Hellbenders

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 One

The swallowing mire of darkness began to clear. To Dean, it seemed as though the swamp mist on the blackest of moon-clouded nights had begun to lift. The darkness that was all around him began slowly to loosen. He felt life return to his leaden limbs, and most importantly, it seemed to him that his brain began to work properly, bringing him back from the strange worlds of unconsciousness and the deep, dark fears that surfaced during every mat-trans jump.

Feeling a well of nausea in the pit of his stomach, Dean rose slowly on one elbow, moving with care and allowing his tortured frame to adjust to the new equilibrium.

Dean Cawdor was the youngest of the band of seven people gathered in the mat-trans chamber. Sitting upright and risking opening an eye when he felt the spinning in his head begin to recede, the youth looked at his companions. His father, Ryan, was already on his feet, although still looking a little groggy. Dean resembled a younger, leaner version of the man, with only time and harsh experience telling in the few inches of height between them and the older man’s more strongly developed musculature.

Dean risked rising to his feet on muscles still a little shaky. He was trembling slightly as he looked around the chamber. They’d obviously all been unconscious for some time, as the disks that usually glowed before and after every jump were flat and colorless. He reached down and grasped his Browning Hi-Power, the blaster that felt so comfortable in his grip it was like an extension of his hand.

“You okay, son?” Ryan asked, the ghost of a smile crossing his face. The curling, dark hair and serious countenance were mirrored in Dean, but the jagged scar that ran the length of the left side of Ryan’s face, broken by the eye patch that covered the empty eye socket was courtesy of his brother Harvey, the now deceased former baron of Front Royal.

Dean nodded, then grimaced as the nausea returned at his sudden head movement.

“Take some time—who knows what’s out there?” Ryan said, casting a glance at the door of the chamber, which would open out onto…who knew what? Some redoubts they had landed in had been occupied, some deserted, some providing food and shelter, some leaving them almost completely blocked off from the outside world. Beyond the sealed door of the chamber—automatically locked once the old comp terminals put the mat-trans programs into operation—could be anything, and they needed to be fully alert before they could risk taking a look.

Beside Ryan, at his feet and beginning to regain consciousness as he spoke, was Krysty Wroth, Ryan’s lover, fellow fighter and friend. A tall, Amazonian woman, she opened startling green eyes on the world, still fogged slightly by the jump.

“That was a bad one, lover,” she whispered to Ryan as she began to slowly rise. “It feels like we almost didn’t make it.” She winced as every muscle in her body protested at her ascent. Her long, flowing red hair hung freely over her shoulders. Ryan noted this, and had a notion that outside the chamber held little in immediate danger: Krysty’s hair was sentient, a result of her mutie genes, and could foretell danger ahead. It would curl in tightly to her neck and scalp and warn of any approaching enemies, be they natural or the result of human activity.

“We’re here, and we’re in one piece,” Ryan replied, glancing across again at Dean, who agreed.

“Just about,” the younger Cawdor replied.

Looking about, Dean could see that the other four members of the close-knit group that traversed the Deathlands were beginning to come around.

J. B. Dix grunted and stirred, shifting from his slumped position until he was sitting with his back against the wall of the chamber. He reached out for the battered fedora that had slipped from his head and placed it firmly on his crown. Then he reached into one of the capacious pockets of his jacket and withdrew the wire-framed spectacles, without which his vision was dangerously poor. He placed them on the bridge of his nose and pushed them up until they were in place, and he looked around at the chamber.

“Mauve?” he muttered, almost to himself. “Haven’t been many chambers with this color. Mebbe this is a new one.”

“Good Lord! Mauve?” muttered a voice beside the Armorer, as Mildred Wyeth began to return to consciousness. J.B., who had replaced his hat and spectacles one-handed, disentangled the fingers of his other hand from Mildred’s and began to replace his weapons in their holsters: the Uzi on his back, the Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun with its deadly load of barbed metal fléchettes on one thigh and the Tekna knife in the scabbard at his waist. Ryan, who had a SIG-Sauer pistol and Steyr rifle, as well as a razor-sharp panga, already had his weapons ready. Krysty, like Dean, had checked and holstered her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson 640 as a reflex, without even thinking about it.

“How you feelin’, Millie?” J.B. asked.

“What sort of an answer you want—the truth, or one where I don’t cuss every word?” Mildred replied, her brown eyes showing the humor coming through the agony of awakening. She stretched, the gray pallor of postjump trauma showing through even on her dark skin. Her long beaded plaits shook as she trembled, stretching every muscle that she could persuade to work. “I swear,” she said, straining through the effort, “even getting thawed was better than this.”

