End Day
End Day
James Axler
TIME WARPEDRyan Cawdor and his six companions struggle to survive postnuclear America, a grim new world where hope for the future is lost amid the devastation.APOCALYPSE REDUXIn pursuit of a hardened enemy–Magus–Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they've encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in twentieth-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they're not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just seventy-two hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day…
TIME WARPED
Ryan Cawdor and his six companions struggle to survive postnuclear America, a grim new world where hope for the future is lost amid the devastation.
APOCALYPSE REDUX
In pursuit of a hardened enemy—Magus—Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they’ve encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in twentieth-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they’re not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just seventy-two hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day...
“This isn’t Deathlands!
Where in nukin’ hell are we?”
J.B. stared up at the wall-to-wall buildings as if he’d never seen the like.
Ryan didn’t seem to notice the Armorer’s distress. He took stock of their surroundings, realizing that the companions had been there before, in the future, amid ashes and ruin. He focused his attention on the traffic, looking from one license plate to another.
“What year is this?” he asked Veronica.
“It’s 2001.”
Doc groaned. “We have jumped back in time.”
“You’re from the future?”
Ryan ignored her question. “What month is it? What day?”
“It’s January 19,” Veronica replied. “Why, do you have somewhere more important to be?”
“Any place but here and now would be just fine,” Ryan told her. “The world ends tomorrow at noon.”
End Day
James Axler
The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Table of Contents
Cover (#ue79566dc-ab0d-5558-b4c3-8df3bb3b5e42)
Back Cover Text (#ufa492970-a3d6-51fc-aa5b-5714450f9abe)
Introduction (#uba38da24-ed57-51ec-9c2d-a7685ed1e371)
Title Page (#uacbf0d4e-c14a-536e-9009-4140f3d79e31)
Quote (#u68a62651-806b-544f-9776-1818e6d5a91b)
Prologue (#u26a5d65d-aecb-5b0a-949c-f361b20b970a)
Chapter One (#u3cc9fc3c-c141-5baa-85d9-deec970781da)
Chapter Two (#u543133d2-3e33-5230-a06b-29ad478aa9cb)
Chapter Three (#u4b3801ff-2bf2-5304-91c7-2f9aa60e7256)
Chapter Four (#u6a09537a-6437-560b-9fb9-bd6251b5e464)
Chapter Five (#u4175254b-24fc-5b19-8d93-1aa2b3b40849)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_3853aff5-86f9-5487-91b4-cf0ad008554d)
Ryan Cawdor peered through the 2.5x telescopic sight of his Steyr Scout Tactical, index finger resting against the longblaster’s trigger guard. Behind the scope’s center post, through the heat shimmer rising off the desert floor, he tracked the five-wag convoy rattling over dirt the color of rust, down a string-straight track between clumps of dry sagebrush and scattered sentinels of saguaro.
At his side J. B. Dix said, “Got a shot on the nukin’ bucket of bolts?”
Ryan didn’t answer. The two wags in the lead, a camouflage-painted SUV and a three-quarter-ton, black-primered pickup, sporting a cabover-mounted machine blaster, raised billowing clouds of dust. If the patterns of the past held, Magus was lounging in the third wag—a big, steel-plate-armored Winnie. The half-human, half-machine monster liked to ride in style, with room to keep spare parts and unspeakable experiments close to hand. Although the drop-down, bulletproof metal shutters on the side windows were raised, a coating of orange dust obscured the view through the glass.
Even if he’d had a target, Ryan wouldn’t have fired. With the Winnie in motion and bouncing over rough terrain, the odds of scoring a hit, let alone a clean kill, were too long. And to open fire would have revealed the companions’ presence to an enemy force they had reckoned was at least thirty-five to their seven.
The issue was more than just superior numbers.
Steel Eyes’s enforcers, which looked like bipedal crosses between carnivorous dinosaurs and bulls, weren’t actually blasterproof but, thanks to a horny, knobby hide two inches thick and bone like reinforced concrete, the squat three-hundred-pounders came damn close to it; in fact, none of the companions had ever seen one downed by a bullet—or a dozen bullets. In a previous encounter, on Magus’s remote gladiator island, they had learned the only way to chill the enforcers was by fire. When the temperature of their copious sweat—a potent secretion that smelled like a combination of ammonia, ether and acetone—was raised to ignition point, they turned into living candles, or more accurately, living blowtorches.
The empty socket under Ryan’s eye patch itched, but he didn’t scratch it. With the sun baking his shoulders and back through his worn black T-shirt, he watched the convoy rumble across the plain, heading for the barren mountains in the eastern distance. When he found himself looking at the rear of the last wag in line, he pulled back from the notch between sandstone boulders, stood up, and slung the Steyr.
“What now, lover?” Krysty Wroth asked.
A layer of desert dust had dulled her usually radiant red prehensile hair; her clothes and high boots were coated with grime. Perspiration mixed with rusty dirt smeared her forehead. The other companions were likewise tinted orange. Doc, Jak, Mildred, Ricky and J.B. looked as if they had just risen from shallow desert graves.
Ryan knew there would be no graves for any of them if they lost the battle ahead; and the dying when it came would be triple hard. Gutted, disemboweled and torn limb from limb, their remains would be scattered across the hardpan, fought over by mutie coyotes, buzzards and pincer-jawed scagworms.
“We follow the convoy at a safe distance until the bastards stop to make camp,” he said. “Wait until they’re all settled in, nice and cozy, then we use frag grens to disable the wags, stun the enforcers and chill any sec men. Mop up the enforcers with the incendies.”
They’d found the cache of AN-M14 TH3 grens among the corpses of a band of coldheart scavengers after a disagreement turned into a gun battle in the hills of New Mex. The nine scavengers wanted to trade some of their predark treasures for a no-holds-barred, romantic overnight with Krysty and Mildred. When they wouldn’t take no for an answer, they took a crisp volley of lead instead. The incendie grens didn’t explode, but when ignited, they burned for thirty to forty-five seconds at 4,330 degrees Fahrenheit—twice the temperature needed to melt steel. The moment Ryan and the companions had laid eyes on the red canisters, they’d all had the same thought: they’d come in handy at some point, especially if they happened to cross paths with Magus and his nasty, sweating playmates again.
Fate had granted them that favor—thanks to the mile-a-minute prattle of a jolt-stoned gaudy-house slut.
“We don’t have enough gas and water left to follow the convoy for another day,” Ryan went on. “We have to make our move tonight. It’s been a hard and bloody road, but this is going to be Magus’s last sunset.”
“Justice finally delivered,” Doc Tanner intoned. “Without mercy or restraint, swords buried to the hilt.”
Even though Doc was the only one who carried a sword—a rapier, actually, which lay concealed inside his silver-handled, ebony walking stick—there were grim-faced nods of agreement all around. After so many years of wandering the hellscape together, the nineteenth-century time traveler’s archaic metaphors rolled off the companions like water off a duck’s back.
Gathering up their longblasters and backpacks, they remounted the dirt bikes they’d acquired from the mountainside ville some eight thousand feet above the desert plain. Krysty took a seat behind Ryan. J.B. and Mildred, and Doc and Ricky were riding double, too. Only Jak Lauren, the albino, was riding solo.
J.B. hawked and sent a gob of rust-colored spit flying over the handlebars and into the dirt. Then he thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and screwed down his fedora. The Armorer was ready to roll.
So was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Having settled in on the seat behind J.B., the African American freezie clapped a steadying hand on his shoulder, which raised a sizable puff of dust.
To Ryan it looked like orange smoke.
“Remember to stay clear of the road,” he said. “Spread out and keep the speed down. If they bother to look back, they’ll think we’re a dust devil. They won’t be able to hear our bike engines over their own racket. Jak, take point. Get as close as you can without showing your hand. When they stop to make camp, turn back at once and catch us up.”
“Yeah,” Jak said, kick-starting the dirt bike and revving the engine. His shoulder-length white hair was streaked with orange, as were his front teeth and dead-pale face. With his ruby-red eyes and the .357 Magnum Colt Python strapped on his hip, he looked like a nightmare clown.
Bristling with their own armament, kerchiefs pulled up over their noses and mouths, Ryan and the others followed Jak down the steep, rocky trail to the valley floor. Without another word the albino zoomed off after the convoy, white hair flying behind him as he jumped the ruts in the crude road.
Ryan waved for his companions to fan out, and they began to advance in a thin skirmish line on either side of the track. Krysty’s arms wrapped around his waist as he zigzagged around sagebrush and cactus, avoiding exposed rocks and navigating flash-flood gullies. Because he was moving so slowly over the soft, loose terrain, he had to keep planting his boot soles to make the bike stay upright. It was hard, sweaty work but necessary: for them to have the best chance of success, they had to catch this enemy by surprise.
As he plowed forward, fighting the drag of the sand, images of what he’d seen high on the mountainside kept cycling through his mind. Try as he might, he couldn’t make them stop.
In Deathlands, violent acts always had a familiar form and shape, like something copied over and over: deeds of murder and mayhem committed out of greed, hunger, lust, revenge and sheer stupidity. Though the details, the circumstances and victims differed from one instance to another, they were similar in scale and scope.
What had happened at the mountain ville was different.
If the place had ever had a name, there was no one left alive to reveal it. What had been done there made the hellscape’s standard inbred chillers, coldheart robbers and insane barons seem like dimmies playing in a very small sandbox.
This wasn’t like the legendary massacre at Virtue Lake, where it was said even the flies on the dog shit were dead. Despite the campfire tales that painted Trader and his cohorts, Ryan Cawdor included, as senseless, murdering monsters, Virtue Lake had no perpetrators, only victims; it was the result of an unfortunate coalescence of events. A bad hand of cards.
The luck of the draw had nothing to do with what had happened high on the mountain. Beyond excessive, as pointless as a cataclysmic act of nature, it bore the unmistakable signature of its creator. The companions had not only viewed this grandiose handiwork before, they had almost been made part of it more than once. There was just one such artist in all the hellscape—an artist who mimicked a wrathful, mindless god.
Magus.
Ryan coasted the bike down the side of a shallow gully, then powered over the soft sand of the wash, building speed to climb the opposite bank. Krysty’s arms tightened around his waist as the bike went momentarily airborne, crow-hopping over the lip.
The suffering of the innocent and the weak in Deathlands was a given, as were the angry forces of nature unleashed by the apocalypse more than a century before. Drought, pestilence, fire, earthquake, eruption, storm, flood, famine were things the companions were powerless in the face of. But the cyclone that was Magus, that cut a path of destruction and horror across the Deathlands, could be halted with bullet and blade, and for the sake of their own continued survival, had to be stopped.
They had fought Steel Eyes before, never losing but never completely winning, either. The monster always seemed to find a way to slip from their grasp at the last second, leaving a stalemate and the threat of doom still hanging over their heads. What they were about to do this night, they were doing for themselves. Avenging the slaughter of the helpless, and the misery left in its wake, was the icing on the cake.
Despite the kerchief covering his lower face, grit crunched between Ryan’s back molars. He would have spit it out, but he was already losing too much moisture. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face, down his spine and rib cage. The bike wasn’t moving fast enough to cool him down. Riding in slow motion, with the taste of mud in his mouth, time dragged on and the exertion was constant. The convoy’s dust cloud was too far away to see; besides, he had to focus on what was directly in front of him. Strain built up in his arms and lower back, even in his fingers, as they gripped the handlebars and feathered throttle and brakes.
Gradually, the eastern hills grew larger until they towered above. The chain of peaks was about four hundred feet high, with saddles between the rounded summits. They were glowing an even warmer shade of red as the sun began to set. When Ryan glanced down at the fuel gauge, the needle was bouncing on empty. If he was running on fumes, they were all running on fumes.
A dirt bike appeared out of the heat waves in the near distance, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, Ryan signaled for the others to stop and shut down their bikes at once. By the time the albino rode up, they had dismounted and were stretching out sore muscles.
“Well?” Ryan said as Jak dumped his bike onto the sand.
“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”
“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”
“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.
“You’ll be in position long before we will,” Ryan said. “Watch the hillside above the camp. I’ll blink my flash once. Wait a count of twenty so Ricky and I can close in from above, then let it nukin’ rip.”
Krysty stepped up to him, slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a long, lingering kiss. “That’s not a goodbye,” she said as she drew back a little. “That’s a see-you-later, lover.”
He looked into her emerald eyes and saw concern in their depths. It was mirrored by her mutie hair, which had contracted into a mass of tight curls. For sure, it was the last night on earth for somebody—at this point it was a coin toss who or what that somebody was going to be, them or Magus.
“It’s never goodbye,” he told her, gently brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.
Waving for Ricky to follow, Ryan turned for the hills and didn’t look back. They set off at a brisk pace, beelining across the plain to the foot of the nearest saddle. With Ryan in the lead, they climbed the crumbling slope using scrub and boulders for handholds. As evening fell, the sweet scent of the sage seemed to grow stronger and stronger. The scattered saguaros cast long, skinny shadows across the slope, and the air temperature began to drop.
At the base of a giant cactus, a mutie jackrabbit with a hairless face as pink as a newborn baby stared at them, its body frozen like a statue. Its foot-and-a-half-long ears stood erect.
“Muy sabroso,” Ricky hissed through clenched teeth, drawing a slim throwing knife from his sleeve. Arm cocked back, eyes locked on his target, he held the blade by the tip.
The teenaged boy seemed to be growing bigger by the day, and he was always hungry, always thinking about his next meal. “Not now,” Ryan said in a low tone. “Jackrabbits scream. Focus. Tune out distractions.”
Once they had crossed over the saddle and began to traverse the shadowed far side of the mountains, he stopped worrying about noise giving away their approach. The view east under a cloudless sky was of another, even wider stretch of desert plain, which ended at the horizon in staggered rows of desolate, ruddy hills.
That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes’s handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville’s tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they’d blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.
After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy’s trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.
By Ryan’s reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus’s likely next landing spot was just the other side of it. Continuing on the ruined road would have led them directly to the ville but cost them the element of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.
From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It’s moving...”
Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.
Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.
Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.
When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn’t fly.
That didn’t bode well.
He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.
Past tense.
The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.
Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.
In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.
At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”
The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?
In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.
Only this time there would be payback.
After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.
“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”
Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.
Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.
He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.
A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.
“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.
With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.
The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.
The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.
With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”
He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:
SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY
LETHAL FORCE
TURN BACK NOW
Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.
“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.
“Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.
“After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.
“We don’t know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what’s gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise is going to disappear quick.”
“We could wait for the stinking pendejos to come out,” Ricky said. “Booby-trap their wags. Blow them all to hell and back when they try to drive off.”
“What if they’re planning to use the mat-trans to jump out of here?” Ryan queried. “What if they have no intention of ever coming back? We could wait outside this redoubt until we’re skeletons, too.”
The companions said nothing. He could see from their expressions his point had sunk in.
“We’ve got to find out what Magus is doing here,” Ryan went on. “We’ve dealt with enforcers in a redoubt before. The tight spaces belowground will make the incendies even more effective. Think about it—chain-reaction fireballs!”
“I do like the sound of that,” J.B. admitted.
One by one, the others nodded. None of them wanted to abandon their quarry after so long a hunt and with the finish almost in sight.
Her eyes gleaming, Krysty said, “Let’s go fry us some big, fat lizard butt.”
“Before we do that,” Ryan said, “we’ve got another little job on our plates.”
At a trot he led them back to the circled wags. “Only way anyone is leaving this camp is on foot,” he said as he unsheathed his panga. With that he slashed the blade across the sidewall of the Winnie’s left front tire, dropping the wheel to its rim with a sudden whoosh.
The companions needed no further instructions. They spread out in the near darkness and quickly cut all the tires on the wags.
As they returned to the redoubt entrance, Ricky said to no one in particular, “There’s lots of gas in the wag tanks for our bikes. And water in the Winnie.”
“Ah, the unbridled optimism of youth,” Doc said with a laugh.
J.B. chuckled, too. “Yeah, the kid thinks we’re actually going to live through this.”
“J.B., what do you mean?” Ricky asked.
“Wait until you come toe-to-toe with an enforcer, my boy,” Doc told him, “then the veil will be lifted.”
The far end of the tunnel was blocked by a blast-proof sec gate, steel bars backed by armaglass, which stood open. Along a bowed-out section of wall near the entry, the snouts of three M-60 machine blasters protruded from a single, horizontal firing slot. Against the wall opposite was a six-foot-high backstop on skids, designed to absorb blasterfire and minimize ricochets. The backstop was decorated with lines of 7.62 mm bullet holes at waist height. They looked as though they’d been drawn with a yardstick. Above and below the holes were irregular patches of brown—ancient crusted blood spatter.
With the others standing well clear, Ryan swept his hand over the electronic eye set in the wall above the blaster muzzles. Nothing happened. The motion detector was out of commission.
After passing through the sec gate, Ryan peered around the corner at the inside of the blaster turret. The trio of M-60s was controlled by a mechanized cam apparatus that had linked triggers and arc of fire. Someone had stripped out the guts of its electronics; wires were cut and hanging loose, circuit boards smashed. The threat on the entrance sign wasn’t hollow. And Krysty was right—this place had its own built-in set of challenges.
“Listen up,” Ryan said, “some of the redoubt’s automatic defense systems might still be operational. There’s no telling what other kinds of traps are still armed. If we follow the footprints, the path should be safe. If we find chills on the floor, we’ll know to take another route.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find chills,” J.B. said as he stared down at the mishmash of rusty footprints. “I get the funny feeling Magus has been here before. Most of the tracks are from barefoot drippers.”
It was something that Ryan had already noticed. The enforcers never wore boots and had very wide, very distinctive, four-toed feet.
“If Steel Eyes already knew about the existence of this redoubt,” J.B. said, “if it’s been a regular stop, then whatever’s inside must be rich pickin’s, and there’s probably a shitload of it.”
“Forget about scav,” Ryan said as he began passing out the incendies. “First and foremost, we’re here to put Magus on the last train west. From here on, we’re triple red. This doesn’t look like a typical redoubt. Keep your eyes open and the chatter to a minimum.”
Ignoring the elevators, they took the stairwell down. In case things went off the rails, it gave them the possibility of a fighting retreat. Dusty footprints decorated the first landing. Magus and the enforcers had followed the same route.
As the companions descended, the whine of a power cycle drifted up from below. It grew louder and higher in pitch until it was a piercing, sustained scream.
“Know what?” Krysty said. “I think Magus is about to make that jump you talked about.”
It didn’t sound like the power-up of a mat-trans unit to Ryan. From the noise level, the energy involved had to be immense. “We need to move faster,” he told the others. “Before they do whatever they’re going to do...”
At the next floor down he took the lead through the stairwell access. A few redoubts had their own unique layout, based on the main function of the installation. The companions knew this place was different, and they didn’t have time to search the place blindly; they needed a map to recce from. And, though the redoubts all sported wall-mounted maps on every level, the diagrams were not necessarily located in the same place.
The concrete corridor opened onto an expansive room lined with comp stations in cramped little cubicles. Ryan had seen such setups before, and they always reminded him of chicken coops—without the stink. The low ceiling had collapsed in places, raining squares of acoustic tile on desktops and floor. There were no bodies, no skeletons, just row after row of gray office furniture coated with a century-thick layer of dust.
The floor-plan map of the redoubt was screwed to the wall, behind a sheet of Plexiglas, beside another bank of elevators.
Mildred swept the plastic clean with her palm. “There,” she said, tapping the cover with a fingernail. “The mat-trans is four levels down and on the far side of the redoubt.”
At a dead run, they retraced their route, and once they reached the staircase, they took the steps two at a time.
The footprints were petering out, but drips of enforcer sweat glistened on the metal front edges of the treads. They looked like sprinkled raindrops—but, to the companions, smelled like scalie piss mixed with wag fuel.
