Chrono Spasm (2 page)

Chapter One

It felt like a gut punch, the kind that the bullies would hammer into Ricky’s stomach when they had cornered him in the back alleys of his hometown of Nuestra Señora. He slumped to the floor, grimacing against the pain, his arms clutched to his sides. J. B. Dix had told him that it could be bad, but he hadn’t realized how bad it would be. Ricky Morales was sixteen and, unlike his six traveling companions, still a newbie when it came to journeying via a mat-trans.

“The kid gonna be okay?” Ryan Cawdor asked as he reentered the mat-trans unit, checking the safety on his SIG-Sauer blaster. He was a tall and imposing man with broad shoulders and a mane of curly black hair that fell to his collar. His bronzed face bore a long scar down the right-hand side, white and hairless, that ran from the corner of his eye all the way down to his mouth. His missing eye was masked by a black leather patch, the thread fraying a little along its stitching. He wore a heavy fur coat over a dirt-smeared shirt and dark undershirt, combat pants and scuffed boots, more durable than stylish. Ryan wore one other item, too, an item he had carried with him since the companions jumped to a redoubt in Canada called a Diefenbunker. There Ryan had traded his beloved Steyr-SSG scoped rifle for a Steyr Scout tactical model which was now slung across his back.

The son of a benevolent baron on the East Coast of the Deathlands, Ryan had grown up in luxury, only to have that life cruelly snatched away when his psychotic brother, Harvey, had tried to expunge the bloodline so that he could take the barony of Front Royal as his own. In the resulting struggle, Ryan had lost his left eye to Harvey’s blade, and he had been set on a path to travel the Deathlands, eventually finding a home with Trader and his war wags.

Over the years since, Ryan had amassed his own family of sorts, one whose ties ran deeper than blood and who traveled together searching the Deathlands for a better tomorrow. Ricky Morales, a handsome Puerto Rican kid from the port of Nuestra Señora, was the newest addition to Ryan’s companions, and the only one of them who hadn’t become accustomed—yet—to the devastating effects of mat-trans travel on human physiology.

“I vouch that the young gentleman will be fine,” Doc Tanner opined as he stood protectively over the youth’s clenching body. Doc was a tall man, scarecrow-thin with a shock of gray-white hair on his aged head. His face was lined, and his penetrating blue eyes spoke of years of wisdom. His clothes, like his manner, were throwbacks to another era, a gentler time when life ran at a slower pace. He wore a black frock coat, a white shirt that was stained with grime and sweat, narrow breeches that clung to his rangy legs and black knee boots.

Though he appeared to be at least sixty years old, Doc Tanner’s history was far more complicated than that. Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born in South Strafford, Vermont, on Valentine’s Day, 1868. He had married his beloved Emily in 1891 and they had lived in wedded bliss for five years, raising two children—Rachel and Jolyon—before Doc’s life changed forever. In 1896 he was time trawled from his own era by the twentieth-century whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Proving to be a difficult subject, Doc was hurled forward in time to the Deathlands. The effect of this forced time travel on Doc had been twofold—firstly, it had prematurely aged him, transforming his body into that of an old man; and second, it had fractured his mind, leaving him with a sometimes tenuous grip on his sanity. Over time, and with the patient help of Ryan and his other companions, Doc had managed to regain much of his sanity—or at least, as much of it as any man who had lost so much could—and become an invaluable asset to the survivalist band.

Inside the green-and-yellow-striped armaglass-walled mat-trans chamber, Doc was leaning on his ebony swordstick, peering at Ricky as he shuddered on the floor. “The lad’s strong, my dear Ryan,” Doc assured the one-eyed man with a knowing smile. “He has the constitution of youth of his side.”

Ryan nodded, pushing the magazine of 9 mm Parabellum bullets into the housing of his SIG-Sauer P-226 blaster. “Lot of good it’ll do him if he can’t stand up.”

“I...can stand...fine,” Ricky mumbled, struggling to pull himself up off the floor.

Doc reached down, taking the youth’s arm in his strong grip. “Slowly, son,” he advised. “There is no need to rush.”

