from the inside. No one answered his frantic pounding, perhaps because it couldn’t be heard over the building roar. Skin Hood dashed past him, heading for the bow in a full-out sprint. Up there, a light winked on and off as the forward companionway hatch banged open and shut.
J.B. raced after the mutie hunter, digging for all he was worth. Behind him, the curtain of inch-diameter, blue iceballs hit the stern. Hail pounding iron plate sounded like machine guns, hundreds of machine guns, firing simultaneously and point-blank into a tin roof. The wall of deafening clatter made his guts, his bones, rattle. The ricocheting hail flew every which way, bouncing twenty, thirty feet in the air, zipping over J.B.’s head, skittering cross the deck in front of him.
He reached the awning over the companionway a second after Skin Hood and before the man could get through the open hatch. J.B. caught hold of the pointy hood and used it to jerk him backward, off balance, then side-kicked hard behind his weight-bearing knee. The leg crumpled and the man crashed to his back.
The mutie hunter jumped up at once, his purple-rimmed eyes wide with terror, his breath fogging in the sudden intense cold. He grabbed for his dagger and lunged at J.B., who stood between him and life.
Reacting, J.B. lunged, too, sweeping aside the blade thrust, wrist on wrist, using his forward momentum to head butt his adversary on the chin. The solid blow wobbled the man and he dropped the dagger. J.B. planted his feet and snapkicked at a center-chest bulls-eye, booting his opponent out from under the awning. The force of the kick sent Skin Hood sprawling, sliding across the icy deck.
He regained his feet just as the edge of the blue curtain reached him. The torrent of hail, like a waterfall breaking over his back and shoulders, drove him instantly to his knees. As he opened his mouth wide to scream, the cascade of ice pellets pounded him face-first into the deck, and in another second, buried him alive.
Gamble big, lose big.
J.B. backed down the companionway, pulled the hatch closed and dogged it.
Problem solved.
Chapter Four
The long night belowdecks went from suffocatingly hot to freezing cold while passengers clung to their pallets, storm-tossed, rattled by the din of hail and the rumble of what sounded like distant carpet bombing. As dawn approached and the racket outside subsided, from his too small bunk Dr. Antoine Kirby could hear the moaning of seasick fellow passengers and the hiss of the ship streaking through the water under full sail.
He was watching when Doc Tanner rolled out of bed, stretched, then brushed the bits of straw from the lapels of his black frock coat. When Tanner moved toward the bulkhead and the galley, Kirby eased out of the middle bunk to follow. In the bed above his, Colonel Graydon Bell was sleeping, belly up. White grease paint had rubbed off onto the coarsely woven cover of the pallet. His bristling cheeks, his brow, even his ears were dappled with bright red pinpoints. His lean jaws were grinding, eyelids fluttering, a steady flow of tears streaming into his receding hairline.
As on every night when Graydon went to bed sober, he was dreaming about dead wives and dead children.
In the PVC tubes propped up at the foot of his bunk the scagworms were dreaming, too. Their millipede legs twitched in hibernation sleep, their armored, eyeless, bullet-heads full of murderous bliss.
Kirby shouldered his M-16 and headed for the galley. He staggered as he hurried after the lanky man with the ebony walking stick. Kirby hadn’t gotten his sea legs yet.
Having found Doc Tanner at last, over such a distance of time and space, against astronomical odds, Kirby and Bell couldn’t bear to let him out of their sight, and in fact were keeping tabs on him in four-hour shifts. If the ancient academic fell overboard and drowned, if some ex-sec man suddenly took it into his head to shoot him in the back, all was lost forever. In the final months of the twentieth century the physicist and the mathematician had devised a second chance for their world. It was a last chance. There would be no subsequent zipping back and forth in time, working the problem on a trial-and-error basis, until they finally got things right. Each zip created an infinitesimal snag in present reality. When overlaid, the zips stretched the original snag into a hole, then a rip. The fabric of existence was far more delicate than anyone ever imagined.
The ship’s crew were the only takers for the breakfast of mixed fried small fish, squid, anchovies, herring and sardines were dropped whole by the bucketful into a wide caldron of boiling oil. After a minute or two, the floating, golden-brown clumps and clots were sieved out with a ladle and dumped in great mounds onto long enameled trays.
A one-course buffet.
Seated islanders hunkered over the tabletops, guarding their plates, eating bare-handed, warm grease running down their forearms.
The sight and the smell crushed what little appetite Kirby had. He climbed the companionway and went on deck. He stood for a moment, face into the wind, sucking down the cool, fresh air. To the northeast, turquoise sky was shot through with black wisps, the remnants of the chem storm they had endured. The orange disk of the sun was just breaking the horizon, above a thin, jagged ribbon of land. There was no way to tell how far they had come overnight; much of it had been spent without sails, bobbing in heavy waves. The sea all around was dark blue with a two-foot chop, scattered whitecaps and a blustery wind running from behind. The swell had fallen off to next to nothing.
He and Tanner weren’t the only passengers on deck, but they were among the few standing upright. Most of the others knelt in front of the scuppers, heads in hands, faces corpse-white, beards matted with dried vomit. Rainfall and sixty-degree seawater had melted the blue hail and washed away its residue. Ahead of him, Doc Tanner advanced to the bowsprit, the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. That wasn’t all that was flapping. His long gray hair momentarily stood straight up, like one of those gee-whiz, static charge demonstrations.
Doc looked to be in his sixties, yet he was actually in his thirties. His forced jumps in time had produced intense submolecular stress. That Doc Tanner was not stark raving mad was testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Though Dr. Antoine Kirby had arrived in the hellscape via cryotank, he faced the same stressors as the skinny Victorian—the same plus one. Doc was a blameless victim of circumstance; Kirby had helped facilitate the end of civilization. He entered cryosleep as an upper middle-class intellectual, a button-downed, closet-full-of-tailored-Italian-suits, Lexus-driving, happily-single, time-share-condo-in-Maui kind of whitecoat. A century as an ice block and four years fruitlessly roaming Deathlands had changed him beyond recognition. And not just externally.
Since his football days, Kirby had consciously repressed his own propensity for violence. He was a big, powerful, physically gifted man who hated aggression. He hated it because it was the easy way out. Because it was mindless and irrational. Because it contributed nothing to human understanding or betterment. The National Football League, which would have gleefully drafted him in the first round, sold diversion, sublimation and manipulation. That was something he wanted no part of. In his view, a life without a search for truth was a waste.
Thanks to cryogenics, the cerebral Dr. Kirby found himself thrust into a shattered and lawless world. He was suddenly forced to fight, and not just a dozen times a year on weekends, but almost daily. And not to win a game. In the process of some of these battles, he had taken human lives. Sometimes with his bare hands. To survive and further the vital mission, he had to unleash the demon within.
A case in point. Kirby and Bell hadn’t found the brood of scagworms they now carried. They had shared a cookfire with the pair of mutie hunters who’d found them, men they had buried the next morning in shallow graves