Through the door four levels down, Jak took point with his .357 Magnum Colt Python, following the sweat trail like a bird dog. It led them through a long, straight corridor to another sec check, this one more daunting than the first. A short section of the corridor was bracketed at either end by steel-barred and armaglass gates, which stood half open. Between the gates was a designated kill zone. Machine-blaster posts were staggered on either side of the hall: get past the first, get nailed by the second. Cameras looked down from all four corners of the ceiling. On the wall to the left was a lone, armored window with a small microphone speaker and a metal sliding bin beneath. The sign beside it read:
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
BEYOND THIS POINT
NO WEAPONS
PLACE SECURITY CARD IN TRAY
OBEY ALL COMMANDS
ENTRANTS SUBJECT TO CAVITY SEARCH
As he read the sign, Ryan could feel the vibration of the generators through the soles of his boots. His skin crawled with static electricity. To send that kind of charge through hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete required an unimaginable amount of power.
An unpleasant thought occurred to him. If Magus knew they were in pursuit, this could be a trap. If a nuclear bomb was involved, if its countdown mechanism had already been activated, there was no escaping back the way they’d come. If Magus intended to jump away at the last second before detonation, their only hope was to do the same.
With Jak ahead of him and Krysty close behind, Ryan moved past a pair of elevator doors in the wall on the left. As Ricky, Mildred and Doc followed, a cheerful chime rang out: ding-ding. The sound stopped all the companions in their tracks. The elevator doors rolled back smoothly.
Backlit by the car’s ceiling bulb was a lone enforcer. It was so wide it seemed to fill the entire doorway. The surface of its skin was covered with an array of ridges and knobs, like a crocodile’s. Sweat beaded and then oozed down its wide belly and dripped steadily off the underside of its pot roast–size scrotum, pooling on the floor between massive, bandy legs.
Throwing back its head, it let loose an earsplitting roar of outrage.
The cry was answered a fraction of a second later by tens of thousands of foot-pounds of concentrated blasterfire. Five different calibers of bullets and shotgun rounds knocked the creature onto its heels and slammed it into the back of the car. Wild ricochets pocked the floor and sidewalls with holes and slashes, as the din of firing continued. Chunks of the enforcer’s thick hide were blown away, revealing shiny blue bone beneath. The point-blank volley seemingly had no other effect. The slugs weren’t through and through; there was no blood—red, blue, green or yellow.
One by one, their blasters came up empty; the shooting dwindled. Before they could all reload and resume fire, the enforcer had recovered. As the elevator doors began to slide closed, it lunged through the haze of trapped blaster smoke. The four-inch-long amber talons on its thumbs held the doors’ leading edges apart, and it stuck its lumpy head through the gap. Yellow eyes slitted, wide, toothy maw grinning in anticipation, it took in seven defenseless victims, all within easy reach.
Mildred yanked the pin from a red canister, paused, then gently rolled the cylinder underhand onto the elevator floor. Fountaining white sparks, like a roman candle, the thermite gren sputtered between the enforcer’s thighs, directly under its prominent gonads.
A very different kind of howl erupted from its throat when a second later the gren fully ignited and took the puddled chemical sweat with it. The resulting blast of four-thousand-degree heat sent Ryan and the others staggering away, shielding their faces with their forearms. Even though the enforcer was engulfed in fire, head to foot, it crumpled the edges of the elevator doors trying to pull itself free.
There was no escape.
In seconds the car’s thin steels walls began to melt around it. The enforcer reeled back from the doorway, arms thrashing. Flames roared upward, burning through the roof of the car, as though it was made of candle wax, and sucking the air in the corridor into the elevator shaft, as if it were a giant chimney. As the enforcer collapsed, the car broke free of its cables and plummeted downward.
Ricky’s dark eyes widened in disbelief. During the brief, one-sided firefight, his De Lisle carbine had been stuck firmly at port arms. “Were you shooting it in the head?”
“Shit, yeah,” Jak said, dumping six smoking hulls from his Python.
J.B. clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder and said, “Those knobby, sweaty bastards die triple hard. Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get used to it—mebbe you’ll even get a shot off next time.”
Ricky shrugged. “Next time I’ll know where to aim.”
The muffled crash of the elevator car rolled up the shaft. It was a long fall to the bottom.
Ryan heard more bellows of fury—seemingly coming from all directions at once. It sounded like three hours past feeding time in a mutie zoo.
Retreat was definitely no longer an option.
“We’ve got to reach the mat-trans,” he said. “Don’t waste ammo. Use the grens to clear a path. Let’s go!”
With that, he and Jak led the full-out charge down the corridor. One hundred feet ahead was an intersection with another corridor. As they neared it, Ryan waved for Jak to slow down. They stopped and peered around the corners as the others stormed past. In the dim overhead light, way down the corridor on the right, he could see lumpy heads bobbing toward them. It was the same story when he looked in the opposite direction.
He and Jak rolled incendies both ways, then without waiting to see the effect, chased after the others. Ryan knew the thermite grens would keep the enforcers back, but only the first wave, and only temporarily.
In front of them, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., Doc and Ricky disappeared into a doorway on the left. Then the floor jolted violently under Ryan’s boots, sending him slamming shoulder first into the wall. Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling. Dozens of levels below, the generator’s whine died away, like a falling artillery shell, and the corridor lights winked out.
For an instant it was so dark Ryan couldn’t see the end of his nose. Pitch-black, but not quiet. Over the pounding of his heart, he heard what sounded like dozens of bare feet slapping the floor. The generator recovered after only a second or two, starting the climb to peak power, and then the lights came back on.
When Ryan looked behind them, he saw a corridor filled wall to wall with wide bodies, and they were bearing down fast. “Run, Jak! Run!” he shouted.
The entrance to the mat-trans unit’s control room stood open. Ryan was the last across the threshold. He spun around, located the keypad and, desperately hoping that the usual codes worked in this redoubt, punched in the one that would close the door. It worked. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly entered another to lock out access.
“We’re too late,” Krysty said as he turned. “We just missed them.”
He’d already guessed that. In a single go, something had drained the tremendous power load to zero.
Ryan rushed past panels of blinking, multicolored lights and the madly chattering, predark machinery, into the anteroom. The door to this mat-trans had a porthole, and he could see the tendrils of jump fog slowly lifting. Though his view was obscured, there were no feet below the mist and no slumped bodies on the floorplates near the door—just shiny smears of sweat.
There was no way to tell where or how many of their quarry had gone. Or even if Magus had jumped with them.
A resounding boom from a foot or fist against the outside of the control room’s door put an end to that train of thought. More banging followed, and under the rain of blows, the barrier began to bulge inward. Amber thumb hooks poked between the edge of the door and its frame, bending back the double-walled steel as if it was pot metal.
It wasn’t going to hold.
Krysty pulled out a red canister.
“No!” he said, catching her hand by the wrist. “If we use incendies in here, we’ll end up cooking ourselves and the mat-trans.”
Behind them, a knobby arm reached through the gap, a hand flailing clumsily toward its prey
“Into the chamber!” Ryan ordered as the anteroom entry was pried open.
The companions piled through ahead of him. Once inside, he shut the door, which didn’t have the usual lever for a handle. He dogged it with the locking wheel—just in time. On the far side of the porthole, inches from his face, enforcers tore madly at the hatch. The locking cams of vanadium steel were too strong for them, but the tips of their amber talons scored the glass, crosshatching it.
Ryan knew he had only seconds before the automatic cycle started. He lunged for the unit’s Last Destination button.
At almost the same instant, Doc shouted from the rear of the chamber, “Wait, Ryan! Do not press—!”
But the button had already clicked under his thumb.
“By the Three Kennedys, look here. Look at this!”
The floorplates beneath his boots throbbing with pulses of light, Ryan pushed past the others and glimpsed what he hadn’t been able to see before: a second porthole door, the mirror image of the one they had entered through. He pressed his face to the armaglass and saw nothing. What was on the other side was not only devoid of light, it swallowed light, like a bottomless hole.
Gray fog materialized near the chamber’s ceiling. As Ryan breathed in the stinging mist, his head began to spin, then his knees gave way. He crumpled to his back on the floorplates. Beside him, Krysty and the others were already down, writhing and screaming. Jumping had never hurt before—the fog had always produced a merciful blackout. Mat-trans units never had two doors. Mind racing, he tried to make sense of it.
Then something incredibly powerful seized his wrists and ankles and stretched them in opposite directions. He roared in pain, certain that every tendon and joint would break under the accelerating pressure, but they didn’t—instead, the opposing forces pulled his body thinner and thinner, as if it were made of rubber.
He couldn’t make it stop; he couldn’t even slow it down.
Chapter One (#ulink_865b404b-67c0-5775-b005-ef422e94ea7d)
Once again Veronica Currant found her attention wandering across the luxuriously appointed dining room, past the dark leather booths, crystal chandeliers and liveried waitstaff. It came to rest on the TV above the Manhattan restaurant’s bar. Because the presidential inauguration was less than a day away, media was replaying the whole “lost ballot” business in excruciating detail: the characters in the Florida GOP implicated in the computer tampering conspiracy, and the Supreme Court decision that had ultimately determined the outcome of the election. The country was sick of hearing about it, and so was she. She just wanted it over with. After all, there were checks and balances built into the system, no matter who was elected. The Republicans had had three successive terms in the White House since 1980. How bad could a Democratic President be?
The tall, gaunt man on the other side of the table tapped his water goblet with a silver spoon to get her attention. “We were discussing terms on a multibook deal,” Noah Prentiss reminded her.
It took an effort of will on her part not to stare at the swollen red knob of his nose and the constellations of tiny starbursts on his cheeks.
Prentiss was an alcoholic, low-rung literary agent. His low-rung client—a small pudgy man who bit his nails—sat to his left. They had turned their half of the white linen tablecloth into a veritable Jackson Pollack of red-wine spills, meat juice and grease spots, bits of discarded gristle, drips of Caesar dressing, shreds of romaine and escaped bread crumbs.
“Kyle and I have discussed the matter at length,” Prentiss went on, “and feel a raise in advance is appropriate on the next Clanker contract.”
Clanker was one of the eight-book series Veronica edited for a New York City paperback house. The central character of the same name was a steampunk cyborg—coal and wood fired.
“No one writes Clanky as good as me,” Kyle Arthur Levinson boasted, somewhat thickly after four martinis and a half bottle of cabernet.
Veronica looked from one man to the other but did not reply. Silence in answer to a question was a negotiating technique she had learned from the five-foot-two pulp-fiction publisher, cigar-smoking entrepreneur and renowned tightwad who was her boss. It was a strategy that put the opposition at an immediate disadvantage.
If she had chosen to, she could have listed many reasons why Mr. Levinson didn’t deserve more book contracts, let alone a raise in pay. He never turned in his assignments on time. Despite the advance outlines to the contrary, he wrote the same story over and over. Clanker aways ran short on energy at a crucial moment in the plot and broke up some chairs or bookshelves to burn in his brass firebox, thus saving the day. Levinson cannibalized action and sex scenes word for word from his own books. He never researched or fact-checked his work. He never read books by the other ghosts in the series, which created conflicts with canon. None of these issues set him apart from the rest of the stable—to one degree or another, all the writers were guilty of the same offenses. So why should he get more money?
Prentiss had an answer for that.
“Remember,” the agent said, “Kyle’s been on this series from the start. He helped build its current global audience.”
“I’m the one who invented ol’ Clanky’s catch phrase, ‘Stoke me!’”
That was hardly something Veronica could forget. Levinson used that tag line at least fifty times in every book, and she had to go through the manuscript and personally remove forty-five of them. Truth be told, “his” catch phrase for Clanker was stolen from “Stalk me!”—the catch phrase from another of the company’s series, Slaughter Realms. Which in turn had been lifted from “Stake me!”—the catch phrase of the house’s vampire line, Blood City.
Sometimes in the middle of an excruciating edit of one of his Clankers, she caught herself wishing he’d write “Choke me!” so she could strangle him with a clear conscience.
“We have come up with some numbers we’d like to run by you,” Prentiss said, holding out a slip of paper.
Veronica took it and put it in her purse without looking at it. “A decision like this has to come from the top,” she said. “I’m sure you understand...”
“Of course,” Prentiss said. “I understand completely. Now, how about a little something sweet?”
Levinson was already scanning the dessert menu with keen interest.
Half an hour later Veronica was starting to feel hungry. She’d had only sparkling water to drink, a seafood risotto and an undressed green salad. Not wanting to prolong the ordeal by ordering more food, she paid the tab with a company credit card and left agent and client happily nursing their third brandies. She knew her boss wouldn’t grouse about the bill. A $300 lunch was peanuts compared to actually giving Levinson a raise. Effective stalling cost money but paid off big time down the road when the writer became desperate. And sooner or later, writers always became desperate.
Outside the restaurant, the January temperature was in the high thirties; it felt colder because it was so damp. She thought about walking the five blocks back to the office but changed her mind. She had a big pile of manuscripts to edit at home, and she wanted to get out of her high heels and into a pair of comfy slippers. After hailing a passing taxi and getting in, she gave the driver the address of her apartment in the East Village.
Her thoughts returned to the Levinson problem.
That there were always worse writers out there had been pounded into her by painful experience. “Better the bad writer you know” was the company’s longstanding philosophy. To overcome the failings of the stable, failings all too apparent to readers of the various series, and to keep her job, she’d had to master the relevant facts and skills herself. She had learned about weapons, tactics, martial arts, survival, engineering, astrophysics; the list went on and on. Despite the fact that she was only twenty-six, she was a mother figure to the writers she herded—a dispenser of sustenance, corrector of embarrassing mistakes, protector and defender. They were babies, all of them. Some white-haired or hairless, some toothless with age, but still helpless, whining babies.
The cab pulled up in front of her brownstone on a street lined wall-to-wall with similar narrow, multistory houses, all of the same, roughly 1850, vintage. Sickly, leafless trees grew out of spike-ringed holes in the sidewalk.
After paying the cabbie, she climbed the steep front stairs, unlocked the door and stepped into the small foyer. As she started up to her second-floor apartment, she considered blowing off work, putting her feet up and reading a good book for a change. A rumble from the floor above startled her. It sounded like a stampede of elephants. Looking up, she saw huge, dark figures lumbering down from the landing. They were as wide bodied as NFL players. The marble staircase shook under their combined weight. She flattened her back against the wall to keep from being trampled.
As they poured past, she saw there were eight or nine of them, all dressed in a kind of uniform: royal-purple satin hoodies and black satin jogging pants. She couldn’t get a clear look at their faces because of the hoods and because they were moving so fast. She did see and recognize the skeletonized buttstocks of AKS-74U “Krinkovs,” some of them slung under the hoodies, the abbreviated autorifles looking like children’s toys. In the middle of the pack, apparently being guarded by the others, was a spindly, frail individual.
Was that Bob Dylan? she thought, turning to look as they crossed the foyer below and trooped out the front door. A rumor had started going around the block that morning that the famous balladeer had bought the brownstone next to this one, but no one had actually seen him yet. What was Bob Dylan doing in her building? The odd smell left in their wake made her wrinkle her nose.
When she peered over the second-floor landing, her heart sank. Her apartment door was standing wide open. Without thinking, she crossed the hall and rushed inside. The place had been trashed—furniture overturned, lamps broken, pictures knocked off the walls as if a whirlwind had struck. The television, stereo and computer were untouched. It smelled like a meth lab.
“Talu, Petey!” she called. “Lucy!”
The cats didn’t come.
She found all three hiding, wide-eyed, in a corner under the bed. Much to her relief, they were unhurt.
Nothing seemed to be missing from the bedroom; everything was just as she had left it. The autographed black-and-white photo of a bearded, smiling Robertson Davies sat atop her dresser.
Oh crap, the Eagle! She jumped up and tore open her closet door. Behind cartons of neatly packed summer clothes on the top shelf, the lock box was still there. She opened it with the keypad and looked down with relief at the Bengal tiger–striped .44 Magnum Desert Eagle snug in its fitted foam case. It had been a strange gift from an even stranger man—restraining-order strange.
Robert Marx, in addition to being bipolar and a con man, had authored a few books for the company’s Western soft-core-porn line, Ramrod—that series’ catch phrase was both obvious and literal. Veronica had never dated Marx, never saw him once outside the company offices, but he had become so enamored of her that out of the blue, he’d given her this $2,500, illegal-in-NYC pistol—the world’s most powerful handgun, in fact. Something Marx thought incredibly funny.
Primarily to defend herself against him—and people like him—Veronica had learned at a range in Connecticut to shoot the monstrous thing. She’d initially had serious problems with muzzle control because of the weapon’s weight—four-and-a-half pounds, fully loaded—and its tremendous recoil. To master it, she’d had to strengthen her wrists and forearms with dumbbell finger curls.
A loud, sudden noise from the living room made her stiffen. It sounded like something heavy had fallen. Maybe one of her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had crashed to the floor.
They’re back! was her only thought.
Veronica kicked off her heels. With the ease of much practice—and without chipping a nail—she slapped home the pistol’s loaded magazine and chambered the first fat wadcutter round in the stack. Snatching the custom-molded earplugs from the case, she thumbed them into place as she moved to the bedroom door. When she burst into the living room with the autopistol in a two-handed grip, ready to fire, there was no one there. Above the toppled chairs and scattered manuscript pages, a weird gray mist swirled in the air.
Something terrible was about to happen. She could feel it in the pit of her stomach.
Firmly planting her feet, she aimed the Eagle at the churning, expanding cloud. As she stared over the iron sights, it occurred to her that she had finally and completely lost her mind.
Chapter Two (#ulink_22ffb412-53b9-50b0-8d06-5c4053469533)
The pain didn’t stop when Ryan went blind in his one good eye.
Or when he stopped breathing. Or when his heart stopped beating.
Consciousness and sensation stubbornly remained while his body stretched and stretched, like a strand of spit, until it was a slithering ribbon a molecule high and a molecule wide. Until it was light years long. The cries of his companions were an unbroken wail, which he vibrated to, like a plucked guitar string.
It was nothing like the jump nightmares he had experienced before. The random, twisted horror stories peopled by ex-lovers, bloodthirsty muties and archenemies of his past were at least a comprehensible agony, with beginnings, middles and ends. There were no time signposts in this version of hell, nothing to separate one excruciating instant from the next. He was being stretched and stretched, but to where? To what? Had they been tricked into an endless loop of matter transfer, never arriving, forever in transit?
And the worst part of all: he had hit the button. Magus’s victory, their defeat, was by his own hand. His own bastard hand.
Suddenly the pressure seemed to ease a bit; before he could come to grips with the change, it reversed entirely. Instead of stretching, there was compression. Violent, dramatic compression at both ends, like g-forces trying to crush him flat, to drive the back of his head into the base of his spine, his ankles into his hipbones. Caught between the downward and upward forces, his insides were squashed. He just managed to roll onto his side as he projectile-vomited.
Choking and gasping for air, Ryan could feel the smooth floor beneath his cheek and temple.
He opened his eye and could see a dim light in the heart of the swirling fog.
They had arrived. Somewhere.
As he crawled toward the brightness, he felt as if he had been run over by a convoy of wags. His skin crackled strangely, as if tissue paper had been stuffed under it. The others were moving on all fours, also apparently unable to stand. He counted the dark shapes on either side of him—all were accounted for.
“Triple red,” he said, or tried to say. His voice came out as a hoarse and almost inaudible croak.
None of them, himself included, had the strength to do more than drag their blasters along.
The edges of the porthole doorway were obscured by the dense, low-hanging fog. As he advanced hand over hand toward the center of the light, the hard glass turned into something softer under his palms and then his knees.
The gray mist began to lift from the floor. The door stood open.
He saw a pair of bare feet in front of him—small, pale, female feet, with red-painted toenails. As the fog dissipated, the woman came into full view. She was young and dressed as no Deathlander he’d ever seen—not even a baron’s wife. Her clothes looked new and were of a strange style: a jacket tailored at the waist and a knee-length skirt snugged around the hips, both cut from the same shiny gray cloth. In her ears, there were sparkling jewel studs, what Ryan thought to be diamonds from pics he had seen. Her shoulder-length hair was brown with red highlights, her small nose freckled.
But what commanded his attention was the enormous gold handblaster she held pointed at them, hammer cocked back to fire. The hole in the business end looked as big as a sewer pipe. The slide and frame were black striped, like the pelt of a tiger. From her stance he could tell she knew what she was doing, and the yawning muzzle stayed rock steady. Her fingernail color matched that of her toes.