Ryan watched as the handsome young man brought himself to his feet. He was struggling to stand up straight, sucking at his teeth as he drew each breath. Mat-trans jumps were bastard-hard on a man’s constitution, Ryan knew, plucking at the guts and cross-wiring the brain’s synapses so that a person was beset with a deluge of nightmarish visions. The other companions had become either used to or resigned to it by now, after dozens of trips. While jump nightmares and nausea were nothing to get complacent about, Ryan and his companions knew that they would pass in time. Ricky, however, wasn’t as experienced. Ryan stepped over, placing one arm around the youth’s back to keep him on his feet.

“I’ve got him,” Ryan told Doc.

The teenaged Ricky Morales had traveled with Ryan’s group for only a few weeks. Ryan was still adjusting to having the kid on his team, another person to worry about when the bullets started flying or muties came sniffing for blood. Ryan had lost companions before, and the most heart-wrenching loss had been that of his own son, Dean, who had been a few years younger than Ricky when he had been spirited away by his mother, Sharona. A recent encounter with Dean had ended badly.

Ryan’s other companions had been less affected by the trauma of the mat-trans jump. Jak Lauren, who had vomited, as usual, had already exited the chamber along with Ryan’s lover, Krysty Wroth, and his most-trusted ally, J.B. When the one-eyed man had given the all-clear, they had gone in search of supplies on this floor of the military redoubt.

The remaining member of the group, Dr. Mildred Wyeth, was sitting just outside the door of the mat-trans, running an inventory of the medical supplies she carried in the satchel at her hip. She wore camou pants and a drab olive shirt, and her hardy jacket hung from the back of her seat. “If you all need a proper doctor,” she called through the open door, “you just shout. I’m doing a two-fer-one flu jab this week, special offer, friends only. Get ’em while they’re hot.”

Doc smiled at her as he stepped from the mat-trans chamber. “You’re in a chipper mood, my good Doctor,” he observed.

Mildred shrugged, her beaded plaits clacking against one another. “What can I say? No one likes a grump.”

Doc nodded, accepting her point.

Like the old man, Mildred was a time traveler of sorts, albeit one who had spent a full century in the sleep-induced coma of cryogenic freezing. In the twentieth century, Mildred had been a medical doctor who had been researching cryogenics. She had also been an expert shot, whose skill with a pistol had earned her a silver medal at the last ever Olympic Games. What should have been a routine surgical procedure in December 2000 had turned problematic, and the decision was made to place Mildred in suspended animation until a solution could be applied. A few days later, the world Mildred knew came to a dramatic end when the escalating hostilities between the United States of America and the United Soviet Socialist Republic had reached their peak, resulting in a nuclear war that had unutterably changed the face of Earth forever.

Stuck in suspended animation for a hundred years, Mildred had been awakened by Ryan and his companions to a world recovering from nuclear holocaust, where humankind had been culled to just one-tenth of what it had been before the war, where society had broken down entirely and where mutants with genetically manipulated bioweapons roamed the lands. It was, not to put to fine a point on it, a rather rude awakening.

Ryan followed Doc, assisting Ricky through the door. “Deep breaths,” Ryan told him. “Take it slow.”

“I’m all right now,” Ricky said, wincing. “It was nothing.” The young man respected Ryan a lot, thought he was the kind of man he would like to grow up to be. He didn’t like Ryan to see him in pain like this; it made him look weak.

Ryan smiled, recognizing the lad’s false bravado. It reminded him of his early days with Jak, the group’s second youngest companion, who had become a man at fourteen without ever knowing a childhood. In those nascent days, Jak had been so reticent to show emotion that he seemed more like an animal than a boy. In some ways, that was mebbe still true now, Ryan reflected.

He walked Ricky over to a chair that had been placed to the right of the chamber door. “Sit and take deep breaths,” he said again. “In and out.”

With that, Ryan left the youth in the recovery position, head ducked low between his knees, while Doc took up a position nearby to keep watch on the lad.

The room outside the mat-trans chamber was as familiar to Ryan as the chamber itself, despite having not visited here before. Located in a military redoubt hidden behind thick walls of concrete and steel, the mat-trans was contained in a purpose-built chamber surrounded by armaglass. Outside its hexagonal walls lay the familiar anteroom, then the control room, computer monitoring desks arrayed in rows. At the far end of the control room was a set of steel-reinforced doors that led into the long-abandoned military complex. The doors were propped open, their steel plating shimmering beneath the flickering fluorescent lights overhead that had come on automatically with the operation of the mat-trans. The system of redoubts dated back to the twentieth century, before the nukecaust, and was largely automated, which meant that it still operated despite the fact that these redoubts hadn’t been accessed in over a hundred years. The level of automation sometimes gave Ryan the sense he was walking in a dream, as if a kind of hidden hand was bringing things back to life.

