punched the LD button twice more and got no further response. Ryan strode over to Doc, who was huddled in the corner, his knees folded into his chest, and rocking with his eyes squeezed shut as tight as fists. For most of the companions a mat-trans jump was like a surprise punch below the belt followed by an uppercut to the jaw. For the man time-trawled from the past, a jump was like a knife through an already damaged brain. At the moment there was no time for sympathy. “Doc, you’ve got to get up.” Ryan shoved Doc’s cane into his tremoring hand and hauled him to his feet.
The scholar put a hand on the glowing wall to steady himself. He shook his head and struggled to focus. Ryan stepped out of the chamber with his rifle leveled and didn’t like what he saw. The redoubt, if it even qualified to be called that, was just a gutted and broken concrete blockhouse. A cold wind whistled through holes in the walls and through missing sections of roof. The sky above was gray, bruised and pregnant with rain. The wind was whipping up to storm conditions. There were only two things of interest in the cold, bare space. One was a great metal hatch in the floor. Whatever alloy it had been made of gleamed as bright as the day it had been forged and untouched by time. It was sunk in the floor almost seamlessly. Three raised panels in the center formed a triangle, but they were as seamless as the hatch and Ryan could see no way to access any of the controls inside them. Black blast streaks around one panel showed that someone had tried with explosives and failed. Ryan ran a finger over one of the blast patterns, and the streak in the residue showed gleaming metal that hadn’t even been scratched.
The second item of interest was a corpse.
It was the body of a woman. Ryan eyed her desiccated flesh. Her black hair was cropped short around her skull like a helmet. Her skin was drawn tight against her bones, and her mummified corpse swam in the undyed homespun tunic clothing her. A leather sandal clung between two clawed toes. The other lay a few feet away. Incongruously a salt-corroded mechanical chron was hooped around one shrunken wrist. Ryan picked up the little blaster on the floor. It was a .32 revolver with foreign writing on it. He broke open the action. All six rounds had been fired. Ryan sniffed the cylinder and smelled black powder. Someone had been rolling their own rounds. Ryan tucked the little blaster in his pocket and turned his attention to the air-cured human body. It had been here for some time. No scavengers had been at it, which worried Ryan. Not even rad-blasted meat went to waste in the Deathlands. Ryan looked around as Doc stepped out of the mat-trans chamber. “You all right?”
Doc clearly wasn’t, but he took a deep breath, straightened the front of his frock coat and squared his shoulders. “I have always found the ocean air bracing.”
Ryan lifted his head and sniffed. Doc was right. The air moaning through the empty blockhouse smelled of the sea as well as rain. Doc took a wobbly knee beside the corpse and smoothed her blond hair. “Poor child.”
“Child?” Ryan shrugged and kept his weapon on the open door. “She looks full grown to me.”
“No more than sixteen or seventeen, I would say.” Doc gazed sadly upon the dead girl’s corpse. “It appears she starved to death.” He suddenly bent and pressed his thumb against the inside of her elbow and then examined the other.
Ryan took a knee beside him. “What?”
“Wounds,” Doc said.
The dead girl’s flesh was paper-thin around her bones, but Ryan could see the puncture marks in her flesh. They had been fairly fresh when she died. “You think she was jolting up?”
“No.” Doc shuddered at the term for the concoction of drugs that the most despairing in the Deathlands chose for oblivion. “The veins, in the arms, the legs, between the toes, are cratered like the moon above. These wounds are surgical. She was either receiving or giving blood intravenously before she died.”
Every once in a while Ryan had to remind himself that “Doc” stood for Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, and that he was a doctor of both science and philosophy. Ryan had seen more bodies than most, and the Deathlands was full of them. They had bigger concerns at the moment. “We’re alone and the mat-trans is fucked.”
Doc rose and peered at the scrolling code on the control panel. “It means nothing to me.” His snowy brows furrowed. “However, the device appears to be peeping.” Doc pulled out his pocket chron and one eyebrow rose. “It appears to be peeping in ten-second intervals, and then the code repeats itself.”
“It’s on some kind of cycle.” Ryan peered at the little comp screen. “But it’s not telling us what the timing is. Mebbe it only lets two people through at a time, then cycles again. Some kind of sec measure.”
“Given that theorem, then perhaps, given time, it will let the others through.”
“Yeah.” Ryan scowled at the screen. “But mebbe only two at a time.” He looked toward the corpse. “Looks like mebbe she died waiting.” Ryan looked at the rad counter pinned to his lapel. The place was clean. He jerked his head toward the open doorway. “Let’s do a recce.”
Doc drew his massive LeMat revolver from beneath his coat and rotated the hammer’s nose to fire the central shotgun barrel. “By all means, let us go and take the airs.”
Ryan recced the outside from both sides of the doorway, but all he could see was windswept rock. “Doc, on my six.” Ryan stepped out, blaster ready. There wasn’t much to see. The howling wind plucked at his clothing and drew tears from his eye. There was no vegetation. They were literally on a rock, which was the size of a predark six-story building. The only distinguishing feature on the rock besides the blockhouse was a remarkable concentration of bird shit.
Of immediate concern was the fact that the barren rock they currently occupied was located in the middle of an ocean.
Doc was right. The dead girl had most likely starved to death, and Ryan had secretly put his remaining food in Krysty’s pack back in the redoubt. All they had with them was two canteens of water. Ryan gazed about. The ocean around the rock was as gray as death and beginning to roil with the coming storm, and they couldn’t LD button back. Doc sighed as he came to his own conclusions. “Oh, dear.”
Ryan scanned the horizon and perceived a pair of smudges to the west. He took his collapsible brass telescope from his pack and snapped it up to his eye. “I make it two islands.” The images were at the limit of the optics, but he could make out buildings and a port on the larger one. Smoke was definitely rising from chimneys. Smoke rose from the smaller island, but all he could make out was empty beach. “The bigger one has a ville.”
Doc took another deep breath of the air. “You know? I believe we are in the North Atlantic.”
Ryan regarded Doc. “And you know that how?”
“I do not know.” Doc shrugged. “It is just an intuition. I do not mean to be obtuse, but back in my time I sailed the Atlantic, and this just…feels like the Atlantic. The North Atlantic. With nightfall the stars will give us a better bearing, but I would say we are in the Azores, the Canaries or the Madeiras.”
Ryan would never accuse Doc of being obtuse. Predark bastard obscure on the other hand…“Lantic or Cific, it doesn’t matter. That girl got skinny waiting for the mat-trans to cycle. That’s a ville across the water, and it’ll have boats. They’ll be watching the storm come in, looking this way. We need to build a signal fire and get off this rock.”
“And if that poor girl died here fleeing the inhabitants of that island?” Doc queried.
“Doc, there’s no food here. We can wait until we run out of