“This isn’t happening,” she said, a look of horror in her eyes. Then it passed and she said, “Don’t move, any of you!”
Ryan tried to speak and couldn’t make his throat muscles obey. A faint, wheezing noise escaped his lips.
To his right, Ricky was still retching, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. He had already vomited all down the front of his T-shirt. It was on his cheeks, his neck and in his hair, too. The youth’s tan face looked deadly pale as he struggled to control the spasms.
The others seemed to have better weathered the storm—at least they weren’t still puking. Some of the decorative beads in Mildred’s plaits had broken, and the braids were undone. Jak had a shallow, bleeding, horizontal cut on his chin. Doc looked dazed, but no more than unusual.
The room where they had materialized was small and cramped. Ryan had never seen so much predark stuff concentrated in one place, but it lay in scattered, broken heaps on the Oriental carpet. A steady grinding noise was coming from the other side of the tall windows—it sounded like hundreds of wag engines all revving at once, interspersed with occasional horn blasts. When he glanced behind them, the open entrance to the chamber they had exited peeked in and out of gray mist.
“Where are we?” Krysty asked, glowering up at their captor. “What ville is this?”
“‘Ville’?” the woman said. “It’s Greenwich Village. Who the hell are you? And where in hell did you come from?”
“Look at this place, Ryan,” Mildred said. “They must have just passed through here. They have to be close.”
He stared down at a broken, framed photo on the floor. A woman in fatigues and a boonie hat was standing behind the corpse of an immense wild boar—at least five hundred pounds, he guessed. She had a bloody spear in one hand and a bloody combat knife in the other and was smiling through her camo face paint.
It was the same woman who was holding them at blasterpoint.
“Who is ‘they’?” the woman demanded. “Do you mean the bastards who wrecked my apartment?”
“The bastards we’re chasing,” Ryan said, his power of speech recovered. “Which way did they go?”
Before she could answer, a whooping, rhythmic siren erupted from outside.
Figuring that if the woman was really going to open fire on them, she would have already done so, Ryan rushed to the bank of windows, and the others followed.
As Mildred looked down on the street she said, “Well, that makes a nice change.”
The enforcers’ elephantine wedding tackle was no longer on display; they had put on pants. Even so, the width and heft of their bodies was unmistakable as were the blocky shapes of their heads inside tight purple hoods. And they were still barefoot.
The lone siren quickly became a deafening chorus. The enforcers rampaged along the sidewalk below, breaking into the small wags jammed end to end—strangely enough, the row of wags looked almost new. The muties rammed their fists through driver windows, ripped the doors from their hinges and tossed them over their shoulders. The wags sagged heavily to one side when enforcers jumped in and began tearing wires from under dashboards, presumably trying to start the engines without keys.
Magus was nowhere in sight.
The woman with the big blaster joined them at the window. “I am definitely losing it,” she said, her weapon now pointed at the floor. “Those things aren’t human.”
A doorway across the street burst open, and a tall man in a robe ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, carrying a yard of polished wooden club, fat at one end, a knurled knob at the other. With the club cocked over his shoulder, he yelled over the din of alarms for an enforcer to get away from his shiny personal wag. Snapping the driver’s door free of the hinge, the creature spun at the waist, flinging it sideways like a gigantic buzz saw. It struck bathrobe man amidships and nearly cut him in two. The impact left him sprawled facedown on the pavement, in the middle of a spreading puddle of gore.
Try as they might, the enforcers couldn’t seem to get the commandeered wags running. In frustration, holes were punched through the roofs, steering wheels snapped off and windshields kicked out onto hoods.
“Is it just me,” Doc said, “or does this all seem a bit chaotic for old Steel Eyes? It hardly reflects the usual high level of advanced planning...” The old man was confused by what he saw outside.
“The clockwork man likes things to go like clockwork,” Ryan agreed.
“Mebbe his brain’s stripped a gear?” J.B. said, without tearing his eyes from the escalating destruction below, wondering how all of the wags had survived looting and scavenging, where the gas had come from.
“Ryan, if we don’t get Magus now...” Krysty said.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Keep the incendies ready. We’re going to have to get in close to maximize the effect.”
As they moved for the door, the woman once more raised her blaster. “Who are you?”
“No time for introductions,” Ryan told her. “Shoot us in the back if you want, but we’re going after them.”
Jak led them out the apartment door and down the marble stairs.
“Toss the grens inside the wags if you can,” Ryan said as they crouched in the foyer. “Locate Magus.”
They burst through the building’s front door two abreast, but had descended only the first few steps when autofire rattled from the far side of the street. A rain of bullets spanged the concrete treads and wrought-iron railings and crashed through the glass in the entry behind them.
With hard cover more than thirty feet out of reach, Ryan had no choice. He turned and pushed the others back through the doorway. Otherwise they were going to be cut to pieces.
Inside the foyer, Mildred said, “Enforcers were doing the shooting, I saw them.”
“That’s a new wrinkle,” J.B. said. “They never touched blasters on the island.”
“They were firing AKS-74Us one-handed,” Mildred continued, “waving them around like garden hoses.”
More high-velocity slugs zipped through the door’s broken glass, cutting tracks down the wall plaster and knocking chips out of the staircase.
“Why are they using blasters now?” Ricky said. “We can’t chill them with bullets. Why do they need blasters?”
“To make us keep our distance and hold our fire,” Ryan said. “Magus is part human and can be hurt with bullets. Did anyone see the bastard?”
Heads shook no.
Another sustained burst of autofire raked the building’s entrance, forcing them to press their backs against the wall. The opposition’s ammo supply seemed endless.
“They’re going to get away, Ryan,” Krysty said after the shooting stopped. “Gaia, they’re all going to get away.”
* * *
AFTER THE SCRUFFY strangers trooped out, Veronica stood amid the ruins of her living room, unable to take her eyes off the gray cloud and the dark, ovoid shape lurking behind it.
If it was real, she reasoned, then everything that had just happened was real.
With the Eagle raised to fire, she looked inside the chamber, saw that it was empty. She gingerly touched the edge of the doorway with a fingertip and got a powerful static shock that made her jerk back her hand. There was actually a little flash and an audible crackle.
It was not a dream.
The creatures outside were real. Mr. Crawford’s body in the street was real. Eye-patch man and the others weren’t lifted from some low-budget ’80s John Carpenter film—they were real, too.
Automatic gunfire clattered in the street. What with that and all the car alarms going off at once, it sounded like video clips of Beirut. Then bullets smashed through her street-facing windows, angling up and digging ugly holes in the plaster overhead. The original 1850s ceiling medallion took the worst of it.
As if she wasn’t pissed enough.
“Hosers!” she shouted.
Avoiding the broken glass underfoot, she ran back into her bedroom. From the closet, she pulled out a pair of running shoes and slipped them on. Then she took the cross-draw, leather chest holster from its hook on the wall behind her clothes, inserted the Desert Eagle and strapped it across her suit jacket. Its twin pouches held 8-round magazines of .44 Magnum bullets.
The weight of the fully loaded harness felt good.
A DIY curriculum of advanced combat and weapons training had not only helped her keep her job, it had taught her that, unlike the authors she wet-nursed and contrary to her own expectations—and the expectations of those who thought they knew her—she was absolutely fearless. It turned out danger flipped her secret switch. Where others feared to tread, Veronica Currant jumped in with both feet.
Born to raise hell and take scalps.
And now, out of the blue, she had been given the chance to fight monsters. Not monsters in lamentable purple prose. Not in a mindless video game. But in the flesh. It felt as if her whole life had been leading up to this moment.
The cats were still hiding wide-eyed under the bed and wouldn’t come when she called and made kissing sounds. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
She yanked the Eagle from its sheath. Kicking the debris from her path, she exited the apartment. As she looked over the hallway rail, more bullets crashed through the front door, a story below.
The strangers were out of the line of fire, squatting along the walls of the foyer, clearly pinned down. Eyepatch, the albino, the black woman, the guy with glasses and fedora, the brown kid, the statuesque redhead, the senior citizen with walking stick—they were variations, permutations of the series’ characters she lived with on a daily basis. Prototypical crusty, hard-bitten badasses, a melange of signature guns and knives in abundance, dressed like homeless people.
And of course, they had suddenly and remarkably come to life.
“This way!” she shouted as she rounded the foot of the staircase. She led them down the hallway to the back of the building and out a rear entry. She turned to the left and descended another short set of steps to the backdoor landing of the building’s below-ground apartment. The door looked solid, but for someone who had mastered violent-entry techniques, it wasn’t. Expelling a grunt, she executed a front kick, planting her foot in precisely the right spot. With a crunch, the door splintered away from the deadbolt and lock plate and swung slowly inward.
“There’s nobody here. Don’t worry,” she said as she stepped through the entrance. “Owner’s still at work. Go on through to the front. We can come up from below street level, get cover from the parked cars.”
The leggy redhead raised an eyebrow at the word we, her expression undisguisedly suspicious and hostile, but the Latino kid with vomit on his shirt and the old man beamed at her. They all seemed taken aback at the apartment’s furnishings.
The fedora-and-glasses guy pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall. “Wow, that’s an old one,” he said.
Veronica thought the remark was odd since it was the current Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and the model in question—blonde, tanned, microbikini, zero body fat, draped over the stern of a vintage speedboat—was all of twenty.
“Don’t put your eyes out staring,” the black woman said, giving him a hard shove from behind.
Taking them through to the living room, Veronica opened the front door, which led up to the street.
Eyepatch put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her from taking point. “This is as far as you go, lady,” he said. “Trust me, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
He held up a red canister. She recognized it at once from her extensive research. Thermite. Four-to five-second delay fuse. Undo safety clip, pull pin, release safety lever. Throwing range, twenty-five meters.
“Let’s clear a path, Jak,” Eyepatch said to the albino. “Right through the windows, into their laps.”
The albino pulled out his own thermite grenade. Veronica thought that the canister’s color was a disturbingly close match to his eyes.
They pushed past her and climbed to the top of the short flight of steps. The others hung back, just below the level of the street. Safety levers plinked off. The two men chucked hissing grenades.
Eyepatch and the albino didn’t appear ready for what happened next—because they didn’t duck.
Massive overlapping explosions rocked the ground, sending them flying backward, arms and legs flailing. As they crashed down on top of their equally astonished friends, the concussion blast emptied window frames up and down the street. A wave of blistering heat washed over the stairwell, then car alarms a block away started wailing.
“Dark night,” the man in the fedora said as he regained his feet. “What was in those wags?”
“Let’s do this before they recover,” Eyepatch said, unslinging his Steyr Scout. Then he scrambled back up the steps, with the others close behind.
Despite the warning for her to stay put, Veronica brought up the rear, Eagle at the ready. The pall of greasy black smoke that hung over the sidewalk made it hard to breathe. Inside the towering, twin fireballs at the curb, there was nothing left but twisted car frames and axles. The spindly sidewalk trees were burning furiously, as if they’d been doused with gasoline, and the cars fore and aft of the thermite strikes were on fire, too. Monsters in purple hoodies had given up trying to jumpstart a ride. They lumbered across the street and disappeared behind the parked cars. She followed the strangers as they took cover away from the heat and smoke, next to a pair of cars farther up the block. As she ducked beside the rear passenger door, autofire rattled at them from the opposite sidewalk. The driver side of the sedan absorbed a torrent of bullets. The left-hand tires both blew out, glass shattered and the car quivered on its suspension. Just above her head, slugs zipped through the front compartment and sparked on the concrete steps behind them.
She had gone through live-fire drills in a Georgia backwoods training camp. This was no drill; these shooters weren’t trying to miss. No way could she get off a shot from her position without putting her head in the ten-ring.
Then Eyepatch, the Latino kid, the black woman and the redhead jumped up from the ends of vehicles and returned fire.
The albino was already in motion, scampering like a white spider between car bumpers. With an underhanded, bowling-ball pitch, he skipped a sputtering red can across the street and under the car the shooters were firing from behind. Then he dived back over the front hood amid a flurry of bullets. He landed with a shoulder roll and came up crouched on the balls of his feet, grinning madly.
An instant later a tremendous boom shook the street. The jolt dropped Veronica hard onto both knees. As she caught herself, she thought she saw a shadowy blur of car door and hood sailing high overhead, then a wave of withering heat made her whimper.
Grenades of that type didn’t explode, she knew. The car’s gas tank hadn’t exploded, either. Not enough time had elapsed for the heat to reach combustion point. The monsters themselves had exploded, like they had five pounds of short-fused C-4 stuffed up their butts.
She peered over the windowsill and saw the surviving monsters break cover and take off down the sidewalk in the direction of Washington Square Park. Their blocky heads and wide shoulders bobbed over the tops of the cars. The monster in front held the one she’d thought was Bob Dylan, carrying the form as if it were a small child—or a ventriloquist’s dummy—legs bouncing up and down at the knees.
When the strangers popped up from behind cover, so did she. Taking stable holds against the vehicles and trees, they all opened fire at once. Eyepatch worked the Steyr’s bolt like a machine, punching out shot after scope-aimed shot. She could see his bullets striking the backs and heads of the retreating monsters, plucking at the fabric, the impacts staggering them as they ran.
Veronica knew her ballistics. For some reason, what should have been certain kill shots with 7.62 mm NATO rounds wasn’t.
She tracked the moving targets over the sights of the Eagle but held fire—without a clear shot, no way was she going to send .44 Magnum slugs sailing down her own street.
The opposition seemed to have a destination in mind.
As they disappeared around the corner, Veronica’s new friends leaped from between the cars to give pursuit. Eyepatch waved for her to stay put.
“No, lover,” said the redhead, a strange glint in her eyes, “let her come along if she wants to.”
Again bringing up the rear, Veronica holstered the Eagle, as it was awkward and heavy to carry in hand while running.
The monsters crossed West Fourth Street against the light, bringing the afternoon traffic to a screeching, horn-honking halt. They took off along the wide sidewalk that bordered the south side of Washington Square Park, scattering pedestrians and sending them fleeing into the trees. The panicked screams brought a pair of horse-mounted cops onto the sidewalk. As they drew sidearms on the approaching purple-hooded crew, their steeds suddenly spooked, reared and, with minds of their own, shot off back into the park.
Farther ahead at the corner, a helmeted motorcycle cop jumped the curb and, with the bike’s siren wailing, cut off the monsters’ path. He drew and rapid-fired his service automatic pistol, but it didn’t slow the charge. The monsters swept over him. Then, like a CG movie stunt, something that shouldn’t have been possible in real life, both Harley and rider were tossed forty feet in the air and came crashing down on the stopped traffic.
The motorcycle’s siren abruptly cut off on impact, but more were coming from all directions and getting louder by the second. The police response would be the Emergency Service Unit—ESU—NYC’s version of SWAT. That was not a good thing. Veronica wanted to yell a warning to the others that armed civilians would be shot first and asked questions afterward, but couldn’t because she was struggling to breathe and keep up the headlong pace. Though Eyepatch and the rest were running hard, they kept looking around. They seemed disturbed, even apprehensive about the surroundings, the people, the traffic, the city skyline.
A half block ahead of them, the monsters poured down the steps to the West Fourth Street subway entrance. As they closed in on it, the rattle of rapid gunfire rolled up from belowground. It sounded like pistols, not AKs.
They paused at the edge of the stairs to catch their breaths.
“Why are they running from us?” the Latino kid said. “They’re stronger, even without blasters. Why they not stand and fight?”
No one answered him.
Hat-and-glasses guy was staring up at the tall, wall-to-wall buildings, as if he’d never seen the like before.
“Dark night! This isn’t Deathlands,” he gasped. “Where in nukin’ hell are we?” To Veronica it looked as if he was on the verge of hyperventilating.
The black woman put a hand on his back and tried to calm him. “We’re in New York, J.B.”
Eyepatch didn’t seem to notice his friend’s distress. “We’ve been here before,” he said. His attention was focused on the traffic on the street beside them; he seemed to be looking from one license plate to another.
“What year is this?” he asked Veronica.
In the context of what had already happened, the question didn’t seem all that strange. “It’s 2001,” she said.
“By the Three Kennedys,” the old man groaned, “we have jumped back in time.”
Veronica blinked at him in disbelief. “You’re from the future, then?” she asked dubiously. As she uttered those ridiculous words, an uncharitable thought popped into her mind: Wow, it must really suck.
Eyepatch didn’t confirm or deny their origins. Instead he asked another question. “What month and day is it?”
“It’s January 19.” A thoroughly assimilated New Yorker, she added sarcastically, “Why? Do you people have somewhere more important to be?”
“Anyplace but here and now would be just fine,” Eyepatch said. “The world ends at noon tomorrow.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_708b7939-0f54-592e-a398-9bbdf5b8866a)
When the bundle of meat and metal in its arms shrilled a command, the enforcer cut hard right and started down the stairs that led below street level. Its brethren followed in lockstep. They had been to this strange-tasting, chaotic, crowded place many times in the service of their shambling master. The fact that they had never before missed the designated landing spot, never met opposition on arrival or taken a casualty did not make it uneasy. They were trivial concerns compared to the inconceivable power the master had shown them over and over.
The power to loot the past and change the future.
As it descended, a rush of warm air rolled up the concrete steps, propelled by the pressure of a subway train moving in a tunnel beneath them. The enforcer sampled the gritty wind with its tongue. Mixed in with inanimate molecules of soot, of petrochemical solvents, of greasy, spoiled food and lavatory-cookie perfume was the flavor of living bodies, hearts pumping hot, red blood and skins oozing a watery sweat. The aroma of humanity did not perk its appetite.
It wasn’t a predator.
It didn’t kill to eat, or kill because it hated; it killed because it could.
At the bottom of the stairway, subway riders starting up for the street took one look at the mass of hooded, menacing figures coming toward them, spun 180 degrees and fled in the opposite direction, scattering across the concrete concourse.
The wide entrance floor was bisected by a barrier of stainless-steel turnstiles and a security kiosk. On previous visits they had paid to ride, according to local custom; this time, however, the master was in a rush and waved for them to hurry ahead. The brethren started hopping the turnstiles, which brought a pair of uniformed NYPD Transit Police charging out of the kiosk to intercept them. Obviously intimidated by the size and number of the fare cheaters, they drew their 9 mm sidearms.
“Stop!” one of them shouted over the sights of his handgun.
The black communication device on his hip chirped and crackled. A disembodied voice announced, “Ten-double-zero, officer down,” then gave a description of multiple, identically dressed suspects fleeing the scene on foot and their last known direction of travel.
With the master cradled in its arms, the enforcer easily jumped the turnstile’s spokes.
“Stop or we’ll fire!” the policeman repeated, eyes wide as he and his partner, pistols held in two-handed grips, closed distance.
From ten feet away the two cops started shooting. Instinctively, the enforcer shielded the master from the flurry of bullets with its own body. The hits to its torso and back barely registered as such—its sheer mass absorbed the shock of the impacts; its armored endoskeleton deflected the projectiles from vital organs. It did feel the hits to the side of its head, though; as its skull was violently jarred again and again, bright white lights flashed behind its eyes.
Bullets ricocheted off it in a wide arc, spraying across the concourse, with nothing to stop their flight but human flesh and bone. A male in an olive parka and watch cap was hit from behind; his knees buckled. An elderly female took a slug in the chest, sagged and toppled, spilling the contents of her shopping bags onto the concrete. Other bystanders dropped at random, as if their strings had been cut. People began screaming. The few who realized what was happening pressed their faces to the floor.
One of the cops circled to the front—from his aimpoint, trying to line up a head shot on the master. Before he could fire, the enforcer shifted the precious deadweight to its left arm and hopped forward with both feet. Toe to toe with the policeman, it struck with its free hand—a precise blow, perfectly timed, with more than three hundred pounds of mass behind it. The amber thumb hook drove into the corner of the man’s left eye socket, through and under the bridge of his nose and out the opposite socket. For an instant they were frozen, the impaler and the impaled, then the handgun slipped from the cop’s fingers and clattered on the concrete. With a brisk snap of its wrist, the enforcer wrenched off the face, from forehead to upper jaw, like a cheap plastic lid, leaving behind a yawning red crater and exposed tongue. A gargling noise burst from the officer’s throat as he collapsed, then blood began to fountain.