Mildred sat at one of the desks closest to the center of the room. The contents of her medical kit were spread out across two desks as she took stock of and reordered her meager supplies, rationalizing them into less space and discarding the used packaging. The arrayed contents consisted of recovered drugs, ointments and a selection of wicked-looking scalpels, their blades honed to razor-sharpness. Mildred also had a blaster on the desk, uncocked and within reach of her right hand should anyone happen to rush into the control room. The weapon was a Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, a neat, matte-black .38 caliber with plenty of punch. She glanced up as Ryan approached.

“You want me to look him over?” Mildred whispered, her eyes flicking to their new companion where he sat doubled over in his seat.

“Not necessary,” Ryan told her quietly, shaking his head. “Doc’s right—the kid’s strong. He just got caught unawares by the jump.”

As they spoke, their remaining companions returned, entering the control room through the double doors.

Leading the group was John Barrymore Dix, a compact man much like the weapons he favored. Also known as the Armorer, J.B. was the group’s weaponsmith and an expert with just about any firearm or detonation device. What he didn’t know about blasters wasn’t worth knowing. He and Ryan owed their companionship to their time spent with the Trader, a legendary survivalist and trader who traveled the Deathlands with his own band, each an expert in his or her own field. J.B. and Ryan had formed a close bond over the years, so close that they often seemed to know what the other was thinking.

Despite being inside the warm redoubt, J.B. wore his usual battered brown fedora and a leather jacket. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses was perched on the bridge of his nose, through which his eyes assessed everything he saw.

Though J.B. appeared squat, that was in fact an illusion created by the shape of his jacket, whose voluminous pockets had become bulked out with various weapons and devices he carried out of necessity. The Armorer was happy to maintain this illusion, preferring that potential enemies underestimate him on first glance for it often ensured they never had the chance to realize their mistake. You only needed to chill a man once to survive, J.B. would insist.

“Place is all cleaned out,” he announced, throwing Ryan a new magazine for his SIG-Sauer. “Plenty of ammo, but not much we can use.”

Ryan snatched the magazine from the air and pocketed it. “What about food?” he asked.

The beautiful red-haired woman who followed J.B. through the doors shook her head regretfully. “There’s been an interruption in the power supply at some point, lover,” she told Ryan. “Refrigerator’s open and everything’s spoiled with mold all over. I wouldn’t touch it.”

“We might have to,” J.B. added, scratching at the day-old stubble that lined his jowls.

“Let’s hope not,” Ryan said. “Mebbe this time we landed in a nice field full of tomatoes and strawberries.”

J.B. laughed at that. “’Cept knowing our luck they’ll be the kind of strawberries that got themselves irradiated and have taken to eating folks who come to pick ’em.”

The redhead shot the Armorer a mock-serious look as she joined Ryan. “If you’ve jinxed us, J.B., I won’t ever forgive you,” she chastised as Ryan ran a hand over her back. Krysty was the one-eyed man’s lover. A striking woman, tall and svelte, Krysty’s red hair drew the eye. The hair seemed almost alive in the bright fluorescent light of the control room; and in truth it was—Krysty was a mutie, with prehensile hair that reflected her emotional state. She had other abilities, too, that sat outside the realm of the average human—some precognition and the ability to tap an incredible well of superhuman strength that came from calling upon the Earth Mother, the goddess Gaia. These bouts of incredible strength lasted only moments and left Krysty drained and as weak as a newborn. Dressed in a red shirt, jeans and blue cowboy boots with silver pointed toes, Krysty had a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver secured at her hip, its burnished silver finish worn from years of service.

Krysty kissed Ryan on the lips, then mouthed a promise of “later” before hurrying across the room to fetch the coat she had left on a seat behind a comp desk.

Doc placed his hand to his brow as Krysty passed, tipping an imaginary hat. Beside him, Ricky was bringing his breathing back to a more normal level, his teeth still gritted in pain. The Latino eyed Krysty for a moment before her eyes met with his, and then he turned away with embarrassment. Ricky thought Krysty was the most beautiful woman in the world.