Labyrinth

Ryan shoved violently back from the table, and looking up, viewed the feast in a new light.

Literally.

The row of torches had ignited the threadbare tapestries, and the walls seethed with flame, brightly illuminating the hall—and its occupants. Seated at his table, and all the other tables were cobwebbed, moldering corpses. He turned to Krysty, and seeing her, let loose a bellow of pain.

A small, hairy-legged spider had built a home between her shriveled breasts. Her hair hung lank and lifeless to her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, and deeply sunken in their sockets, but the skin of her eyelids, face and neck twitched and rippled, animated by the stillbusy parasites beneath.

As Ryan recoiled in shock, the high-pitched notes of the fiddle and squeezebox turned into a shrill, electronic whine, and the drumbeat became an intermittent whipcrack.

He came awake with a hard jerk, gasping for air.

There was none.

He lay curled on an armaglass floor, his throat scorched, a burning pain spearing deep in his lungs, and withering heat beating against his back. Gray smoke, thick with particulate matter, swirled in the small chamber, transected by wild flashes of electricity.

The jump dream had ended but his nightmare continued.

The mat-trans unit was on fire.

Beside him on the floor, he could see the slumping forms of his five companions. As he pushed up from the blistering hot armaglass, his world went dim around the edges—lack of oxygen was shutting down his brain. If he allowed himself to pass out, they would all die, and horribly. A tingling rush of adrenaline brought Ryan to full consciousness.

He had to use his shoulder to crack loose the door of the mat-trans unit, which was stuck in the jamb. It swung open, revealing an anteroom lit by a bank of flickering fluorescent bulbs. Fresh air rushed in around him, feeding the flames. Ryan sucked down a quick breath, then turned back to the blaze and his helpless friends.

He grabbed hold of the nearest arm and dragged its owner’s body over to the portal. The tails of Doc Tanner’s frock coat were smoking as Ryan tumbled him out of the chamber. The lanky old man didn’t move. There was no time to check for a pulse—fire was starting to shoot up along the expansion seams in the armaglass floor.

Ryan gathered Krysty in his arms. Though she was unconscious, her prehensile mutie hair had retracted into the tight ringlets of mortal fear. She moaned as he unceremoniously pitched her out of the doorway.

When Ryan tried to do the same for Jak Lauren, the albino came to in his grasp. Faster than a blink, the wild child of Deathlands had the razor-sharp point of a leaf-bladed knife jammed against the front of Ryan’s throat, his slitted, blood red eyes glittering.

“Jak, it’s me,” Ryan said, giving him a hard shake. “For nuke’s sake, wake up.”

The youth’s eyes widened, and he immediately lowered the blade.

“Come on,” Ryan said as he turned back for the others. “We’ve got to hurry….”

After dragging their two remaining companions over the threshold, he and Jak did the same with all their backpacks. Crossing the chamber was like being caught on an armaglass skillet. Impervious to heat, the unit’s floor plates weren’t burning; it was the material beneath—circuitry, floor joists, insulation—that was on fire. Boot soles melting, Ryan retrieved his predark treasure, a scoped Steyr SSG-70 sniper rifle.

Jak staggered out of the mat-trans ahead of him, his lank white hair and ghostly skin peppered with soot. Ryan was relieved to see the rest of his crew, certainly worse for wear, but alive and awake.

Krysty sat on the floor, her long legs drawn up to her chest. She looked dazed, but she wasn’t burned. In the eerie, flickering light, trapped smoke rose like steam from the shoulders and back of her fur coat.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth knelt beside her. The stocky black woman was dressed in an OD jacket, camouflage BDU pants, jungle boots and a sleeveless gray T-shirt. She wore her hair in braided, beaded plaits. On her hip was a Czech ZKR 551 revolver in a pancake holster, the same weapon she had used to win a silver medal in pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic Games. Shortly after that victory, she had been the victim of complications during surgery, a result of reaction to anesthetic. To save her life, the medical team put her in cryogenic stasis. Less than a month later, when a massive thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union ended civilization, Mildred slept dreamlessly through it. She continued to sleep for another hundred years, until Ryan and the others revived her.

What had gone so terribly wrong on January 20, 2001, was anybody’s guess.

Human error. Machine error. A combination of same.

And the sad truth was, it no longer mattered.

All the people who gave a damn about laying blame had been vaporized The great mistake, once made, was uncorrectable; by its very nature, it could never be repeated. It had destroyed Earth and its potential; it had derailed human history.

While Mildred attended to Krysty, Doc released the catch on his ebony sword stick and unsheathed the rapier blade. Satisfied that it wasn’t damaged, he re-sheathed it and checked his side arm. From a tooled Mexican leather holster, he drew a massive, gold engraved revolver. The two-barreled Le Mat was a Civil War, black powder relic, and the original “room broom.” Beneath a six-and-a-half-inch pistol barrel, hung a second, scattergun barrel, chambered for a single load of “blue whistlers.”