The other cop staggered in retreat, the slide on his empty pistol locked back. Behind him, one of the brethren ripped a turnstile from its mounting and with a downward, single-handed blow, drove one of the fat, stainless spokes through the crown of his head. The massive surge of pressure inside the skull made both eyes pop out of their sockets, but the policeman never felt it. He was already dead.
As master and disciples advanced toward the platform entrances, the screams and shouts behind them grew louder and louder. Humanity was waking up. Commuters in winter coats and hats rushing up from the trains parted like a school of panicked baitfish. While some darted for safety, others flattened themselves against the walls or fell helplessly to their knees. Those who froze in their tracks midconcourse were either bowled over and trampled or grabbed, broken and flung out of the way.
The half man/half machine in the enforcer’s arms shuddered and made a clanking, grinding noise—like a wag throwing a tie-rod.
The master was laughing.
Then the grating, steel-scraping-on-steel voice said, “Faster! Hurry!”
They trooped down more flights of stairs, smashing and hurling human obstacles out of their path. When they stepped onto the middle of the subway platform, the nearest waiting commuters hurried for the other exits. On the opposite platform, a crowd stared at them uneasily.
From down the tunnel to the right came a rush of warm wind, signaling the approach of a train—one going in the opposite direction.
“Cross the tracks!” the half man/half machine shouted at them. “Now! Run!”
The enforcer carrying the master didn’t expect an explanation. That it understood the reasons for an action wasn’t required. Its brain was no match for the master’s, even without its comp enhancement. The only thing required was that it did as it was told. With the other brethren, it jumped down from the platform onto the soot and grease-blackened rail bed.
“Watch out for the electrified rail,” the master reminded it.
As the enforcer stepped over the high-voltage track, between the ceiling supports, the wind gusted harder. It tasted ozone and rat shit in the steady breeze, and when it looked down the dark tunnel it saw the headlight of the train bearing down on them.
The humans on the platform were yelling and waving for them to go back. When they saw the hooded, assault-rifle-armed heavyweights were going to make it safely across, they turned and raced for the exits.
The brethren jumped up onto another deserted platform.
Seconds later the long, low train squeaked to a stop beside them. The doors to all the cars slid open and commuters flowed onto the platform, moving quickly past the enforcers, looks of astonishment on their faces. When the brethren entered the middle door of a car, they forced a mad exodus of riders out either end. Commuters pushed and shoved to escape.
“Put me down,” the master said.
The enforcer obeyed at once, carefully lowering the half man/half machine to the floor of the car. As it did so, there was a rumbling sound and a vibration beneath them, then more shrill squeaking as a train going the other way came to a stop at the opposite platform.
Through the speakers overhead, an automated voice warned travelers that their car doors were about to close.
“Don’t look in the other train!” the master screeched as all the doors whooshed shut.
Another command without explanation.
But too late this time. It had already turned its head. The train opposite was only a few feet away; plates of grease-smeared window glass faced each other across the narrow gap. It blinked its eyes and immediately turned back.
With a stomach-wrenching lurch, they accelerated away from the station.
The two trains had been side by side for only a second or two, but the afterimage of what it had seen through the hazy windows, in the strangely flickering, interior lights was burned into its mind.
Standing in the aisle of the opposing train, it had seen itself, the master and the others.
Even the two brethren who had fallen.
Chapter Four (#ulink_3467ea31-d7c7-5457-a3a3-f11051ff6d58)
A handful of people dashed up the stairs from the subway as if hell was on their heels. They ran past Ryan and down the sidewalk. Wailing sirens closed in all around. The wags on the street were stopped bumper to bumper, engines idling, horns honking, drivers shouting. So much noise, so many wags. So many people packed into such a small space—faces looking down from thousands of windows onto a gray canyon, which snaked between towering buildings. The concrete was cold against his palm. He smelled wag exhaust, saw the overcast sky above—though he felt like a speck of dust sucked down into the spinning gears of a vast and angry machine, it was all real.
All happening.
“Magus is heading for one of the underground trains,” Mildred said. “If we don’t catch up quick, we’re going to lose the trail.”
Unslinging his Steyr, Ryan waved for the others to follow. As he descended the stairs, the honking, wailing din turned into a screaming din. Wide and low-ceilinged, the concourse echoed with cries of pain and anguish. As the companions jumped the turnstiles, dazed people struggled up from the floor ahead of them. Seeing the group’s weapons, some pointed and screamed at them. Some pleaded for help as they pulled on limp arms, trying to raise loved ones who were obviously past raising. Some just sat weeping, with their faces buried in their hands.
“Ryan, wait,” Krysty said, catching him by the arm. “How are we going to stop the enforcers? We can’t use thermite in here. Look around. There are too many innocent people.”
“They’re all going to be ashes in less than twenty-four hours anyway,” J.B. said.
“But not by our doing,” Mildred argued.
“We’ll figure that out when we find Magus,” Ryan told her.
The trail the enforcers left behind was easy to follow, even in a full-out sprint. It consisted of broken bodies—some still crawling, most not. It led them through a doorway and down a long flight of stairs.
As Ryan stepped onto the empty platform, a shrill horn sounded. In front of him, the low silver train was already in motion to the right. He got a quick but unmistakable glimpse of purple-hooded behemoths clogging the middle of one of the cars before the train disappeared into the tunnel.
Across the tracks, beyond the row of ceiling supports, the opposite platform was empty—no passengers, no train.
“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.
Ryan turned to the woman with the unholstered, tiger-striped blaster. She didn’t look rattled by what she’d just seen, which surprised him. She looked really, really pissed off. “Which way is that train headed?”
“North to Herald Square,” she said.
“How many stops in that direction?” Mildred asked.
“It isn’t the number of stops,” the woman said. “They could get off anywhere, change trains, reverse direction. If you don’t know where they’re going...”
“We don’t know where they’re going or why,” Ryan said.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed, screwing down his fedora with one hand. “We did this for nothing? We’re going to die for nothing?”
“Attention,” a voice bellowed through the speakers above the platform. “Attention, all subway passengers. This station is being cleared for security reasons. Repeat, this station is being cleared for security reasons. Until the procedure is complete, no more trains will be stopping here. For your own safety and the safety of those around you, please remain calm and follow the signs to the nearest street exit. If you need help, NYPD officers will be available to assist you.”
“What’s going on?” Krysty asked.
“The ESU is about to clean house,” the woman with the tiger-striped blaster said as the announcement began to repeat.
“Combat-trained, militarized police,” Mildred explained. “Automatic weapons. Grenades. Snipers. Explosives.”
“This place is about to be assaulted by men in black uniforms, battle helmets and armored vests,” the woman added. “They will see us as armed suspects at the scene of a mass murder or terrorist attack. They will shoot on sight. We have two choices. Abandon our weapons now, blend in with the other passengers as best we can before they sweep in and hope to hell they don’t review the station’s closed circuit video before we manage to get out—”
“We’re not going to throw away our blasters,” J.B. interrupted.
“That’s a nonstarter,” Mildred agreed.
“The other choice is to follow the purple hoodies down the tunnel,” the woman said.
“But they are on a train, my dear, and we are on foot,” Doc said.
“I don’t mean follow them down the tunnel to catch them,” the woman stated. “I mean go down the tunnel to get out of here. ESU will clear the station first and then move on to the tunnels. If you want to keep your guns and stay alive, we have to escape while they’re busy elsewhere.”
“Do you know the way?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” the woman said as she holstered the big gold blaster. “Follow me. My name’s Veronica, by the way. Veronica Currant. But you can call me Vee.”
They quickly exchanged names; there was no time for handshakes.
Overhead the loudspeaker voice boomed, “Attention subway passengers. Attention subway passengers. If you are injured and unable to move or find yourself trapped, please remain calm. Do not resist the approaching armed police officers. Obey all their commands. They will take you to safety and medical help as quickly as possible.”
Vee led them down to the end of the platform, then jumped down onto the rail bed. “Stay away from that,” she said, pointing to the left, at the third rail.
Ryan had already noticed the red warning sign that read Danger High Voltage. The lights in the tunnel were dim and widely spaced; the air rank and humid. A thick coating of black grime covered its walls and coated the clustered pipes and cables that ran along them.
They had trotted maybe fifty yards when Vee stopped at a barely visible hatch-style door on the right. It was unmarked. With a grunt, she leaned on the locking lever, and the door cracked open. “This is a tunnel-maintenance access and emergency exit,” she said. “From here we can get to the street.”
She leaned through the doorway, then a weak light came on inside.
“How do you know so much about this place?” Mildred asked as they filed into the cramped space. “Do you work here or something?”
“No, I just pick up odd, interesting tidbits in my job,” she said.
A very steep stairway led up, so steep there were support rails along both walls. When they shut and dogged the hatch door, it muffled the racket from the station. They ascended in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing.
Ryan could feel the strain in his thighs as he put one boot in front of another. They had done a lot of full-out running and fighting in a very short time span. Not to mention the aftereffects of the chron jump. J.B.’s comment about their sacrifice being all for nothing tried to go around and around in his head, but he shut it off.
The game wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
Not while they still drew breath.
At the top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.
“Our position appears untenable,” Doc observed.
“Then we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”
“That isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”
“We shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”
“Even if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”
“So,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.
“Except to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.
“The mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I brought this down on us. We should have waited outside the redoubt for Magus to come back. From the moment we set foot inside that place, we were fucked.”
“Stuck between a rock and another rock,” Doc said soberly.
They had been caught in countless tight spots in the past—or more correctly in the future—but they had always been able to figure a way out. This time perhaps not. A question occurred to Ryan: Could a person really die a hundred years before he was born? He kept it to himself.
“We still have some time left,” Vee said. “Can’t we change the future somehow? Avert this nuclear attack? What do you know about it?”
She sounded remarkably calm for someone who’d recently learned the world was going to blow up in a matter of hours, Doc thought.
“Precious little that would help that cause, my dear,” Doc said. “An all-out missile exchange between the United States and the Russians on January 20, 2001, created a global, nuclear holocaust that ended much of civilization. That conflagration and its aftermath necessarily complicates the unraveling of the whos, the wheres and the whens. Which one, if either, started it is unknown. It could have been initiated by a third party or a computer glitch—or misinterpreted data. Miscommunication, even. Because we don’t know the precise chain of circumstances that triggered Armageddon, altering the course of those events becomes difficult if not impossible.”
“If you’re thinking of warning someone about nukeday,” Krysty said, “who would listen?”
“You’re right,” Vee agreed. “No one is going to listen.”
“You believe us?” Ricky asked.
“After what I’ve seen with my own eyes today, I’d believe anything you told me.”
“What’s happened to us is triple bad luck, and there’s no way around it,” Ryan told the others. “But it doesn’t change why we’re here. Or what we can do in the time we have left. One way or another we can still make sure Magus never leaves this place.”
“Chill half-metal bastard,” Jak spit.
“We need to get off the street and figure out how,” Ryan said.
“We can go to my office,” Vee told. “It will be closed for the night by the time we get there. I have the keys. No one will bother us. We can cut through the alleys and stay out of sight.”
As they trooped single file down the sidewalk, away from the subway station and the police barricades, a man in a peacoat stepped from a doorway and, smiling broadly, accosted Ryan. “Snake Plissken!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were dead!” Then he laughed like a mutie hyena.
Ryan kept walking. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that line.
To his back the man shouted, “Hey, Snake, Escape from L.A. blew chunks!”
Chapter Five (#ulink_a2ac497f-906f-5317-a40c-6e6866bb1b91)
Angelo McCreedy lowered his copy of the Daily Racing Form as people poured up the steps from the Thirty-Fourth Street–Herald Square Metro station. In his classic black chauffeur cap, black three-piece suit and tie and black leather gloves, he leaned against the stretch limo’s front fender. If his pickup didn’t show soon, he was going to have to move the limo from the taxi stand and start circling the block—the cabbies lined up behind him were starting to get restless. Exiting subway travelers seemed in an extra big hurry this afternoon, maybe because of all the sirens going off. A major accident was the cherry on top. It could louse up traffic for the rest of the day.
As he folded his Form and tucked it under his arm, a mass of shiny purple appeared at the top of the subway stairs.
Man, those are some big dudes, he thought.
They looked almost identical, like octuplets. They were in matching outfits and had the same height and build. The tight hoodies kept their faces in shadow. They all sported what from a distance looked like very expensive alligator boots. All except the littlest one, who was being carried like a child.
Some kind of cripple, he thought. Poor thing had metal feet.
McCreedy’s heart did a skip-tee-doo when the purple bunch turned and came right at him. His face flushed with fight-or-flight hormones. He wanted to retreat around the front of the vehicle but couldn’t make his legs move quickly enough. He didn’t notice the assault rifles they carried until the two-horned, front sight of one was jammed up under his chin.
The eyes shadowed by the hoodie top were yellow. Not yellow brown or yellow green. Yellow yellow, as in a daisy. And the pupils were elliptical slits that ran vertically, like a reptile’s. The double-wide holding the gun had on a rubber, alligator Halloween mask; it and the daisy eyes had to be some kind of prank. Then the mouth opened, and he saw the rows of small, pointed teeth and the flicking tongue.
As he sagged back against the fender, the creature holding the cripple leaned the little one’s head close to his ear. McCreedy opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came from his throat.
It had only half a human face, the rest was metal. The eyes were both metal. As the fan-bladed pupils opened wider, they made a whirring sound like the aperture of a cheap video camera. Guy wires and grommets connected its cheeks and jaw. Where living flesh abutted the stainless steel it looked angry and infected. It shouldn’t have been alive, but it was.
In a voice that sounded like wing nuts rattling in a tin can, it said, “You will drive us.”
As McCreedy was bum-rushed around the front bumper to the driver door, he kept thinking that this couldn’t be happening. In desperation he looked to the slowly passing cars for help, which was absurd—it was Manhattan. No help was forthcoming.
The limo sagged heavily, springs squeaking as the purple crew began piling into the rear compartment, invisible behind the black-tinted windows. Rough hands shoved him behind the wheel and slammed the door. The monster who got in the front passenger seat carried a very short, very deadly-looking assault rifle. It was only then he noticed the wicked amber hooks on both thumbs.
“Keep the privacy screen down,” the little one said. “Do exactly as I say, or your brains are going to end up on the hood like three pounds of bird shit.”
“Yes, sir,” McCreedy managed to croak. “Where do you want to go?”
The grating voice rattled off the address of a university hospital on the East Side. The bigger ones hadn’t made a peep. He wondered if they could even speak. Without signaling, he pulled away from the curb and forced his way into the sluggish flow of traffic.
As they crept forward, he considered cracking a joke to break the ominous silence: “Hey, how ’bout those Mets?” But the eye-watering, cat-piss smell wafting from the limo’s passenger compartment made him change his mind.
Like a meth ho’s thong, he thought.
He glanced warily back in his rearview. They sat as still as statues on the white leather upholstery. If, in addition to being armed, stand-on-two-legs giant reptiles, they were tweakers, no telling how they would take a joke. Screw it, he needed to bail on the limo. Just get the heck out and quickly, before things got even worse.
McCreedy studied the traffic ahead. If he had a sufficient gap in front or on either side, he could floor the gas, open his door and roll out. To shoot at him, they’d have to get out on the opposite side and fire over the roof or around the bumpers. By the time they did that, he would be running against the direction of traffic, keeping his head down, using the cars for cover. He’d seen the same scenario pulled off lots of times on TV and in the movies. And what choice did he have anyway? He was fairly sure if he didn’t do something, he was going to end up dead.
As he crept his fingers down to unfasten his seat belt, a horn of the assault rifle’s front sight hooked under his nose. As if the monster had read his mind.
“Drive!” said the voice from the back.
At one point during the twenty-minute trip, he thought he heard snoring coming from the back. When he turned up the entrance ramp to the hospital complex’s parking lot, the limo was riding so low the frame scraped on the concrete. Metal face directed him to the main building, which covered half a city block and was at least thirty stories tall.
McCreedy stopped in a patient-loading-and-unloading zone. He wondered what the heck they were doing at a hospital. If the little one needed an oil change and filter, Jiffy Lube had faster service.
A reptilian hand seized his neck and squeezed. The amber thumb hook rested against his jugular vein.
“You’re coming with us. Get out slowly.”
All of them piled out, the little one moving on its own in front of him in the middle of the pack. With an odd, herky-jerky gait, it passed through the automatic double doors.
The entourage drew immediate attention from staff and patients. Like a circus act. Or a rap ensemble.
“Wait just a minute, please.” A pair of uniformed, armed security guards stepped up to block their path. “Are you here for medical services or to visit someone?” one of them asked.
“Out of the way,” the little one rattled.
The guards exchanged quick, concerned looks but did not budge. Their hands dropped to the butts of their holstered sidearms.
McCreedy started to shout a warning about the assault rifles, but before he could get a word out, the scaly hand tightened on his neck, shutting off his air and the flow of blood to his brain.
The reptilians didn’t need guns to handle the situation.
One of them simply reached out and grabbed the big, burly men by their faces, gripping eye sockets and chins in either hand, pulled them over double and hauled them squealing through an open doorway. The door to the side room slammed shut. From the other side came violent, crashing sounds. It was over in seconds.
When the monster reappeared, McCreedy saw, inside the hood, below the slitted yellow eyes, a toothy smile.
Seeing them coming four abreast, hospital workers and civilians cleared a path, flattening against walls or slipping out of the way into rooms and alcoves, in some cases abandoning patients on gurneys and in wheelchairs to their fates.
They turned into the first elevator in a bank of four. The car groaned under their combined weight. One of them—maybe Metal face, he couldn’t see who—pushed a button on the control panel. The doors closed; the car jerked, then began to smoothly drop. It was a tight fit; it smelled really bad and something was leaking from somewhere—puddles were spreading underfoot.
McCreedy looked up from his shoe tops and kept his eyes focused on the back-lit indicator above the door. They passed P for parking, then B—for basement, one through four, before stopping at B5.
The doors opened onto a windowless, drop-ceiling hallway lit by overhead fluorescents. The reek of formaldehyde made a nice change from the aroma in the elevator. A rainbow of color-coded stripes on the facing concrete-block wall indicated the routes to various departments on this level: Pathology, Medical Records, Maintenance, Central Disinfection, as well as others.
They trudged down the corridor, made a hard right and filed through a doorway placard-labeled Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.
On the other side of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, people in white face masks, hair covers and sterile suits were bent over rows of workstations. Everything was white on white.
One of the workers looked up from a binocular microscope. When he saw the mob standing on the other side of the glass, he rose and stepped to a sliding door. He cracked it back a scant couple of inches, pulled his face mask down under his grizzle-goateed chin and said, “Yes, how can I help you gentlemen?”
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James Axler
TIME WARPEDRyan Cawdor and his six companions struggle to survive postnuclear America, a grim new world where hope for the future is lost amid the devastation.APOCALYPSE REDUXIn pursuit of a hardened enemy–Magus–Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they've encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in twentieth-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they're not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just seventy-two hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day…
TIME WARPED
Ryan Cawdor and his six companions struggle to survive postnuclear America, a grim new world where hope for the future is lost amid the devastation.
APOCALYPSE REDUX
In pursuit of a hardened enemy—Magus—Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they’ve encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in twentieth-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they’re not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just seventy-two hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day...
“This isn’t Deathlands!
Where in nukin’ hell are we?”
J.B. stared up at the wall-to-wall buildings as if he’d never seen the like.
Ryan didn’t seem to notice the Armorer’s distress. He took stock of their surroundings, realizing that the companions had been there before, in the future, amid ashes and ruin. He focused his attention on the traffic, looking from one license plate to another.
“What year is this?” he asked Veronica.
“It’s 2001.”
Doc groaned. “We have jumped back in time.”
“You’re from the future?”
Ryan ignored her question. “What month is it? What day?”
“It’s January 19,” Veronica replied. “Why, do you have somewhere more important to be?”