Dr. Mildred Wyeth was one of only two members of the group that had firsthand knowledge of the world before skydark. In the late twentieth century she, as a working doctor herself, had accepted that she would have to have a minor operation. There was no real risk, except that she developed a severe allergic reaction to the anesthetic, and she was cryogenically frozen until the problem could be sorted out. Then there came a bigger problem: the nukecaust. And so Mildred lay frozen for more than a hundred years until she was discovered by Ryan and his companions, who managed to revive her. Waking up into an alien world, Mildred’s mental toughness had enabled her to cope with the sudden change, and her old life had also equipped her to cope with the dangers, as she was a crack shot who had been an Olympic medalist for target shooting before the world had been nuked. She soon found that moving, breathing targets were as easy to hit when your life depended on it, and her Czech-made ZKR pistol had become a part of her persona.

Mildred clambered to her feet, swaying slightly as she adjusted to having all her atoms in one piece once more. The part of her that had been a doctor still wondered what the constant tearing apart and reassembling of their constituent atoms was doing to them, but the part of her that had adjusted to the new world figured it was a problem that had, of necessity, to be low on the list of priorities.

Except when she looked across at the two remaining members of the group, and the two who always had the most problems regaining their consciousness and equilibrium after a jump. For different reasons, Jak Lauren and Dr. Theophilus Tanner were at their most physically vulnerable during the period of a mat-trans jump.

Jak moaned, curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Tendrils of his thin, stringy white hair were caked in vomit as it lay across his face, and when he opened his red, albino eyes they were sightless at first. His whipcord-thin body seemed dwarfed by the camou trousers, heavy boots and patched jacket that appeared to swallow up his small frame.

Yet this was deceptive; Jak Lauren was a child of the bayous, whose hunting instincts and ability to chill in a multiplicity of manners had been honed by his early life in the swamplands. He had proved his strength, speed and cunning many times after joining Ryan’s band, and his loyalty was beyond question.

Mildred hurried over to Jak, bending to check his pulse. It was strong but erratic. She stepped back as another stream of bile shot from his mouth, and his body convulsed in a spasm of retching.

“Dammit, you nearly got me, Jak,” she whispered as she avoided the vomit.

“Sorry,” he replied weakly, his eyes coming into focus, “try harder next time.”

“You’re feeling better, then,” she said simply, helping him to sit upright, careful to avoid the hidden jagged metal and pieces of glass sewn into his jacket.

As he adjusted himself into a sitting position, Jak took in his surroundings. “Made it,” he said softly.

“Looks like it,” Mildred replied, adding, “at least, I think so.” She glanced over to where Doc Tanner lay. Beside him lay his weapons: the silver-tipped lion’s-head cane with a hidden blade, rapier thin, made of the finest tempered Toledo steel. Next to it sat the ancient LeMat percussion pistol, with its double barrels, one of which was primed for a charge of shot, the other for a ball that was of an incredible diameter and density for such a pistol. They were old weapons, but ones that, in the hands of the skilled Doc Tanner, were deadly.

Theophilus Tanner was, like Mildred, one of the few people in the with any firsthand knowledge of the world before skydark. Except that his story was more incredible than anything that any of the companions could have dreamed, and hadn’t even come out of the mouth of Tanner himself. Some of the things they had learned about the man had come through chance discoveries in files and records left behind in some of the places they had visited.

Lying on the floor of the chamber with his frock coat wrapped around him and his white mane of hair obscuring his features, Doc could be mistaken—on glimpsing his weathered and lined features—for a man in his sixties. And yet he was only in his late thirties. Doc had been the subject of an experiment by Operation Chronos, a part of the Totality Concept, a U.S. Government project that had been partly responsible for the war that led to the devastation of skydark, and that had bequeathed the redoubts and the mat-trans units to those who came after.

Doc had been born in the late 1860s in a rural part of Vermont, and was a doctor both of science and of philosophy. A happily married man, he had been snatched away from his beloved wife, Emily, and his children, Rachel and Jolyon, by a random time trawl operated by the whitecoat scientists of Operation Chronos. He had fought and struggled, both mentally and physically, with his captors. Doc had become a problem, and the solution was to send him forward in time. Doc had been shot a hundred years into the future, ironically saving him from the fate that soon caught up with his tormentors, but leaving him adrift in a world completely unlike anything he could ever have imagined.

Doc’s physical frame showed signs of the stresses of such time travel, but it was his mind that was much more of a concern to those he traveled with. In flashes, Doc was erudite and sharp, but at other times he was in a different world than those around him, and his grasp on reality could be dangerously thin, the silken thread of his psyche perilously close to snapping.

As Mildred attended to him, he mumbled incoherently, his pulse fading in and out with his consciousness, as though he were actually close to just fading away in front of them. Without saying anything, Mildred knew that the others mirrored her thoughts: how many more of these jumps could Doc’s mind and body take?

And then, just when she thought that he was about to fade again, his eyes snapped open, the clear blue orbs immediately focused on her.

“By the Three Kennedys,” he whispered hoarsely, “I do believe we’ve arrived safely once more. Perhaps we should stick around, see what’s happening.”

Ryan looked at Krysty. The ends of her hair were wispy tendrils that began to flutter, as though from the slightest breeze.