Though Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner appeared to be a well preserved sixty, as with Mildred Wyeth, appearances were deceiving. Chronologically his age was closer to four times sixty. The Harvard- and Oxford-educated Tanner had the distinction of being the first human time traveler, albeit an unwilling one. He had been ripped from the loving bosom of his family in 1896, and drawn one hundred years into the future by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Doc had spent his brief time in the late 1990s as a prisoner, locked down inside the ultrasecret facility. The jubilation of the twentieth-century scientists over their success was short-lived, thanks to Tanner’s ingratitude, truculence and general unpleasantness. Shortly before skydark, to rid themselves of the troublemaker, and to further test the limits of their experimental technology, they had hurled him forward in time. In so doing, they had inadvertently saved him from the nukecaust.

John Barrymore Dix, his fedora pushed way back on his head, was preoccupied, patting down his coat pockets. Ryan and J.B. had been running buddies since their convoy days with Trader, Deathlands’ legendary freebooter. It was Trader who had given J.B., a weapons specialist of extraordinary talent, the nickname “Armorer.” Finding nothing in his coat, with more urgency J.B. turned to his trousers. When he looked up from the fruitless search, Ryan read the expression behind the smudged, wire-rimmed glasses.

Triple red.

Dropping his Smith & Wesson M-4000, 12-gauge shotgun, J.B. jumped for the mat-trans unit. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted. “Get down!”

As J.B. grabbed the edge of the door, a string of explosions from inside the chamber rocked the room. In the same instant, a volley of buckshot ricocheted out the portal at a steep upward angle, cutting ragged furrows in the acoustic tile ceiling and shattering fluorescent bulbs.

J.B. slammed the door shut, sealing the last of the 12-gauge cook-offs behind armaglass and steel. Over the muffled explosions of the accidentally dropped shells, J.B. cursed a blue streak. He had cause to be upset with himself. In Deathlands, reliable ammo was more valuable than gold.

Even with the door closed, the adjoining walls and ceiling were starting to blister from the heat. Though there were smoke sensors and fire suppression nozzles placed at intervals along the ceiling, the century-old system was inoperative.

Still a bit dazed, Krysty got up from the floor. “What the blazes happened?” she groaned.

Ryan pointed out the deep scoring of tool marks along the door frame. Next to it, a head-size hole in the plaster revealed a mass of melted conduit and charred wiring.

The conclusion was as unmistakable as it was disheartening.

“Somebody’s beaten us here,” Mildred said.

“And when they saw the heavy door,” Ryan added, “they must’ve figured to find sweet pickings on the other side. They couldn’t open it with their pry bars and sledges, so they attacked the wall, looking for another way in. That was a dead end, too.”

J.B. agreed with him. “After the damage was done, the unit just sat there until we showed up,” he said. “The rematerialization power surge short-circuited the system. We were lucky to come through in one piece.”

“One thing is certain,” Doc said as he dusted off the lapels of his frock coat, “the machine has jumped its final cargo. Once again we find ourselves reduced to more primitive means of transportation—namely, our own two feet.”

“The smoke is getting worse in here,” Mildred said. “No telling what kind of toxic fumes we’re inhaling. There could even be a radiation leak if the containment vessel’s been breached. I suggest we take this show on the road before we start glowing in the dark.”

She didn’t have to add that whoever had wrecked the unit could still be lying in wait.

After drawing their weapons and shouldering their packs, the six companions exited the anteroom and control room, then entered the long, doorless corridor that separated the mat-trans unit from the rest of the redoubt. Jak took point, with his lightning reflexes and .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver.

Motion sensors triggered the overhead lights as they rapidly advanced, single file. Some of the fluorescent tubes were missing, some blinked erratically, others just buzzed and snapped. Vandals had caved in the walls in places; chunks of concrete and bits of glass from broken lights crunched underfoot. The dusty floor of the hallway revealed no recent bootprints. The air was as still and stale as a crypt.

The hall ended in an open doorway. As the companions stepped through it, the light banks switched on, revealing a broad, low-ceilinged room. What had once been a communications center had been turned into a debris field of broken glass, plastic and metal, waist-high in places.

At the sight, J.B. muttered a string of obscenities.

He and Ryan had spent most of their adult lives seeking out and pillaging similar predark strongholds. The network of secret installations, complete with stores of food, ammunition, fuel and vehicles, had been built to shelter and support America’s political, military and scientific elite in the case of nuclear war. But the end had come far too quickly for mass evacuations, and the installations were never occupied and used as the builders intended. The quirk of fate had left the redoubts’ caches of matériel and technology waiting, intact, for someone to find.

In this case, discovery was a done deal.

Here and there in the mounds of trash, individual sleeping chambers had been burrowed, then insulated and cushioned with layers of cardboard. In the middle of the room, a four-foot-high berm of trash had been pushed back, exposing an area of the floor and a wide, blackened hole chipped into the concrete. Smoke stained the ceiling above the crude firepit. Ringing the pit were a half-dozen ergonomic chairs missing their wheels and to one side of the hole lay a neat stack of fuel: gray plastic-veneered pressboard from workstations and cubicle dividers hacked into kindling.