“Any place but here and now would be just fine,” Ryan told her. “The world ends tomorrow at noon.”
End Day
James Axler
The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Table of Contents
Cover (#ue79566dc-ab0d-5558-b4c3-8df3bb3b5e42)
Back Cover Text (#ufa492970-a3d6-51fc-aa5b-5714450f9abe)
Introduction (#uba38da24-ed57-51ec-9c2d-a7685ed1e371)
Title Page (#uacbf0d4e-c14a-536e-9009-4140f3d79e31)
Quote (#u68a62651-806b-544f-9776-1818e6d5a91b)
Prologue (#u26a5d65d-aecb-5b0a-949c-f361b20b970a)
Chapter One (#u3cc9fc3c-c141-5baa-85d9-deec970781da)
Chapter Two (#u543133d2-3e33-5230-a06b-29ad478aa9cb)
Chapter Three (#u4b3801ff-2bf2-5304-91c7-2f9aa60e7256)
Chapter Four (#u6a09537a-6437-560b-9fb9-bd6251b5e464)
Chapter Five (#u4175254b-24fc-5b19-8d93-1aa2b3b40849)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_3853aff5-86f9-5487-91b4-cf0ad008554d)
Ryan Cawdor peered through the 2.5x telescopic sight of his Steyr Scout Tactical, index finger resting against the longblaster’s trigger guard. Behind the scope’s center post, through the heat shimmer rising off the desert floor, he tracked the five-wag convoy rattling over dirt the color of rust, down a string-straight track between clumps of dry sagebrush and scattered sentinels of saguaro.
At his side J. B. Dix said, “Got a shot on the nukin’ bucket of bolts?”
Ryan didn’t answer. The two wags in the lead, a camouflage-painted SUV and a three-quarter-ton, black-primered pickup, sporting a cabover-mounted machine blaster, raised billowing clouds of dust. If the patterns of the past held, Magus was lounging in the third wag—a big, steel-plate-armored Winnie. The half-human, half-machine monster liked to ride in style, with room to keep spare parts and unspeakable experiments close to hand. Although the drop-down, bulletproof metal shutters on the side windows were raised, a coating of orange dust obscured the view through the glass.
Even if he’d had a target, Ryan wouldn’t have fired. With the Winnie in motion and bouncing over rough terrain, the odds of scoring a hit, let alone a clean kill, were too long. And to open fire would have revealed the companions’ presence to an enemy force they had reckoned was at least thirty-five to their seven.
The issue was more than just superior numbers.
Steel Eyes’s enforcers, which looked like bipedal crosses between carnivorous dinosaurs and bulls, weren’t actually blasterproof but, thanks to a horny, knobby hide two inches thick and bone like reinforced concrete, the squat three-hundred-pounders came damn close to it; in fact, none of the companions had ever seen one downed by a bullet—or a dozen bullets. In a previous encounter, on Magus’s remote gladiator island, they had learned the only way to chill the enforcers was by fire. When the temperature of their copious sweat—a potent secretion that smelled like a combination of ammonia, ether and acetone—was raised to ignition point, they turned into living candles, or more accurately, living blowtorches.
The empty socket under Ryan’s eye patch itched, but he didn’t scratch it. With the sun baking his shoulders and back through his worn black T-shirt, he watched the convoy rumble across the plain, heading for the barren mountains in the eastern distance. When he found himself looking at the rear of the last wag in line, he pulled back from the notch between sandstone boulders, stood up, and slung the Steyr.
“What now, lover?” Krysty Wroth asked.
A layer of desert dust had dulled her usually radiant red prehensile hair; her clothes and high boots were coated with grime. Perspiration mixed with rusty dirt smeared her forehead. The other companions were likewise tinted orange. Doc, Jak, Mildred, Ricky and J.B. looked as if they had just risen from shallow desert graves.
Ryan knew there would be no graves for any of them if they lost the battle ahead; and the dying when it came would be triple hard. Gutted, disemboweled and torn limb from limb, their remains would be scattered across the hardpan, fought over by mutie coyotes, buzzards and pincer-jawed scagworms.
“We follow the convoy at a safe distance until the bastards stop to make camp,” he said. “Wait until they’re all settled in, nice and cozy, then we use frag grens to disable the wags, stun the enforcers and chill any sec men. Mop up the enforcers with the incendies.”
They’d found the cache of AN-M14 TH3 grens among the corpses of a band of coldheart scavengers after a disagreement turned into a gun battle in the hills of New Mex. The nine scavengers wanted to trade some of their predark treasures for a no-holds-barred, romantic overnight with Krysty and Mildred. When they wouldn’t take no for an answer, they took a crisp volley of lead instead. The incendie grens didn’t explode, but when ignited, they burned for thirty to forty-five seconds at 4,330 degrees Fahrenheit—twice the temperature needed to melt steel. The moment Ryan and the companions had laid eyes on the red canisters, they’d all had the same thought: they’d come in handy at some point, especially if they happened to cross paths with Magus and his nasty, sweating playmates again.
Fate had granted them that favor—thanks to the mile-a-minute prattle of a jolt-stoned gaudy-house slut.
“We don’t have enough gas and water left to follow the convoy for another day,” Ryan went on. “We have to make our move tonight. It’s been a hard and bloody road, but this is going to be Magus’s last sunset.”
“Justice finally delivered,” Doc Tanner intoned. “Without mercy or restraint, swords buried to the hilt.”
Even though Doc was the only one who carried a sword—a rapier, actually, which lay concealed inside his silver-handled, ebony walking stick—there were grim-faced nods of agreement all around. After so many years of wandering the hellscape together, the nineteenth-century time traveler’s archaic metaphors rolled off the companions like water off a duck’s back.
Gathering up their longblasters and backpacks, they remounted the dirt bikes they’d acquired from the mountainside ville some eight thousand feet above the desert plain. Krysty took a seat behind Ryan. J.B. and Mildred, and Doc and Ricky were riding double, too. Only Jak Lauren, the albino, was riding solo.
J.B. hawked and sent a gob of rust-colored spit flying over the handlebars and into the dirt. Then he thumbed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and screwed down his fedora. The Armorer was ready to roll.
So was Dr. Mildred Wyeth. Having settled in on the seat behind J.B., the African American freezie clapped a steadying hand on his shoulder, which raised a sizable puff of dust.
To Ryan it looked like orange smoke.
“Remember to stay clear of the road,” he said. “Spread out and keep the speed down. If they bother to look back, they’ll think we’re a dust devil. They won’t be able to hear our bike engines over their own racket. Jak, take point. Get as close as you can without showing your hand. When they stop to make camp, turn back at once and catch us up.”
“Yeah,” Jak said, kick-starting the dirt bike and revving the engine. His shoulder-length white hair was streaked with orange, as were his front teeth and dead-pale face. With his ruby-red eyes and the .357 Magnum Colt Python strapped on his hip, he looked like a nightmare clown.
Bristling with their own armament, kerchiefs pulled up over their noses and mouths, Ryan and the others followed Jak down the steep, rocky trail to the valley floor. Without another word the albino zoomed off after the convoy, white hair flying behind him as he jumped the ruts in the crude road.
Ryan waved for his companions to fan out, and they began to advance in a thin skirmish line on either side of the track. Krysty’s arms wrapped around his waist as he zigzagged around sagebrush and cactus, avoiding exposed rocks and navigating flash-flood gullies. Because he was moving so slowly over the soft, loose terrain, he had to keep planting his boot soles to make the bike stay upright. It was hard, sweaty work but necessary: for them to have the best chance of success, they had to catch this enemy by surprise.
As he plowed forward, fighting the drag of the sand, images of what he’d seen high on the mountainside kept cycling through his mind. Try as he might, he couldn’t make them stop.
In Deathlands, violent acts always had a familiar form and shape, like something copied over and over: deeds of murder and mayhem committed out of greed, hunger, lust, revenge and sheer stupidity. Though the details, the circumstances and victims differed from one instance to another, they were similar in scale and scope.
What had happened at the mountain ville was different.
If the place had ever had a name, there was no one left alive to reveal it. What had been done there made the hellscape’s standard inbred chillers, coldheart robbers and insane barons seem like dimmies playing in a very small sandbox.
This wasn’t like the legendary massacre at Virtue Lake, where it was said even the flies on the dog shit were dead. Despite the campfire tales that painted Trader and his cohorts, Ryan Cawdor included, as senseless, murdering monsters, Virtue Lake had no perpetrators, only victims; it was the result of an unfortunate coalescence of events. A bad hand of cards.
The luck of the draw had nothing to do with what had happened high on the mountain. Beyond excessive, as pointless as a cataclysmic act of nature, it bore the unmistakable signature of its creator. The companions had not only viewed this grandiose handiwork before, they had almost been made part of it more than once. There was just one such artist in all the hellscape—an artist who mimicked a wrathful, mindless god.
Magus.
Ryan coasted the bike down the side of a shallow gully, then powered over the soft sand of the wash, building speed to climb the opposite bank. Krysty’s arms tightened around his waist as the bike went momentarily airborne, crow-hopping over the lip.
The suffering of the innocent and the weak in Deathlands was a given, as were the angry forces of nature unleashed by the apocalypse more than a century before. Drought, pestilence, fire, earthquake, eruption, storm, flood, famine were things the companions were powerless in the face of. But the cyclone that was Magus, that cut a path of destruction and horror across the Deathlands, could be halted with bullet and blade, and for the sake of their own continued survival, had to be stopped.
They had fought Steel Eyes before, never losing but never completely winning, either. The monster always seemed to find a way to slip from their grasp at the last second, leaving a stalemate and the threat of doom still hanging over their heads. What they were about to do this night, they were doing for themselves. Avenging the slaughter of the helpless, and the misery left in its wake, was the icing on the cake.
Despite the kerchief covering his lower face, grit crunched between Ryan’s back molars. He would have spit it out, but he was already losing too much moisture. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face, down his spine and rib cage. The bike wasn’t moving fast enough to cool him down. Riding in slow motion, with the taste of mud in his mouth, time dragged on and the exertion was constant. The convoy’s dust cloud was too far away to see; besides, he had to focus on what was directly in front of him. Strain built up in his arms and lower back, even in his fingers, as they gripped the handlebars and feathered throttle and brakes.
Gradually, the eastern hills grew larger until they towered above. The chain of peaks was about four hundred feet high, with saddles between the rounded summits. They were glowing an even warmer shade of red as the sun began to set. When Ryan glanced down at the fuel gauge, the needle was bouncing on empty. If he was running on fumes, they were all running on fumes.
A dirt bike appeared out of the heat waves in the near distance, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, Ryan signaled for the others to stop and shut down their bikes at once. By the time the albino rode up, they had dismounted and were stretching out sore muscles.
“Well?” Ryan said as Jak dumped his bike onto the sand.
“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”
“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”
“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.
“You’ll be in position long before we will,” Ryan said. “Watch the hillside above the camp. I’ll blink my flash once. Wait a count of twenty so Ricky and I can close in from above, then let it nukin’ rip.”
Krysty stepped up to him, slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a long, lingering kiss. “That’s not a goodbye,” she said as she drew back a little. “That’s a see-you-later, lover.”
He looked into her emerald eyes and saw concern in their depths. It was mirrored by her mutie hair, which had contracted into a mass of tight curls. For sure, it was the last night on earth for somebody—at this point it was a coin toss who or what that somebody was going to be, them or Magus.
“It’s never goodbye,” he told her, gently brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.
Waving for Ricky to follow, Ryan turned for the hills and didn’t look back. They set off at a brisk pace, beelining across the plain to the foot of the nearest saddle. With Ryan in the lead, they climbed the crumbling slope using scrub and boulders for handholds. As evening fell, the sweet scent of the sage seemed to grow stronger and stronger. The scattered saguaros cast long, skinny shadows across the slope, and the air temperature began to drop.
At the base of a giant cactus, a mutie jackrabbit with a hairless face as pink as a newborn baby stared at them, its body frozen like a statue. Its foot-and-a-half-long ears stood erect.
“Muy sabroso,” Ricky hissed through clenched teeth, drawing a slim throwing knife from his sleeve. Arm cocked back, eyes locked on his target, he held the blade by the tip.
The teenaged boy seemed to be growing bigger by the day, and he was always hungry, always thinking about his next meal. “Not now,” Ryan said in a low tone. “Jackrabbits scream. Focus. Tune out distractions.”
Once they had crossed over the saddle and began to traverse the shadowed far side of the mountains, he stopped worrying about noise giving away their approach. The view east under a cloudless sky was of another, even wider stretch of desert plain, which ended at the horizon in staggered rows of desolate, ruddy hills.
That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes’s handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville’s tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they’d blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.
After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy’s trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.
By Ryan’s reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus’s likely next landing spot was just the other side of it. Continuing on the ruined road would have led them directly to the ville but cost them the element of surprise. Ryan guided them a ways into the meadow, then stopped the single file of riders with a raised hand. He listened hard, but there was not so much as a bird tweet or a bug chirp.
From her perch behind him on the horse, Krysty pointed at the thick, waist-high grass to their right. She said softly in his ear, “Something there. It’s moving...”
Jak was already standing tall in his stirrups, eyes fixed in the same direction.
Ryan signaled for the albino to dismount and circle around behind, drew his panga from its sheath and quietly swung down from the horse. He had walked no more than twenty feet when he saw something bright red among the green. He thought he glimpsed a stout black body beneath. Whatever it was, it turned to the left and disappeared. He followed, wading through the lake of tall grass.
Jak was moving toward him, the sun reflecting off white hair and skin. He had his arms outstretched, and he was smiling.
When Ryan took his next step, it was met by a burst of noise from in front of him. A blur of angry birds with flaming red heads, thick black-feathered bodies and flapping, four-foot wings, shot from cover. As the buzzards rushed past him, scuttling away like gigantic swarthy chickens, he instinctively swung the panga, smacking one of them on the pate with the flat of the blade. Stunned, the bird sat down hard, beak gaping, wings spread and twitching. It stank like a slaughterhouse; there was fresh blood smeared on its chest feathers. Its stomach was grossly distended, the contents so densely packed and heavy that, like its brethren, it couldn’t fly.
That didn’t bode well.
He waved for the others to dismount. They left the horses to graze in the meadow and, spreading out, weapons at the ready, advanced to the edge of the clearing. Nestled among the trees, the nameless ville had once looked like something out of a predark storybook: tiny central square with bandstand, on either side of which stood a school, city hall, church with tall steeple, movie house, stores. Because of its remote location, it had survived Armageddon pretty much intact. And had apparently provided sufficient protection to a support a limited population.
Past tense.
The central square and surrounding street was littered with bodies. It looked as if it had rained dead people and dead dogs. Many of the corpses were torn into pieces: arms, legs and heads ripped off and flung. The buzzards had been hard at the best bits—the eyes and tongues—leaving three gory craters in every upturned face.
Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.
In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.
At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”
The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?
In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.
Only this time there would be payback.
After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.
“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”
Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.
Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.
He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.
A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.
“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.
With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.
The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.
The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.
With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”
He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:
SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY
LETHAL FORCE
TURN BACK NOW
Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.
“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.
“Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.
“After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.
“We don’t know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what’s gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise is going to disappear quick.”
“We could wait for the stinking pendejos to come out,” Ricky said. “Booby-trap their wags. Blow them all to hell and back when they try to drive off.”
“What if they’re planning to use the mat-trans to jump out of here?” Ryan queried. “What if they have no intention of ever coming back? We could wait outside this redoubt until we’re skeletons, too.”
The companions said nothing. He could see from their expressions his point had sunk in.
“We’ve got to find out what Magus is doing here,” Ryan went on. “We’ve dealt with enforcers in a redoubt before. The tight spaces belowground will make the incendies even more effective. Think about it—chain-reaction fireballs!”
“I do like the sound of that,” J.B. admitted.
One by one, the others nodded. None of them wanted to abandon their quarry after so long a hunt and with the finish almost in sight.
Her eyes gleaming, Krysty said, “Let’s go fry us some big, fat lizard butt.”
“Before we do that,” Ryan said, “we’ve got another little job on our plates.”
At a trot he led them back to the circled wags. “Only way anyone is leaving this camp is on foot,” he said as he unsheathed his panga. With that he slashed the blade across the sidewall of the Winnie’s left front tire, dropping the wheel to its rim with a sudden whoosh.
The companions needed no further instructions. They spread out in the near darkness and quickly cut all the tires on the wags.
As they returned to the redoubt entrance, Ricky said to no one in particular, “There’s lots of gas in the wag tanks for our bikes. And water in the Winnie.”
“Ah, the unbridled optimism of youth,” Doc said with a laugh.
J.B. chuckled, too. “Yeah, the kid thinks we’re actually going to live through this.”
“J.B., what do you mean?” Ricky asked.
“Wait until you come toe-to-toe with an enforcer, my boy,” Doc told him, “then the veil will be lifted.”
The far end of the tunnel was blocked by a blast-proof sec gate, steel bars backed by armaglass, which stood open. Along a bowed-out section of wall near the entry, the snouts of three M-60 machine blasters protruded from a single, horizontal firing slot. Against the wall opposite was a six-foot-high backstop on skids, designed to absorb blasterfire and minimize ricochets. The backstop was decorated with lines of 7.62 mm bullet holes at waist height. They looked as though they’d been drawn with a yardstick. Above and below the holes were irregular patches of brown—ancient crusted blood spatter.
With the others standing well clear, Ryan swept his hand over the electronic eye set in the wall above the blaster muzzles. Nothing happened. The motion detector was out of commission.
After passing through the sec gate, Ryan peered around the corner at the inside of the blaster turret. The trio of M-60s was controlled by a mechanized cam apparatus that had linked triggers and arc of fire. Someone had stripped out the guts of its electronics; wires were cut and hanging loose, circuit boards smashed. The threat on the entrance sign wasn’t hollow. And Krysty was right—this place had its own built-in set of challenges.
“Listen up,” Ryan said, “some of the redoubt’s automatic defense systems might still be operational. There’s no telling what other kinds of traps are still armed. If we follow the footprints, the path should be safe. If we find chills on the floor, we’ll know to take another route.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find chills,” J.B. said as he stared down at the mishmash of rusty footprints. “I get the funny feeling Magus has been here before. Most of the tracks are from barefoot drippers.”
It was something that Ryan had already noticed. The enforcers never wore boots and had very wide, very distinctive, four-toed feet.
“If Steel Eyes already knew about the existence of this redoubt,” J.B. said, “if it’s been a regular stop, then whatever’s inside must be rich pickin’s, and there’s probably a shitload of it.”
“Forget about scav,” Ryan said as he began passing out the incendies. “First and foremost, we’re here to put Magus on the last train west. From here on, we’re triple red. This doesn’t look like a typical redoubt. Keep your eyes open and the chatter to a minimum.”
Ignoring the elevators, they took the stairwell down. In case things went off the rails, it gave them the possibility of a fighting retreat. Dusty footprints decorated the first landing. Magus and the enforcers had followed the same route.
As the companions descended, the whine of a power cycle drifted up from below. It grew louder and higher in pitch until it was a piercing, sustained scream.
“Know what?” Krysty said. “I think Magus is about to make that jump you talked about.”
It didn’t sound like the power-up of a mat-trans unit to Ryan. From the noise level, the energy involved had to be immense. “We need to move faster,” he told the others. “Before they do whatever they’re going to do...”
At the next floor down he took the lead through the stairwell access. A few redoubts had their own unique layout, based on the main function of the installation. The companions knew this place was different, and they didn’t have time to search the place blindly; they needed a map to recce from. And, though the redoubts all sported wall-mounted maps on every level, the diagrams were not necessarily located in the same place.
The concrete corridor opened onto an expansive room lined with comp stations in cramped little cubicles. Ryan had seen such setups before, and they always reminded him of chicken coops—without the stink. The low ceiling had collapsed in places, raining squares of acoustic tile on desktops and floor. There were no bodies, no skeletons, just row after row of gray office furniture coated with a century-thick layer of dust.
The floor-plan map of the redoubt was screwed to the wall, behind a sheet of Plexiglas, beside another bank of elevators.
