She nodded.
Doc squinted, the fear and uncertainty fluttering in his chest, a cavity that was also being filled with pain as the spokes moved and bit deeper.
“But you’re dead.”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “So’s your wife and your kids, Doc. We’re all dead. But you’re not. That’s why you’ve got to go on suffering.”
Despite the fear and agony, a wry smile crossed Doc’s face. He had often considered that those who had perished were the lucky ones. Lori Quint, found in a redoubt in Alaska and rescued from the dysfunctional family of a “father” that used her as a toy for his own gratification, only to perish along the way.
Suddenly, Doc was no longer afraid. He knew he wasn’t trapped under a wagon in the West. He wasn’t in his own time…In fact, he had no time to call his own. He had long since left Emily, Rachel and Jolyon behind. They had their lives, lived out to whatever span, without ever knowing what had happened to him. How could they? How could nineteenth-century gentlefolk ever comprehend the perverse science behind Operation Chronos, that part of the Totality Concept that had snatched Doc from his own time and propelled him into the 1990s, before his dissension and desire to return to his own time had forced his captors to send him into a future that, ironically, had preserved his life. For while he had leaped over the nuclear holocaust known in his new time as skydark, those very scientists whose Totality Concept had helped form it were to perish.
And in that dark new world of the Deathlands, Doc had met Lori and lost her.
But despite it all, despite the physical strain of being propelled through time, and immense mental torment that made him feel as though he had descended into insanity, emerged the other side and gained the ability to dip his toe in and out of those murky waters of madness, he had survived. He and his traveling companions.
And the journey wasn’t yet over.
“Do what you must,” Doc said simply.
Lori Quint nodded blankly and walked over to the wheel, poised over Doc’s chest.
“Sorry,” she said as she began to push the wheel down…gently at first, but then with more force, the effort showing on her face.
“It doesn’t matter…it just, ah—”
Doc’s ability to speak was taken from him by the rush of pain as the splintered wood bit deeper into his flesh, breaking the skin and tearing the flesh and sinew beneath, the resistance of his ribs making them almost audibly creak before the sharp snapping sounds of bone giving way to a greater force.
Doc looked up into Lori’s face as the periphery of his vision grew dim, the black edges spreading across the whole of his vision.
“It just has to carry on….” he whispered as all darkened, and the pain grew to encompass all.
“DOC LOOKS in a pretty bad way.”
Ryan Cawdor hunkered down beside the older man, whose white, straggling hair matted in sweat-soaked strands to his head. He was stretched out on the floor of the mat-trans chamber. His limbs jerked in spasm, and his open eyes flicked the whites up into his skull.
Doc was always Ryan’s main concern on arriving at a new destination. The mat-trans chambers were located in secret predark U.S. Army redoubts that were dotted across the ruins of America, in the lands now known as the Deathlands. None of the fellow travelers knew how to program the computer-triggered matter-transfer machines that were at the heart of each base; they knew only that closing the door triggered the mechanism and set the old comp tech working that was left in the depopulated bases. Each jump was a gamble. The vast land and weather upheavals that had followed the long night of skydark had changed the geography of the old Americas irrevocably, so there was always the risk that they would land in a mat-trans chamber that was crushed beneath tons of rock, or flooded so that they would instantly drown.
So far they had been lucky—either that, or the automatic default settings on the remaining working comps would only transfer at random to redoubts where the chambers were still able to receive. That wasn’t something that Ryan could assume.
But the redoubts offered them a way to move vast distances across the scorched earth. However, everything had its price. Although it gave them an advantage that few, if any, could share, it also carried its own cost. The jumps were a nightmare experience where every atom of their being was torn apart, flung across vast distances and then reassembled. It made them all feel as though they had been ripped slowly apart, each sinew stretched to snapping point, all organs squeezed tightly in an iron grip…and gave them a worse hangover and comedown than the strongest shine or jolt.
Some of the group adapted to the jump better than others, and it seemed to be reliant on something genetic rather than just fitness and strength. Although the fact that Ryan was always the first to stir after a jump could lead to that initial conclusion, for he was the most obviously physically fit specimen in the group. He stood more than six feet tall, with a mane of waving, dark curls that framed a square-jawed and handsome face, that was only somewhat marred by the patch that covered the empty left eye socket. The livid and puckered scar that ran down his cheek bore testimony to the manner in which the eye had been lost. The one-eyed man was a fighting machine, his whipcord musculature developed by years of action.
Hearing a murmur behind him as he crouched over Doc, Ryan turned to find his son, Dean, regaining consciousness and rising to his feet. Just as his father had checked the razor-sharp panga strapped to his thigh and the 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol in its holster when he came to, settling the Steyr SSG-70 across his shoulder, so Dean automatically checked and holstered the 9 mm Browning Hi-Power that was his preferred blaster. Apart from the fact that he was still in possession of both eyes, Dean could have been a mirror image of his father. Now twelve years old, the boy was developing into a fighting machine that would one day be the equal of his father.
Ryan looked away from his son and back to the prone old man.
“Doc looks bad,” Dean remarked, joining his father.
Ryan nodded. “Mildred should be conscious soon. Mebbe she’ll be able to do something.”
Krysty Wroth was also beginning to stir from the stupor brought on by the mat-trans jump. She groaned as she raised her head, her long fur coat wrapped around her shapely and finely muscled body, tendrils of her Titian red, sentient hair, uncurling from around her head and flowing freely as she felt the danger recede. Krysty had the ability to sense danger, and her mutie senses were trusted by Ryan in tight spots.
The woman rose to her feet, her blue, silver-tipped Western boots clicking on the smooth floor of the chamber. Without pausing, she checked her .38-caliber Model 640 Smith & Wesson, holstering it as she strode the short distance to where Ryan and Dean were hunched over Doc.
By now, Dr. Mildred Wyeth was coming around, as was J. B. Dix. As usual, the pair made the jump side by side, their hands touching. Neither was the type to show his or her emotions, but each would put the other before him or herself.
Mildred’s dark skin was nearly ashen with the shock of the jump, her breathing labored but regular.
“Shit, I never even used to get hangovers that bad,” she muttered, her beaded plaits shaking around her downturned face as she tried to clear her head. “That’s the worst jump I can remember for a long, long time.”
“Uh-huh,
