-eyed man signaled them to move with a wave of the Steyr rifle that he held in his right hand, and began to walk down the road that curved along the slope of the hill. Following him down, it was easy for the rest of them to see that he was accurate in his assessment of the territory. The hill was a verdant green, with only small rocks and pebbles poking through the covering of topsoil. There was little in the way of vegetation to provide any sort of cover on the hillside, and Krysty’s hair flowed free down her back, indicating that there was little in the way of hidden danger to alert her mutie sense.

The road had a rough shale-and-gravel surface that crunched under their marching feet, the loose rock shooting across onto the grass and down the slope of the hill toward the beach.

As they descended, Mildred looked at the island that lay only a couple of miles out across the narrow channel. It was fairly flat and seemed to be well covered by vegetation and trees. The environment on the small piece of land seemed to be better equipped for supporting life than the barren hillside of the peninsula.

They reached the bottom of the hill and followed the road, most of them glancing out at the channel. It seemed calm as the waves lapped gently along the shallow beach, but as their glances strayed farther out, they could see patches of white water that pointed to a crosscurrent that could be deadly to the unsuspecting. It was likely the island was isolated and uninhabited because of it. Despite the proximity to land, negotiating the narrow channel would be a dangerous task.

Looking up, the entrance to the redoubt could be quite plainly seen and once more it crossed Mildred’s mind to wonder why the predark base had been left so completely undisturbed over the past century.

Rounding the hill, the companions found that they were immediately ascending once more, the land on the reverse of the hill narrowing to a band of rock that formed a sharp slope that led upward to form a bridge between the hill and the mainland. The tides around the coast had to have eaten away at the rocks over centuries, chipping away the land until it formed little more that a narrow causeway. The topsoil that covered the hill became more sparse, slabs of rock showing through and coloring the landscape a slate gray.

“I’ve got a feeling I know why the redoubt has been left alone,” Mildred said as they climbed, the incline becoming steeper with each footfall.

It was a rhetorical statement. They could all quite clearly see what had happened. The centuries of tide had worn the rock to a narrow bridge, the shift in the landscape fashioned by the post-nukecaust nuclear winter rendering a causeway at its narrowest point. Jagged shards of rock fell abruptly away to the razor-sharp granite below, which was consistently being lashed by the current as the tides forced water into the narrow channel. Across the divide, which seemed to be about ten yards in length, the causeway reappeared with the same jagged disruption in the pattern of the dark rock face. It was as though the tide and the earth movement beneath had caused a great chunk of the natural bridge to be ripped wholesale from the causeway and just tossed away, isolating the hill completely from the mainland. Beyond the divide, the causeway widened to join the rest of the coastline, where the greenery was lush and the land looked fertile and verdant.

“Fireblast,” Ryan whispered softly. He knew that if there was some way to bridge the divide, they would reach a landscape that offered the promise of good living and perhaps a friendly ville. To their back lay only an island and the barren hill, with the possibility of a quick mat-trans jump to another place—always assuming their constitutions could take another jump so quickly. Knowing how Doc and Jak were always affected, and from the way in which Dean had suffered with this particular jump, it didn’t seem a viable option this soon.

Jak joined the one-eyed man at the head of the divide and looked down onto the razor-sharp rocks. The albino looked across toward the far side of the gap, screwing up his red eyes to get a better view in the wind that whipped through the hole left by the missing rock.

“If bit shorter, would say try climb down, mebbe get across, then make rope across.”

Ryan nodded briefly. “String some across, then hand-over-hand. Half, mebbe three-quarters, of the distance and we could all make it. But this is a bit much for Doc, mebbe for Mildred and Dean, as well. Anyway, who could get down this side, across and then up the other?”

Jak shrugged. “Mebbe me, if water not run strong down there.”

Ryan cast his eye down to the cross-tide as it crashed on the razored rocks. He grimaced. “Yeah, try to get across those rocks with no tide and you could probably just about make it. But if one of those waves catches you, you’re fucked.”

Jak nodded once. “Cut you up like the sharpest knife.”

“Nothing to do except go back, then,” Ryan stated.

The other companions moved to the edge of the rock for a better view of the channel. Looking along the coastline that lay behind the hill and peninsula, they could see that the drop from the top of the land to the sea below was sheer for as far as the eye could see. Small strips of sand here and there ended in a sheet of rock that would impede any progress, even assuming they had a craft on which to sail around the hill and the causeway. The rock bridge, so violently severed, was their only practical hope of reaching the mainland.

“I fear this may turn out to be something of an anticlimax,” Doc said woefully.

“Mebbe not,” J.B. told them. “We’ve got two choices—go back to the redoubt and get the hell out…”

“Or?” Dean asked.

“Or we try to get to that island, see what it’s like there. Mebbe there’s some life of some kind, or mebbe just a place we could rest up for some time.”

“Life?” Mildred questioned. “John, how the hell could anyone live on there, cut off from anywhere else?”

The Armorer gave her a rare grin. “I only said mebbe, Millie,” he countered.

They turned and walked back down the incline of the road to the base of the hill.

“What do you think, Dad?” Dean asked. “Reckon we could get out to the island?”

“Not keen on making another jump so soon?” Ryan queried.

Dean tried to keep the darkness out of his voice, but couldn’t stop it crossing his brow as he spoke. “I can’t say as I’d be too happy about having to do that,” he said simply.

“That is something on which I think many, if not all, of us would agree,” Doc muttered.

“Rather chance water than go back to mat-trans so soon,” Jak added.

“I figured you’d mebbe all feel that way,” the one-eyed man said as they hit the road base and rounded the circumference of the hill. They came to the thin strip of beach that petered out into nothing at the bend of the land.

Ryan looked toward the island, judging not so much the distance or the terrain as the state of the water that lay between. For about half a mile or so the water was quite calm. It also seemed to be calm as it neared the shore of the island. However, there was about a mile of rough sea between these two points, the white water pointing to a boiling rage of current beneath the almost-calm surface.

“Do you think we can make it across that, especially with no raft of any kind—and nothing that I can see around here to build one?” J.B. asked.

Ryan shook his head. “It’s a hard call,” he mused. “I figure we’re all strong enough to make the distance. The only problem is just how much of a bastard that current in the middle is going to be.” He continued, pointing to the white water that speckled the surface, “And how deep is this channel? Are there rocks under the current like the ones we’ve just seen, waiting to rip us to shreds if we get pushed onto them?”