Mildred swept the plastic clean with her palm. “There,” she said, tapping the cover with a fingernail. “The mat-trans is four levels down and on the far side of the redoubt.”
At a dead run, they retraced their route, and once they reached the staircase, they took the steps two at a time.
The footprints were petering out, but drips of enforcer sweat glistened on the metal front edges of the treads. They looked like sprinkled raindrops—but, to the companions, smelled like scalie piss mixed with wag fuel.
Through the door four levels down, Jak took point with his .357 Magnum Colt Python, following the sweat trail like a bird dog. It led them through a long, straight corridor to another sec check, this one more daunting than the first. A short section of the corridor was bracketed at either end by steel-barred and armaglass gates, which stood half open. Between the gates was a designated kill zone. Machine-blaster posts were staggered on either side of the hall: get past the first, get nailed by the second. Cameras looked down from all four corners of the ceiling. On the wall to the left was a lone, armored window with a small microphone speaker and a metal sliding bin beneath. The sign beside it read:
NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
BEYOND THIS POINT
NO WEAPONS
PLACE SECURITY CARD IN TRAY
OBEY ALL COMMANDS
ENTRANTS SUBJECT TO CAVITY SEARCH
As he read the sign, Ryan could feel the vibration of the generators through the soles of his boots. His skin crawled with static electricity. To send that kind of charge through hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete required an unimaginable amount of power.
An unpleasant thought occurred to him. If Magus knew they were in pursuit, this could be a trap. If a nuclear bomb was involved, if its countdown mechanism had already been activated, there was no escaping back the way they’d come. If Magus intended to jump away at the last second before detonation, their only hope was to do the same.
With Jak ahead of him and Krysty close behind, Ryan moved past a pair of elevator doors in the wall on the left. As Ricky, Mildred and Doc followed, a cheerful chime rang out: ding-ding. The sound stopped all the companions in their tracks. The elevator doors rolled back smoothly.
Backlit by the car’s ceiling bulb was a lone enforcer. It was so wide it seemed to fill the entire doorway. The surface of its skin was covered with an array of ridges and knobs, like a crocodile’s. Sweat beaded and then oozed down its wide belly and dripped steadily off the underside of its pot roast–size scrotum, pooling on the floor between massive, bandy legs.
Throwing back its head, it let loose an earsplitting roar of outrage.
The cry was answered a fraction of a second later by tens of thousands of foot-pounds of concentrated blasterfire. Five different calibers of bullets and shotgun rounds knocked the creature onto its heels and slammed it into the back of the car. Wild ricochets pocked the floor and sidewalls with holes and slashes, as the din of firing continued. Chunks of the enforcer’s thick hide were blown away, revealing shiny blue bone beneath. The point-blank volley seemingly had no other effect. The slugs weren’t through and through; there was no blood—red, blue, green or yellow.
One by one, their blasters came up empty; the shooting dwindled. Before they could all reload and resume fire, the enforcer had recovered. As the elevator doors began to slide closed, it lunged through the haze of trapped blaster smoke. The four-inch-long amber talons on its thumbs held the doors’ leading edges apart, and it stuck its lumpy head through the gap. Yellow eyes slitted, wide, toothy maw grinning in anticipation, it took in seven defenseless victims, all within easy reach.
Mildred yanked the pin from a red canister, paused, then gently rolled the cylinder underhand onto the elevator floor. Fountaining white sparks, like a roman candle, the thermite gren sputtered between the enforcer’s thighs, directly under its prominent gonads.
A very different kind of howl erupted from its throat when a second later the gren fully ignited and took the puddled chemical sweat with it. The resulting blast of four-thousand-degree heat sent Ryan and the others staggering away, shielding their faces with their forearms. Even though the enforcer was engulfed in fire, head to foot, it crumpled the edges of the elevator doors trying to pull itself free.
There was no escape.
In seconds the car’s thin steels walls began to melt around it. The enforcer reeled back from the doorway, arms thrashing. Flames roared upward, burning through the roof of the car, as though it was made of candle wax, and sucking the air in the corridor into the elevator shaft, as if it were a giant chimney. As the enforcer collapsed, the car broke free of its cables and plummeted downward.
Ricky’s dark eyes widened in disbelief. During the brief, one-sided firefight, his De Lisle carbine had been stuck firmly at port arms. “Were you shooting it in the head?”
“Shit, yeah,” Jak said, dumping six smoking hulls from his Python.
J.B. clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder and said, “Those knobby, sweaty bastards die triple hard. Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get used to it—mebbe you’ll even get a shot off next time.”
Ricky shrugged. “Next time I’ll know where to aim.”
The muffled crash of the elevator car rolled up the shaft. It was a long fall to the bottom.
Ryan heard more bellows of fury—seemingly coming from all directions at once. It sounded like three hours past feeding time in a mutie zoo.
Retreat was definitely no longer an option.
“We’ve got to reach the mat-trans,” he said. “Don’t waste ammo. Use the grens to clear a path. Let’s go!”
With that, he and Jak led the full-out charge down the corridor. One hundred feet ahead was an intersection with another corridor. As they neared it, Ryan waved for Jak to slow down. They stopped and peered around the corners as the others stormed past. In the dim overhead light, way down the corridor on the right, he could see lumpy heads bobbing toward them. It was the same story when he looked in the opposite direction.
He and Jak rolled incendies both ways, then without waiting to see the effect, chased after the others. Ryan knew the thermite grens would keep the enforcers back, but only the first wave, and only temporarily.
In front of them, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., Doc and Ricky disappeared into a doorway on the left. Then the floor jolted violently under Ryan’s boots, sending him slamming shoulder first into the wall. Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling. Dozens of levels below, the generator’s whine died away, like a falling artillery shell, and the corridor lights winked out.
For an instant it was so dark Ryan couldn’t see the end of his nose. Pitch-black, but not quiet. Over the pounding of his heart, he heard what sounded like dozens of bare feet slapping the floor. The generator recovered after only a second or two, starting the climb to peak power, and then the lights came back on.
When Ryan looked behind them, he saw a corridor filled wall to wall with wide bodies, and they were bearing down fast. “Run, Jak! Run!” he shouted.
The entrance to the mat-trans unit’s control room stood open. Ryan was the last across the threshold. He spun around, located the keypad and, desperately hoping that the usual codes worked in this redoubt, punched in the one that would close the door. It worked. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly entered another to lock out access.
“We’re too late,” Krysty said as he turned. “We just missed them.”
He’d already guessed that. In a single go, something had drained the tremendous power load to zero.
Ryan rushed past panels of blinking, multicolored lights and the madly chattering, predark machinery, into the anteroom. The door to this mat-trans had a porthole, and he could see the tendrils of jump fog slowly lifting. Though his view was obscured, there were no feet below the mist and no slumped bodies on the floorplates near the door—just shiny smears of sweat.
There was no way to tell where or how many of their quarry had gone. Or even if Magus had jumped with them.
A resounding boom from a foot or fist against the outside of the control room’s door put an end to that train of thought. More banging followed, and under the rain of blows, the barrier began to bulge inward. Amber thumb hooks poked between the edge of the door and its frame, bending back the double-walled steel as if it was pot metal.
It wasn’t going to hold.
Krysty pulled out a red canister.
“No!” he said, catching her hand by the wrist. “If we use incendies in here, we’ll end up cooking ourselves and the mat-trans.”
Behind them, a knobby arm reached through the gap, a hand flailing clumsily toward its prey
“Into the chamber!” Ryan ordered as the anteroom entry was pried open.
The companions piled through ahead of him. Once inside, he shut the door, which didn’t have the usual lever for a handle. He dogged it with the locking wheel—just in time. On the far side of the porthole, inches from his face, enforcers tore madly at the hatch. The locking cams of vanadium steel were too strong for them, but the tips of their amber talons scored the glass, crosshatching it.
Ryan knew he had only seconds before the automatic cycle started. He lunged for the unit’s Last Destination button.
At almost the same instant, Doc shouted from the rear of the chamber, “Wait, Ryan! Do not press—!”
But the button had already clicked under his thumb.
“By the Three Kennedys, look here. Look at this!”
The floorplates beneath his boots throbbing with pulses of light, Ryan pushed past the others and glimpsed what he hadn’t been able to see before: a second porthole door, the mirror image of the one they had entered through. He pressed his face to the armaglass and saw nothing. What was on the other side was not only devoid of light, it swallowed light, like a bottomless hole.
Gray fog materialized near the chamber’s ceiling. As Ryan breathed in the stinging mist, his head began to spin, then his knees gave way. He crumpled to his back on the floorplates. Beside him, Krysty and the others were already down, writhing and screaming. Jumping had never hurt before—the fog had always produced a merciful blackout. Mat-trans units never had two doors. Mind racing, he tried to make sense of it.
Then something incredibly powerful seized his wrists and ankles and stretched them in opposite directions. He roared in pain, certain that every tendon and joint would break under the accelerating pressure, but they didn’t—instead, the opposing forces pulled his body thinner and thinner, as if it were made of rubber.
He couldn’t make it stop; he couldn’t even slow it down.
Chapter One (#ulink_865b404b-67c0-5775-b005-ef422e94ea7d)
Once again Veronica Currant found her attention wandering across the luxuriously appointed dining room, past the dark leather booths, crystal chandeliers and liveried waitstaff. It came to rest on the TV above the Manhattan restaurant’s bar. Because the presidential inauguration was less than a day away, media was replaying the whole “lost ballot” business in excruciating detail: the characters in the Florida GOP implicated in the computer tampering conspiracy, and the Supreme Court decision that had ultimately determined the outcome of the election. The country was sick of hearing about it, and so was she. She just wanted it over with. After all, there were checks and balances built into the system, no matter who was elected. The Republicans had had three successive terms in the White House since 1980. How bad could a Democratic President be?
The tall, gaunt man on the other side of the table tapped his water goblet with a silver spoon to get her attention. “We were discussing terms on a multibook deal,” Noah Prentiss reminded her.
It took an effort of will on her part not to stare at the swollen red knob of his nose and the constellations of tiny starbursts on his cheeks.
Prentiss was an alcoholic, low-rung literary agent. His low-rung client—a small pudgy man who bit his nails—sat to his left. They had turned their half of the white linen tablecloth into a veritable Jackson Pollack of red-wine spills, meat juice and grease spots, bits of discarded gristle, drips of Caesar dressing, shreds of romaine and escaped bread crumbs.
“Kyle and I have discussed the matter at length,” Prentiss went on, “and feel a raise in advance is appropriate on the next Clanker contract.”
Clanker was one of the eight-book series Veronica edited for a New York City paperback house. The central character of the same name was a steampunk cyborg—coal and wood fired.
“No one writes Clanky as good as me,” Kyle Arthur Levinson boasted, somewhat thickly after four martinis and a half bottle of cabernet.
Veronica looked from one man to the other but did not reply. Silence in answer to a question was a negotiating technique she had learned from the five-foot-two pulp-fiction publisher, cigar-smoking entrepreneur and renowned tightwad who was her boss. It was a strategy that put the opposition at an immediate disadvantage.
If she had chosen to, she could have listed many reasons why Mr. Levinson didn’t deserve more book contracts, let alone a raise in pay. He never turned in his assignments on time. Despite the advance outlines to the contrary, he wrote the same story over and over. Clanker aways ran short on energy at a crucial moment in the plot and broke up some chairs or bookshelves to burn in his brass firebox, thus saving the day. Levinson cannibalized action and sex scenes word for word from his own books. He never researched or fact-checked his work. He never read books by the other ghosts in the series, which created conflicts with canon. None of these issues set him apart from the rest of the stable—to one degree or another, all the writers were guilty of the same offenses. So why should he get more money?
Prentiss had an answer for that.
“Remember,” the agent said, “Kyle’s been on this series from the start. He helped build its current global audience.”
“I’m the one who invented ol’ Clanky’s catch phrase, ‘Stoke me!’”
That was hardly something Veronica could forget. Levinson used that tag line at least fifty times in every book, and she had to go through the manuscript and personally remove forty-five of them. Truth be told, “his” catch phrase for Clanker was stolen from “Stalk me!”—the catch phrase from another of the company’s series, Slaughter Realms. Which in turn had been lifted from “Stake me!”—the catch phrase of the house’s vampire line, Blood City.
Sometimes in the middle of an excruciating edit of one of his Clankers, she caught herself wishing he’d write “Choke me!” so she could strangle him with a clear conscience.
“We have come up with some numbers we’d like to run by you,” Prentiss said, holding out a slip of paper.
Veronica took it and put it in her purse without looking at it. “A decision like this has to come from the top,” she said. “I’m sure you understand...”
“Of course,” Prentiss said. “I understand completely. Now, how about a little something sweet?”
Levinson was already scanning the dessert menu with keen interest.
Half an hour later Veronica was starting to feel hungry. She’d had only sparkling water to drink, a seafood risotto and an undressed green salad. Not wanting to prolong the ordeal by ordering more food, she paid the tab with a company credit card and left agent and client happily nursing their third brandies. She knew her boss wouldn’t grouse about the bill. A $300 lunch was peanuts compared to actually giving Levinson a raise. Effective stalling cost money but paid off big time down the road when the writer became desperate. And sooner or later, writers always became desperate.
Outside the restaurant, the January temperature was in the high thirties; it felt colder because it was so damp. She thought about walking the five blocks back to the office but changed her mind. She had a big pile of manuscripts to edit at home, and she wanted to get out of her high heels and into a pair of comfy slippers. After hailing a passing taxi and getting in, she gave the driver the address of her apartment in the East Village.
Her thoughts returned to the Levinson problem.
That there were always worse writers out there had been pounded into her by painful experience. “Better the bad writer you know” was the company’s longstanding philosophy. To overcome the failings of the stable, failings all too apparent to readers of the various series, and to keep her job, she’d had to master the relevant facts and skills herself. She had learned about weapons, tactics, martial arts, survival, engineering, astrophysics; the list went on and on. Despite the fact that she was only twenty-six, she was a mother figure to the writers she herded—a dispenser of sustenance, corrector of embarrassing mistakes, protector and defender. They were babies, all of them. Some white-haired or hairless, some toothless with age, but still helpless, whining babies.
The cab pulled up in front of her brownstone on a street lined wall-to-wall with similar narrow, multistory houses, all of the same, roughly 1850, vintage. Sickly, leafless trees grew out of spike-ringed holes in the sidewalk.
After paying the cabbie, she climbed the steep front stairs, unlocked the door and stepped into the small foyer. As she started up to her second-floor apartment, she considered blowing off work, putting her feet up and reading a good book for a change. A rumble from the floor above startled her. It sounded like a stampede of elephants. Looking up, she saw huge, dark figures lumbering down from the landing. They were as wide bodied as NFL players. The marble staircase shook under their combined weight. She flattened her back against the wall to keep from being trampled.
As they poured past, she saw there were eight or nine of them, all dressed in a kind of uniform: royal-purple satin hoodies and black satin jogging pants. She couldn’t get a clear look at their faces because of the hoods and because they were moving so fast. She did see and recognize the skeletonized buttstocks of AKS-74U “Krinkovs,” some of them slung under the hoodies, the abbreviated autorifles looking like children’s toys. In the middle of the pack, apparently being guarded by the others, was a spindly, frail individual.
Was that Bob Dylan? she thought, turning to look as they crossed the foyer below and trooped out the front door. A rumor had started going around the block that morning that the famous balladeer had bought the brownstone next to this one, but no one had actually seen him yet. What was Bob Dylan doing in her building? The odd smell left in their wake made her wrinkle her nose.
When she peered over the second-floor landing, her heart sank. Her apartment door was standing wide open. Without thinking, she crossed the hall and rushed inside. The place had been trashed—furniture overturned, lamps broken, pictures knocked off the walls as if a whirlwind had struck. The television, stereo and computer were untouched. It smelled like a meth lab.
“Talu, Petey!” she called. “Lucy!”
The cats didn’t come.
She found all three hiding, wide-eyed, in a corner under the bed. Much to her relief, they were unhurt.
Nothing seemed to be missing from the bedroom; everything was just as she had left it. The autographed black-and-white photo of a bearded, smiling Robertson Davies sat atop her dresser.
Oh crap, the Eagle! She jumped up and tore open her closet door. Behind cartons of neatly packed summer clothes on the top shelf, the lock box was still there. She opened it with the keypad and looked down with relief at the Bengal tiger–striped .44 Magnum Desert Eagle snug in its fitted foam case. It had been a strange gift from an even stranger man—restraining-order strange.
Robert Marx, in addition to being bipolar and a con man, had authored a few books for the company’s Western soft-core-porn line, Ramrod—that series’ catch phrase was both obvious and literal. Veronica had never dated Marx, never saw him once outside the company offices, but he had become so enamored of her that out of the blue, he’d given her this $2,500, illegal-in-NYC pistol—the world’s most powerful handgun, in fact. Something Marx thought incredibly funny.
Primarily to defend herself against him—and people like him—Veronica had learned at a range in Connecticut to shoot the monstrous thing. She’d initially had serious problems with muzzle control because of the weapon’s weight—four-and-a-half pounds, fully loaded—and its tremendous recoil. To master it, she’d had to strengthen her wrists and forearms with dumbbell finger curls.
A loud, sudden noise from the living room made her stiffen. It sounded like something heavy had fallen. Maybe one of her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had crashed to the floor.
They’re back! was her only thought.
Veronica kicked off her heels. With the ease of much practice—and without chipping a nail—she slapped home the pistol’s loaded magazine and chambered the first fat wadcutter round in the stack. Snatching the custom-molded earplugs from the case, she thumbed them into place as she moved to the bedroom door. When she burst into the living room with the autopistol in a two-handed grip, ready to fire, there was no one there. Above the toppled chairs and scattered manuscript pages, a weird gray mist swirled in the air.
Something terrible was about to happen. She could feel it in the pit of her stomach.
Firmly planting her feet, she aimed the Eagle at the churning, expanding cloud. As she stared over the iron sights, it occurred to her that she had finally and completely lost her mind.
Chapter Two (#ulink_22ffb412-53b9-50b0-8d06-5c4053469533)
The pain didn’t stop when Ryan went blind in his one good eye.
Or when he stopped breathing. Or when his heart stopped beating.
Consciousness and sensation stubbornly remained while his body stretched and stretched, like a strand of spit, until it was a slithering ribbon a molecule high and a molecule wide. Until it was light years long. The cries of his companions were an unbroken wail, which he vibrated to, like a plucked guitar string.
It was nothing like the jump nightmares he had experienced before. The random, twisted horror stories peopled by ex-lovers, bloodthirsty muties and archenemies of his past were at least a comprehensible agony, with beginnings, middles and ends. There were no time signposts in this version of hell, nothing to separate one excruciating instant from the next. He was being stretched and stretched, but to where? To what? Had they been tricked into an endless loop of matter transfer, never arriving, forever in transit?
And the worst part of all: he had hit the button. Magus’s victory, their defeat, was by his own hand. His own bastard hand.
Suddenly the pressure seemed to ease a bit; before he could come to grips with the change, it reversed entirely. Instead of stretching, there was compression. Violent, dramatic compression at both ends, like g-forces trying to crush him flat, to drive the back of his head into the base of his spine, his ankles into his hipbones. Caught between the downward and upward forces, his insides were squashed. He just managed to roll onto his side as he projectile-vomited.
Choking and gasping for air, Ryan could feel the smooth floor beneath his cheek and temple.
He opened his eye and could see a dim light in the heart of the swirling fog.
They had arrived. Somewhere.
As he crawled toward the brightness, he felt as if he had been run over by a convoy of wags. His skin crackled strangely, as if tissue paper had been stuffed under it. The others were moving on all fours, also apparently unable to stand. He counted the dark shapes on either side of him—all were accounted for.
“Triple red,” he said, or tried to say. His voice came out as a hoarse and almost inaudible croak.
None of them, himself included, had the strength to do more than drag their blasters along.
The edges of the porthole doorway were obscured by the dense, low-hanging fog. As he advanced hand over hand toward the center of the light, the hard glass turned into something softer under his palms and then his knees.
The gray mist began to lift from the floor. The door stood open.
He saw a pair of bare feet in front of him—small, pale, female feet, with red-painted toenails. As the fog dissipated, the woman came into full view. She was young and dressed as no Deathlander he’d ever seen—not even a baron’s wife. Her clothes looked new and were of a strange style: a jacket tailored at the waist and a knee-length skirt snugged around the hips, both cut from the same shiny gray cloth. In her ears, there were sparkling jewel studs, what Ryan thought to be diamonds from pics he had seen. Her shoulder-length hair was brown with red highlights, her small nose freckled.
But what commanded his attention was the enormous gold handblaster she held pointed at them, hammer cocked back to fire. The hole in the business end looked as big as a sewer pipe. The slide and frame were black striped, like the pelt of a tiger. From her stance he could tell she knew what she was doing, and the yawning muzzle stayed rock steady. Her fingernail color matched that of her toes.
“This isn’t happening,” she said, a look of horror in her eyes. Then it passed and she said, “Don’t move, any of you!”
Ryan tried to speak and couldn’t make his throat muscles obey. A faint, wheezing noise escaped his lips.
To his right, Ricky was still retching, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. He had already vomited all down the front of his T-shirt. It was on his cheeks, his neck and in his hair, too. The youth’s tan face looked deadly pale as he struggled to control the spasms.
The others seemed to have better weathered the storm—at least they weren’t still puking. Some of the decorative beads in Mildred’s plaits had broken, and the braids were undone. Jak had a shallow, bleeding, horizontal cut on his chin. Doc looked dazed, but no more than unusual.
The room where they had materialized was small and cramped. Ryan had never seen so much predark stuff concentrated in one place, but it lay in scattered, broken heaps on the Oriental carpet. A steady grinding noise was coming from the other side of the tall windows—it sounded like hundreds of wag engines all revving at once, interspersed with occasional horn blasts. When he glanced behind them, the open entrance to the chamber they had exited peeked in and out of gray mist.
“Where are we?” Krysty asked, glowering up at their captor. “What ville is this?”
“‘Ville’?” the woman said. “It’s Greenwich Village. Who the hell are you? And where in hell did you come from?”
“Look at this place, Ryan,” Mildred said. “They must have just passed through here. They have to be close.”
He stared down at a broken, framed photo on the floor. A woman in fatigues and a boonie hat was standing behind the corpse of an immense wild boar—at least five hundred pounds, he guessed. She had a bloody spear in one hand and a bloody combat knife in the other and was smiling through her camo face paint.
It was the same woman who was holding them at blasterpoint.
“Who is ‘they’?” the woman demanded. “Do you mean the bastards who wrecked my apartment?”
“The bastards we’re chasing,” Ryan said, his power of speech recovered. “Which way did they go?”
Before she could answer, a whooping, rhythmic siren erupted from outside.
Figuring that if the woman was really going to open fire on them, she would have already done so, Ryan rushed to the bank of windows, and the others followed.
As Mildred looked down on the street she said, “Well, that makes a nice change.”
The enforcers’ elephantine wedding tackle was no longer on display; they had put on pants. Even so, the width and heft of their bodies was unmistakable as were the blocky shapes of their heads inside tight purple hoods. And they were still barefoot.
The lone siren quickly became a deafening chorus. The enforcers rampaged along the sidewalk below, breaking into the small wags jammed end to end—strangely enough, the row of wags looked almost new. The muties rammed their fists through driver windows, ripped the doors from their hinges and tossed them over their shoulders. The wags sagged heavily to one side when enforcers jumped in and began tearing wires from under dashboards, presumably trying to start the engines without keys.
Magus was nowhere in sight.
The woman with the big blaster joined them at the window. “I am definitely losing it,” she said, her weapon now pointed at the floor. “Those things aren’t human.”
A doorway across the street burst open, and a tall man in a robe ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, carrying a yard of polished wooden club, fat at one end, a knurled knob at the other. With the club cocked over his shoulder, he yelled over the din of alarms for an enforcer to get away from his shiny personal wag. Snapping the driver’s door free of the hinge, the creature spun at the waist, flinging it sideways like a gigantic buzz saw. It struck bathrobe man amidships and nearly cut him in two. The impact left him sprawled facedown on the pavement, in the middle of a spreading puddle of gore.
Try as they might, the enforcers couldn’t seem to get the commandeered wags running. In frustration, holes were punched through the roofs, steering wheels snapped off and windshields kicked out onto hoods.
“Is it just me,” Doc said, “or does this all seem a bit chaotic for old Steel Eyes? It hardly reflects the usual high level of advanced planning...” The old man was confused by what he saw outside.
“The clockwork man likes things to go like clockwork,” Ryan agreed.
“Mebbe his brain’s stripped a gear?” J.B. said, without tearing his eyes from the escalating destruction below, wondering how all of the wags had survived looting and scavenging, where the gas had come from.
“Ryan, if we don’t get Magus now...” Krysty said.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “Keep the incendies ready. We’re going to have to get in close to maximize the effect.”
As they moved for the door, the woman once more raised her blaster. “Who are you?”
“No time for introductions,” Ryan told her. “Shoot us in the back if you want, but we’re going after them.”
Jak led them out the apartment door and down the marble stairs.
“Toss the grens inside the wags if you can,” Ryan said as they crouched in the foyer. “Locate Magus.”
They burst through the building’s front door two abreast, but had descended only the first few steps when autofire rattled from the far side of the street. A rain of bullets spanged the concrete treads and wrought-iron railings and crashed through the glass in the entry behind them.
With hard cover more than thirty feet out of reach, Ryan had no choice. He turned and pushed the others back through the doorway. Otherwise they were going to be cut to pieces.
Inside the foyer, Mildred said, “Enforcers were doing the shooting, I saw them.”
“That’s a new wrinkle,” J.B. said. “They never touched blasters on the island.”
“They were firing AKS-74Us one-handed,” Mildred continued, “waving them around like garden hoses.”
More high-velocity slugs zipped through the door’s broken glass, cutting tracks down the wall plaster and knocking chips out of the staircase.
“Why are they using blasters now?” Ricky said. “We can’t chill them with bullets. Why do they need blasters?”
“To make us keep our distance and hold our fire,” Ryan said. “Magus is part human and can be hurt with bullets. Did anyone see the bastard?”
Heads shook no.
Another sustained burst of autofire raked the building’s entrance, forcing them to press their backs against the wall. The opposition’s ammo supply seemed endless.
“They’re going to get away, Ryan,” Krysty said after the shooting stopped. “Gaia, they’re all going to get away.”
* * *
AFTER THE SCRUFFY strangers trooped out, Veronica stood amid the ruins of her living room, unable to take her eyes off the gray cloud and the dark, ovoid shape lurking behind it.
If it was real, she reasoned, then everything that had just happened was real.
With the Eagle raised to fire, she looked inside the chamber, saw that it was empty. She gingerly touched the edge of the doorway with a fingertip and got a powerful static shock that made her jerk back her hand. There was actually a little flash and an audible crackle.
It was not a dream.
The creatures outside were real. Mr. Crawford’s body in the street was real. Eye-patch man and the others weren’t lifted from some low-budget ’80s John Carpenter film—they were real, too.
Automatic gunfire clattered in the street. What with that and all the car alarms going off at once, it sounded like video clips of Beirut. Then bullets smashed through her street-facing windows, angling up and digging ugly holes in the plaster overhead. The original 1850s ceiling medallion took the worst of it.
As if she wasn’t pissed enough.
“Hosers!” she shouted.
Avoiding the broken glass underfoot, she ran back into her bedroom. From the closet, she pulled out a pair of running shoes and slipped them on. Then she took the cross-draw, leather chest holster from its hook on the wall behind her clothes, inserted the Desert Eagle and strapped it across her suit jacket. Its twin pouches held 8-round magazines of .44 Magnum bullets.
The weight of the fully loaded harness felt good.
A DIY curriculum of advanced combat and weapons training had not only helped her keep her job, it had taught her that, unlike the authors she wet-nursed and contrary to her own expectations—and the expectations of those who thought they knew her—she was absolutely fearless. It turned out danger flipped her secret switch. Where others feared to tread, Veronica Currant jumped in with both feet.
Born to raise hell and take scalps.
And now, out of the blue, she had been given the chance to fight monsters. Not monsters in lamentable purple prose. Not in a mindless video game. But in the flesh. It felt as if her whole life had been leading up to this moment.
The cats were still hiding wide-eyed under the bed and wouldn’t come when she called and made kissing sounds. They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
She yanked the Eagle from its sheath. Kicking the debris from her path, she exited the apartment. As she looked over the hallway rail, more bullets crashed through the front door, a story below.
The strangers were out of the line of fire, squatting along the walls of the foyer, clearly pinned down. Eyepatch, the albino, the black woman, the guy with glasses and fedora, the brown kid, the statuesque redhead, the senior citizen with walking stick—they were variations, permutations of the series’ characters she lived with on a daily basis. Prototypical crusty, hard-bitten badasses, a melange of signature guns and knives in abundance, dressed like homeless people.
And of course, they had suddenly and remarkably come to life.
“This way!” she shouted as she rounded the foot of the staircase. She led them down the hallway to the back of the building and out a rear entry. She turned to the left and descended another short set of steps to the backdoor landing of the building’s below-ground apartment. The door looked solid, but for someone who had mastered violent-entry techniques, it wasn’t. Expelling a grunt, she executed a front kick, planting her foot in precisely the right spot. With a crunch, the door splintered away from the deadbolt and lock plate and swung slowly inward.
“There’s nobody here. Don’t worry,” she said as she stepped through the entrance. “Owner’s still at work. Go on through to the front. We can come up from below street level, get cover from the parked cars.”
The leggy redhead raised an eyebrow at the word we, her expression undisguisedly suspicious and hostile, but the Latino kid with vomit on his shirt and the old man beamed at her. They all seemed taken aback at the apartment’s furnishings.
The fedora-and-glasses guy pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall. “Wow, that’s an old one,” he said.
Veronica thought the remark was odd since it was the current Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and the model in question—blonde, tanned, microbikini, zero body fat, draped over the stern of a vintage speedboat—was all of twenty.
“Don’t put your eyes out staring,” the black woman said, giving him a hard shove from behind.
Taking them through to the living room, Veronica opened the front door, which led up to the street.
Eyepatch put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her from taking point. “This is as far as you go, lady,” he said. “Trust me, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
He held up a red canister. She recognized it at once from her extensive research. Thermite. Four-to five-second delay fuse. Undo safety clip, pull pin, release safety lever. Throwing range, twenty-five meters.
“Let’s clear a path, Jak,” Eyepatch said to the albino. “Right through the windows, into their laps.”
The albino pulled out his own thermite grenade. Veronica thought that the canister’s color was a disturbingly close match to his eyes.
They pushed past her and climbed to the top of the short flight of steps. The others hung back, just below the level of the street. Safety levers plinked off. The two men chucked hissing grenades.
Eyepatch and the albino didn’t appear ready for what happened next—because they didn’t duck.
Massive overlapping explosions rocked the ground, sending them flying backward, arms and legs flailing. As they crashed down on top of their equally astonished friends, the concussion blast emptied window frames up and down the street. A wave of blistering heat washed over the stairwell, then car alarms a block away started wailing.
“Dark night,” the man in the fedora said as he regained his feet. “What was in those wags?”
“Let’s do this before they recover,” Eyepatch said, unslinging his Steyr Scout. Then he scrambled back up the steps, with the others close behind.
Despite the warning for her to stay put, Veronica brought up the rear, Eagle at the ready. The pall of greasy black smoke that hung over the sidewalk made it hard to breathe. Inside the towering, twin fireballs at the curb, there was nothing left but twisted car frames and axles. The spindly sidewalk trees were burning furiously, as if they’d been doused with gasoline, and the cars fore and aft of the thermite strikes were on fire, too. Monsters in purple hoodies had given up trying to jumpstart a ride. They lumbered across the street and disappeared behind the parked cars. She followed the strangers as they took cover away from the heat and smoke, next to a pair of cars farther up the block. As she ducked beside the rear passenger door, autofire rattled at them from the opposite sidewalk. The driver side of the sedan absorbed a torrent of bullets. The left-hand tires both blew out, glass shattered and the car quivered on its suspension. Just above her head, slugs zipped through the front compartment and sparked on the concrete steps behind them.
She had gone through live-fire drills in a Georgia backwoods training camp. This was no drill; these shooters weren’t trying to miss. No way could she get off a shot from her position without putting her head in the ten-ring.
Then Eyepatch, the Latino kid, the black woman and the redhead jumped up from the ends of vehicles and returned fire.
The albino was already in motion, scampering like a white spider between car bumpers. With an underhanded, bowling-ball pitch, he skipped a sputtering red can across the street and under the car the shooters were firing from behind. Then he dived back over the front hood amid a flurry of bullets. He landed with a shoulder roll and came up crouched on the balls of his feet, grinning madly.
An instant later a tremendous boom shook the street. The jolt dropped Veronica hard onto both knees. As she caught herself, she thought she saw a shadowy blur of car door and hood sailing high overhead, then a wave of withering heat made her whimper.
Grenades of that type didn’t explode, she knew. The car’s gas tank hadn’t exploded, either. Not enough time had elapsed for the heat to reach combustion point. The monsters themselves had exploded, like they had five pounds of short-fused C-4 stuffed up their butts.
She peered over the windowsill and saw the surviving monsters break cover and take off down the sidewalk in the direction of Washington Square Park. Their blocky heads and wide shoulders bobbed over the tops of the cars. The monster in front held the one she’d thought was Bob Dylan, carrying the form as if it were a small child—or a ventriloquist’s dummy—legs bouncing up and down at the knees.
When the strangers popped up from behind cover, so did she. Taking stable holds against the vehicles and trees, they all opened fire at once. Eyepatch worked the Steyr’s bolt like a machine, punching out shot after scope-aimed shot. She could see his bullets striking the backs and heads of the retreating monsters, plucking at the fabric, the impacts staggering them as they ran.
Veronica knew her ballistics. For some reason, what should have been certain kill shots with 7.62 mm NATO rounds wasn’t.
She tracked the moving targets over the sights of the Eagle but held fire—without a clear shot, no way was she going to send .44 Magnum slugs sailing down her own street.
The opposition seemed to have a destination in mind.
As they disappeared around the corner, Veronica’s new friends leaped from between the cars to give pursuit. Eyepatch waved for her to stay put.
“No, lover,” said the redhead, a strange glint in her eyes, “let her come along if she wants to.”
Again bringing up the rear, Veronica holstered the Eagle, as it was awkward and heavy to carry in hand while running.
The monsters crossed West Fourth Street against the light, bringing the afternoon traffic to a screeching, horn-honking halt. They took off along the wide sidewalk that bordered the south side of Washington Square Park, scattering pedestrians and sending them fleeing into the trees. The panicked screams brought a pair of horse-mounted cops onto the sidewalk. As they drew sidearms on the approaching purple-hooded crew, their steeds suddenly spooked, reared and, with minds of their own, shot off back into the park.
Farther ahead at the corner, a helmeted motorcycle cop jumped the curb and, with the bike’s siren wailing, cut off the monsters’ path. He drew and rapid-fired his service automatic pistol, but it didn’t slow the charge. The monsters swept over him. Then, like a CG movie stunt, something that shouldn’t have been possible in real life, both Harley and rider were tossed forty feet in the air and came crashing down on the stopped traffic.
The motorcycle’s siren abruptly cut off on impact, but more were coming from all directions and getting louder by the second. The police response would be the Emergency Service Unit—ESU—NYC’s version of SWAT. That was not a good thing. Veronica wanted to yell a warning to the others that armed civilians would be shot first and asked questions afterward, but couldn’t because she was struggling to breathe and keep up the headlong pace. Though Eyepatch and the rest were running hard, they kept looking around. They seemed disturbed, even apprehensive about the surroundings, the people, the traffic, the city skyline.
A half block ahead of them, the monsters poured down the steps to the West Fourth Street subway entrance. As they closed in on it, the rattle of rapid gunfire rolled up from belowground. It sounded like pistols, not AKs.
They paused at the edge of the stairs to catch their breaths.
“Why are they running from us?” the Latino kid said. “They’re stronger, even without blasters. Why they not stand and fight?”
No one answered him.
Hat-and-glasses guy was staring up at the tall, wall-to-wall buildings, as if he’d never seen the like before.
“Dark night! This isn’t Deathlands,” he gasped. “Where in nukin’ hell are we?” To Veronica it looked as if he was on the verge of hyperventilating.
The black woman put a hand on his back and tried to calm him. “We’re in New York, J.B.”
Eyepatch didn’t seem to notice his friend’s distress. “We’ve been here before,” he said. His attention was focused on the traffic on the street beside them; he seemed to be looking from one license plate to another.
“What year is this?” he asked Veronica.
In the context of what had already happened, the question didn’t seem all that strange. “It’s 2001,” she said.
“By the Three Kennedys,” the old man groaned, “we have jumped back in time.”
Veronica blinked at him in disbelief. “You’re from the future, then?” she asked dubiously. As she uttered those ridiculous words, an uncharitable thought popped into her mind: Wow, it must really suck.
Eyepatch didn’t confirm or deny their origins. Instead he asked another question. “What month and day is it?”
“It’s January 19.” A thoroughly assimilated New Yorker, she added sarcastically, “Why? Do you people have somewhere more important to be?”
“Anyplace but here and now would be just fine,” Eyepatch said. “The world ends at noon tomorrow.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_708b7939-0f54-592e-a398-9bbdf5b8866a)
When the bundle of meat and metal in its arms shrilled a command, the enforcer cut hard right and started down the stairs that led below street level. Its brethren followed in lockstep. They had been to this strange-tasting, chaotic, crowded place many times in the service of their shambling master. The fact that they had never before missed the designated landing spot, never met opposition on arrival or taken a casualty did not make it uneasy. They were trivial concerns compared to the inconceivable power the master had shown them over and over.
The power to loot the past and change the future.
As it descended, a rush of warm air rolled up the concrete steps, propelled by the pressure of a subway train moving in a tunnel beneath them. The enforcer sampled the gritty wind with its tongue. Mixed in with inanimate molecules of soot, of petrochemical solvents, of greasy, spoiled food and lavatory-cookie perfume was the flavor of living bodies, hearts pumping hot, red blood and skins oozing a watery sweat. The aroma of humanity did not perk its appetite.
It wasn’t a predator.
It didn’t kill to eat, or kill because it hated; it killed because it could.
At the bottom of the stairway, subway riders starting up for the street took one look at the mass of hooded, menacing figures coming toward them, spun 180 degrees and fled in the opposite direction, scattering across the concrete concourse.
The wide entrance floor was bisected by a barrier of stainless-steel turnstiles and a security kiosk. On previous visits they had paid to ride, according to local custom; this time, however, the master was in a rush and waved for them to hurry ahead. The brethren started hopping the turnstiles, which brought a pair of uniformed NYPD Transit Police charging out of the kiosk to intercept them. Obviously intimidated by the size and number of the fare cheaters, they drew their 9 mm sidearms.
“Stop!” one of them shouted over the sights of his handgun.
The black communication device on his hip chirped and crackled. A disembodied voice announced, “Ten-double-zero, officer down,” then gave a description of multiple, identically dressed suspects fleeing the scene on foot and their last known direction of travel.
With the master cradled in its arms, the enforcer easily jumped the turnstile’s spokes.
“Stop or we’ll fire!” the policeman repeated, eyes wide as he and his partner, pistols held in two-handed grips, closed distance.
From ten feet away the two cops started shooting. Instinctively, the enforcer shielded the master from the flurry of bullets with its own body. The hits to its torso and back barely registered as such—its sheer mass absorbed the shock of the impacts; its armored endoskeleton deflected the projectiles from vital organs. It did feel the hits to the side of its head, though; as its skull was violently jarred again and again, bright white lights flashed behind its eyes.
Bullets ricocheted off it in a wide arc, spraying across the concourse, with nothing to stop their flight but human flesh and bone. A male in an olive parka and watch cap was hit from behind; his knees buckled. An elderly female took a slug in the chest, sagged and toppled, spilling the contents of her shopping bags onto the concrete. Other bystanders dropped at random, as if their strings had been cut. People began screaming. The few who realized what was happening pressed their faces to the floor.
One of the cops circled to the front—from his aimpoint, trying to line up a head shot on the master. Before he could fire, the enforcer shifted the precious deadweight to its left arm and hopped forward with both feet. Toe to toe with the policeman, it struck with its free hand—a precise blow, perfectly timed, with more than three hundred pounds of mass behind it. The amber thumb hook drove into the corner of the man’s left eye socket, through and under the bridge of his nose and out the opposite socket. For an instant they were frozen, the impaler and the impaled, then the handgun slipped from the cop’s fingers and clattered on the concrete. With a brisk snap of its wrist, the enforcer wrenched off the face, from forehead to upper jaw, like a cheap plastic lid, leaving behind a yawning red crater and exposed tongue. A gargling noise burst from the officer’s throat as he collapsed, then blood began to fountain.
The other cop staggered in retreat, the slide on his empty pistol locked back. Behind him, one of the brethren ripped a turnstile from its mounting and with a downward, single-handed blow, drove one of the fat, stainless spokes through the crown of his head. The massive surge of pressure inside the skull made both eyes pop out of their sockets, but the policeman never felt it. He was already dead.
As master and disciples advanced toward the platform entrances, the screams and shouts behind them grew louder and louder. Humanity was waking up. Commuters in winter coats and hats rushing up from the trains parted like a school of panicked baitfish. While some darted for safety, others flattened themselves against the walls or fell helplessly to their knees. Those who froze in their tracks midconcourse were either bowled over and trampled or grabbed, broken and flung out of the way.
The half man/half machine in the enforcer’s arms shuddered and made a clanking, grinding noise—like a wag throwing a tie-rod.
The master was laughing.
Then the grating, steel-scraping-on-steel voice said, “Faster! Hurry!”
They trooped down more flights of stairs, smashing and hurling human obstacles out of their path. When they stepped onto the middle of the subway platform, the nearest waiting commuters hurried for the other exits. On the opposite platform, a crowd stared at them uneasily.
From down the tunnel to the right came a rush of warm wind, signaling the approach of a train—one going in the opposite direction.
“Cross the tracks!” the half man/half machine shouted at them. “Now! Run!”
The enforcer carrying the master didn’t expect an explanation. That it understood the reasons for an action wasn’t required. Its brain was no match for the master’s, even without its comp enhancement. The only thing required was that it did as it was told. With the other brethren, it jumped down from the platform onto the soot and grease-blackened rail bed.
“Watch out for the electrified rail,” the master reminded it.
As the enforcer stepped over the high-voltage track, between the ceiling supports, the wind gusted harder. It tasted ozone and rat shit in the steady breeze, and when it looked down the dark tunnel it saw the headlight of the train bearing down on them.
The humans on the platform were yelling and waving for them to go back. When they saw the hooded, assault-rifle-armed heavyweights were going to make it safely across, they turned and raced for the exits.
The brethren jumped up onto another deserted platform.
Seconds later the long, low train squeaked to a stop beside them. The doors to all the cars slid open and commuters flowed onto the platform, moving quickly past the enforcers, looks of astonishment on their faces. When the brethren entered the middle door of a car, they forced a mad exodus of riders out either end. Commuters pushed and shoved to escape.
“Put me down,” the master said.
The enforcer obeyed at once, carefully lowering the half man/half machine to the floor of the car. As it did so, there was a rumbling sound and a vibration beneath them, then more shrill squeaking as a train going the other way came to a stop at the opposite platform.
Through the speakers overhead, an automated voice warned travelers that their car doors were about to close.
“Don’t look in the other train!” the master screeched as all the doors whooshed shut.
Another command without explanation.
But too late this time. It had already turned its head. The train opposite was only a few feet away; plates of grease-smeared window glass faced each other across the narrow gap. It blinked its eyes and immediately turned back.
With a stomach-wrenching lurch, they accelerated away from the station.
The two trains had been side by side for only a second or two, but the afterimage of what it had seen through the hazy windows, in the strangely flickering, interior lights was burned into its mind.
Standing in the aisle of the opposing train, it had seen itself, the master and the others.
Even the two brethren who had fallen.
Chapter Four (#ulink_3467ea31-d7c7-5457-a3a3-f11051ff6d58)
A handful of people dashed up the stairs from the subway as if hell was on their heels. They ran past Ryan and down the sidewalk. Wailing sirens closed in all around. The wags on the street were stopped bumper to bumper, engines idling, horns honking, drivers shouting. So much noise, so many wags. So many people packed into such a small space—faces looking down from thousands of windows onto a gray canyon, which snaked between towering buildings. The concrete was cold against his palm. He smelled wag exhaust, saw the overcast sky above—though he felt like a speck of dust sucked down into the spinning gears of a vast and angry machine, it was all real.
All happening.
“Magus is heading for one of the underground trains,” Mildred said. “If we don’t catch up quick, we’re going to lose the trail.”
Unslinging his Steyr, Ryan waved for the others to follow. As he descended the stairs, the honking, wailing din turned into a screaming din. Wide and low-ceilinged, the concourse echoed with cries of pain and anguish. As the companions jumped the turnstiles, dazed people struggled up from the floor ahead of them. Seeing the group’s weapons, some pointed and screamed at them. Some pleaded for help as they pulled on limp arms, trying to raise loved ones who were obviously past raising. Some just sat weeping, with their faces buried in their hands.
“Ryan, wait,” Krysty said, catching him by the arm. “How are we going to stop the enforcers? We can’t use thermite in here. Look around. There are too many innocent people.”
“They’re all going to be ashes in less than twenty-four hours anyway,” J.B. said.
“But not by our doing,” Mildred argued.
“We’ll figure that out when we find Magus,” Ryan told her.
The trail the enforcers left behind was easy to follow, even in a full-out sprint. It consisted of broken bodies—some still crawling, most not. It led them through a doorway and down a long flight of stairs.
As Ryan stepped onto the empty platform, a shrill horn sounded. In front of him, the low silver train was already in motion to the right. He got a quick but unmistakable glimpse of purple-hooded behemoths clogging the middle of one of the cars before the train disappeared into the tunnel.
Across the tracks, beyond the row of ceiling supports, the opposite platform was empty—no passengers, no train.
“What do we do now?” Ricky asked.
Ryan turned to the woman with the unholstered, tiger-striped blaster. She didn’t look rattled by what she’d just seen, which surprised him. She looked really, really pissed off. “Which way is that train headed?”
“North to Herald Square,” she said.
“How many stops in that direction?” Mildred asked.
“It isn’t the number of stops,” the woman said. “They could get off anywhere, change trains, reverse direction. If you don’t know where they’re going...”
“We don’t know where they’re going or why,” Ryan said.
“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed, screwing down his fedora with one hand. “We did this for nothing? We’re going to die for nothing?”
“Attention,” a voice bellowed through the speakers above the platform. “Attention, all subway passengers. This station is being cleared for security reasons. Repeat, this station is being cleared for security reasons. Until the procedure is complete, no more trains will be stopping here. For your own safety and the safety of those around you, please remain calm and follow the signs to the nearest street exit. If you need help, NYPD officers will be available to assist you.”
“What’s going on?” Krysty asked.
“The ESU is about to clean house,” the woman with the tiger-striped blaster said as the announcement began to repeat.
“Combat-trained, militarized police,” Mildred explained. “Automatic weapons. Grenades. Snipers. Explosives.”
“This place is about to be assaulted by men in black uniforms, battle helmets and armored vests,” the woman added. “They will see us as armed suspects at the scene of a mass murder or terrorist attack. They will shoot on sight. We have two choices. Abandon our weapons now, blend in with the other passengers as best we can before they sweep in and hope to hell they don’t review the station’s closed circuit video before we manage to get out—”
“We’re not going to throw away our blasters,” J.B. interrupted.
“That’s a nonstarter,” Mildred agreed.
“The other choice is to follow the purple hoodies down the tunnel,” the woman said.
“But they are on a train, my dear, and we are on foot,” Doc said.
“I don’t mean follow them down the tunnel to catch them,” the woman stated. “I mean go down the tunnel to get out of here. ESU will clear the station first and then move on to the tunnels. If you want to keep your guns and stay alive, we have to escape while they’re busy elsewhere.”
“Do you know the way?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do,” the woman said as she holstered the big gold blaster. “Follow me. My name’s Veronica, by the way. Veronica Currant. But you can call me Vee.”
They quickly exchanged names; there was no time for handshakes.
Overhead the loudspeaker voice boomed, “Attention subway passengers. Attention subway passengers. If you are injured and unable to move or find yourself trapped, please remain calm. Do not resist the approaching armed police officers. Obey all their commands. They will take you to safety and medical help as quickly as possible.”
Vee led them down to the end of the platform, then jumped down onto the rail bed. “Stay away from that,” she said, pointing to the left, at the third rail.
Ryan had already noticed the red warning sign that read Danger High Voltage. The lights in the tunnel were dim and widely spaced; the air rank and humid. A thick coating of black grime covered its walls and coated the clustered pipes and cables that ran along them.
They had trotted maybe fifty yards when Vee stopped at a barely visible hatch-style door on the right. It was unmarked. With a grunt, she leaned on the locking lever, and the door cracked open. “This is a tunnel-maintenance access and emergency exit,” she said. “From here we can get to the street.”
She leaned through the doorway, then a weak light came on inside.
“How do you know so much about this place?” Mildred asked as they filed into the cramped space. “Do you work here or something?”
“No, I just pick up odd, interesting tidbits in my job,” she said.
A very steep stairway led up, so steep there were support rails along both walls. When they shut and dogged the hatch door, it muffled the racket from the station. They ascended in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing.
Ryan could feel the strain in his thighs as he put one boot in front of another. They had done a lot of full-out running and fighting in a very short time span. Not to mention the aftereffects of the chron jump. J.B.’s comment about their sacrifice being all for nothing tried to go around and around in his head, but he shut it off.
The game wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
Not while they still drew breath.
At the top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.
“Our position appears untenable,” Doc observed.
“Then we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”
“That isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”
“We shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”
“Even if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”
“So,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.
“Except to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.
“The mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I brought this down on us. We should have waited outside the redoubt for Magus to come back. From the moment we set foot inside that place, we were fucked.”
“Stuck between a rock and another rock,” Doc said soberly.
They had been caught in countless tight spots in the past—or more correctly in the future—but they had always been able to figure a way out. This time perhaps not. A question occurred to Ryan: Could a person really die a hundred years before he was born? He kept it to himself.
“We still have some time left,” Vee said. “Can’t we change the future somehow? Avert this nuclear attack? What do you know about it?”
She sounded remarkably calm for someone who’d recently learned the world was going to blow up in a matter of hours, Doc thought.
“Precious little that would help that cause, my dear,” Doc said. “An all-out missile exchange between the United States and the Russians on January 20, 2001, created a global, nuclear holocaust that ended much of civilization. That conflagration and its aftermath necessarily complicates the unraveling of the whos, the wheres and the whens. Which one, if either, started it is unknown. It could have been initiated by a third party or a computer glitch—or misinterpreted data. Miscommunication, even. Because we don’t know the precise chain of circumstances that triggered Armageddon, altering the course of those events becomes difficult if not impossible.”
“If you’re thinking of warning someone about nukeday,” Krysty said, “who would listen?”
“You’re right,” Vee agreed. “No one is going to listen.”
“You believe us?” Ricky asked.
“After what I’ve seen with my own eyes today, I’d believe anything you told me.”
“What’s happened to us is triple bad luck, and there’s no way around it,” Ryan told the others. “But it doesn’t change why we’re here. Or what we can do in the time we have left. One way or another we can still make sure Magus never leaves this place.”
“Chill half-metal bastard,” Jak spit.
“We need to get off the street and figure out how,” Ryan said.
“We can go to my office,” Vee told. “It will be closed for the night by the time we get there. I have the keys. No one will bother us. We can cut through the alleys and stay out of sight.”
As they trooped single file down the sidewalk, away from the subway station and the police barricades, a man in a peacoat stepped from a doorway and, smiling broadly, accosted Ryan. “Snake Plissken!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were dead!” Then he laughed like a mutie hyena.
Ryan kept walking. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that line.
To his back the man shouted, “Hey, Snake, Escape from L.A. blew chunks!”
Chapter Five (#ulink_a2ac497f-906f-5317-a40c-6e6866bb1b91)
Angelo McCreedy lowered his copy of the Daily Racing Form as people poured up the steps from the Thirty-Fourth Street–Herald Square Metro station. In his classic black chauffeur cap, black three-piece suit and tie and black leather gloves, he leaned against the stretch limo’s front fender. If his pickup didn’t show soon, he was going to have to move the limo from the taxi stand and start circling the block—the cabbies lined up behind him were starting to get restless. Exiting subway travelers seemed in an extra big hurry this afternoon, maybe because of all the sirens going off. A major accident was the cherry on top. It could louse up traffic for the rest of the day.
As he folded his Form and tucked it under his arm, a mass of shiny purple appeared at the top of the subway stairs.
Man, those are some big dudes, he thought.
They looked almost identical, like octuplets. They were in matching outfits and had the same height and build. The tight hoodies kept their faces in shadow. They all sported what from a distance looked like very expensive alligator boots. All except the littlest one, who was being carried like a child.
Some kind of cripple, he thought. Poor thing had metal feet.
McCreedy’s heart did a skip-tee-doo when the purple bunch turned and came right at him. His face flushed with fight-or-flight hormones. He wanted to retreat around the front of the vehicle but couldn’t make his legs move quickly enough. He didn’t notice the assault rifles they carried until the two-horned, front sight of one was jammed up under his chin.
The eyes shadowed by the hoodie top were yellow. Not yellow brown or yellow green. Yellow yellow, as in a daisy. And the pupils were elliptical slits that ran vertically, like a reptile’s. The double-wide holding the gun had on a rubber, alligator Halloween mask; it and the daisy eyes had to be some kind of prank. Then the mouth opened, and he saw the rows of small, pointed teeth and the flicking tongue.
As he sagged back against the fender, the creature holding the cripple leaned the little one’s head close to his ear. McCreedy opened his mouth to cry for help, but no sound came from his throat.
It had only half a human face, the rest was metal. The eyes were both metal. As the fan-bladed pupils opened wider, they made a whirring sound like the aperture of a cheap video camera. Guy wires and grommets connected its cheeks and jaw. Where living flesh abutted the stainless steel it looked angry and infected. It shouldn’t have been alive, but it was.
In a voice that sounded like wing nuts rattling in a tin can, it said, “You will drive us.”
As McCreedy was bum-rushed around the front bumper to the driver door, he kept thinking that this couldn’t be happening. In desperation he looked to the slowly passing cars for help, which was absurd—it was Manhattan. No help was forthcoming.
The limo sagged heavily, springs squeaking as the purple crew began piling into the rear compartment, invisible behind the black-tinted windows. Rough hands shoved him behind the wheel and slammed the door. The monster who got in the front passenger seat carried a very short, very deadly-looking assault rifle. It was only then he noticed the wicked amber hooks on both thumbs.
“Keep the privacy screen down,” the little one said. “Do exactly as I say, or your brains are going to end up on the hood like three pounds of bird shit.”
“Yes, sir,” McCreedy managed to croak. “Where do you want to go?”
The grating voice rattled off the address of a university hospital on the East Side. The bigger ones hadn’t made a peep. He wondered if they could even speak. Without signaling, he pulled away from the curb and forced his way into the sluggish flow of traffic.
As they crept forward, he considered cracking a joke to break the ominous silence: “Hey, how ’bout those Mets?” But the eye-watering, cat-piss smell wafting from the limo’s passenger compartment made him change his mind.
Like a meth ho’s thong, he thought.
He glanced warily back in his rearview. They sat as still as statues on the white leather upholstery. If, in addition to being armed, stand-on-two-legs giant reptiles, they were tweakers, no telling how they would take a joke. Screw it, he needed to bail on the limo. Just get the heck out and quickly, before things got even worse.
McCreedy studied the traffic ahead. If he had a sufficient gap in front or on either side, he could floor the gas, open his door and roll out. To shoot at him, they’d have to get out on the opposite side and fire over the roof or around the bumpers. By the time they did that, he would be running against the direction of traffic, keeping his head down, using the cars for cover. He’d seen the same scenario pulled off lots of times on TV and in the movies. And what choice did he have anyway? He was fairly sure if he didn’t do something, he was going to end up dead.
As he crept his fingers down to unfasten his seat belt, a horn of the assault rifle’s front sight hooked under his nose. As if the monster had read his mind.
“Drive!” said the voice from the back.
At one point during the twenty-minute trip, he thought he heard snoring coming from the back. When he turned up the entrance ramp to the hospital complex’s parking lot, the limo was riding so low the frame scraped on the concrete. Metal face directed him to the main building, which covered half a city block and was at least thirty stories tall.
McCreedy stopped in a patient-loading-and-unloading zone. He wondered what the heck they were doing at a hospital. If the little one needed an oil change and filter, Jiffy Lube had faster service.
A reptilian hand seized his neck and squeezed. The amber thumb hook rested against his jugular vein.
“You’re coming with us. Get out slowly.”
All of them piled out, the little one moving on its own in front of him in the middle of the pack. With an odd, herky-jerky gait, it passed through the automatic double doors.
The entourage drew immediate attention from staff and patients. Like a circus act. Or a rap ensemble.
“Wait just a minute, please.” A pair of uniformed, armed security guards stepped up to block their path. “Are you here for medical services or to visit someone?” one of them asked.
“Out of the way,” the little one rattled.
The guards exchanged quick, concerned looks but did not budge. Their hands dropped to the butts of their holstered sidearms.
McCreedy started to shout a warning about the assault rifles, but before he could get a word out, the scaly hand tightened on his neck, shutting off his air and the flow of blood to his brain.
The reptilians didn’t need guns to handle the situation.
One of them simply reached out and grabbed the big, burly men by their faces, gripping eye sockets and chins in either hand, pulled them over double and hauled them squealing through an open doorway. The door to the side room slammed shut. From the other side came violent, crashing sounds. It was over in seconds.
When the monster reappeared, McCreedy saw, inside the hood, below the slitted yellow eyes, a toothy smile.
Seeing them coming four abreast, hospital workers and civilians cleared a path, flattening against walls or slipping out of the way into rooms and alcoves, in some cases abandoning patients on gurneys and in wheelchairs to their fates.
They turned into the first elevator in a bank of four. The car groaned under their combined weight. One of them—maybe Metal face, he couldn’t see who—pushed a button on the control panel. The doors closed; the car jerked, then began to smoothly drop. It was a tight fit; it smelled really bad and something was leaking from somewhere—puddles were spreading underfoot.
McCreedy looked up from his shoe tops and kept his eyes focused on the back-lit indicator above the door. They passed P for parking, then B—for basement, one through four, before stopping at B5.
The doors opened onto a windowless, drop-ceiling hallway lit by overhead fluorescents. The reek of formaldehyde made a nice change from the aroma in the elevator. A rainbow of color-coded stripes on the facing concrete-block wall indicated the routes to various departments on this level: Pathology, Medical Records, Maintenance, Central Disinfection, as well as others.
They trudged down the corridor, made a hard right and filed through a doorway placard-labeled Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.
On the other side of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, people in white face masks, hair covers and sterile suits were bent over rows of workstations. Everything was white on white.
One of the workers looked up from a binocular microscope. When he saw the mob standing on the other side of the glass, he rose and stepped to a sliding door. He cracked it back a scant couple of inches, pulled his face mask down under his grizzle-goateed chin and said, “Yes, how can I help you gentlemen?”
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James Axler
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: TIME WARPEDRyan Cawdor and his six companions struggle to survive postnuclear America, a grim new world where hope for the future is lost amid the devastation.APOCALYPSE REDUXIn pursuit of a hardened enemy–Magus–Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they′ve encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in twentieth-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they′re not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just seventy-two hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day…