Authors: James Axler
Chrono Spasm (25 page)
Epilogue
This much Don Nectar knew for certain: Tanner had been right. He was a shade, a shadow, a heart murmur mistaken for life.
Whatever the time scoop technology had done to Doc Tanner, it had glitched in a way that had created an afterimage, and it was that image that had been spit out in the hidden facility in Alaska, far away from the great workings of Operation Chronos. The facility had been nothing more than a B unit, a place to check data, out of the way of the Washington politicos.
Who knew how time trawling worked? Who could say what rogue data was created when a person’s form was shunted into the time stream? What had happened to Doc Tanner had happened against his will, and it had generated a sliver of rogue data that had mistakenly thought itself a man. A glitch in time called Don Nectar.
Now, as Nectar was wrenched apart, absorbed once more by the time flow, he wondered how many other Don Nectars had been created, how much rogue data still existed, searching for the host body that would join with it to make it whole and let it go home. A legion of shadows, each one a tiny sliver of what Doc Tanner could have been.
Nectar closed his eyes as time’s river washed over him, buzzing through his body with all the power of the chronal waves.
This much he knew for certain: traveling through time always came with a cost.
* * *
T
HEY
MET
in the snow-dusted
plains of His Ink Orchard, close to the ruined mines. R
yan spotted J.B. and Mildred by the fire they had set to keep warm. The sun was rising once again, making its slow trek over the horizon where it would wait ponderously for the rest of the day.
“We were under attack by crazy things,” J.B. told Ryan. “Thought we were going to die when suddenly the bastards winked out of existence as if they’d never been. That was your doing, right?”
Ryan nodded. “We had a little something to do with it, yeah.”
Beside him, Krysty was brushing snow from her red-gold hair. Her strength had returned, her normal strength that was, but she would ask Mildred to check her over before they returned to the redoubt and its mat-trans, there to locate a new destination and perhaps a new destiny.
Ricky was annoyed he hadn’t seen J.B. in action in the gladiatorial ring. He idolized the weaponsmith, even if he wouldn’t come right out and say it.
Searching through her voluminous bag, Mildred produced his and Jak’s blasters and other weapons, easing the DeLisle off her shoulder. “You have to learn to pick up your toys after playing,” she chided Ricky.
Ricky knew she was kidding and he laughed.
The area that had once seemed to be beyond the edge of the world was returning to normal. Snow fell in its usual pattern, straight down without stopping; and the barricade that Nyarla and her father referred to as the Tall Wall had come down without so much as a hint that it had ever been. The bubble of ruined time—the chrono spasm—had healed, the untamed energies returned to wherever they had come from, the chronovores disappeared. Doubtless, the muties remained, but that was the twisted nature of the Deathlands.
Doc turned to his companions, a look of concern on his lined face. “I am famished,” he said. “Wherever we wind up next, let us stay long enough to find ourselves a decent meal. Mayhap, roast chicken, so delicious you can smell it a room away.”
Ryan smiled. The man had lost almost everything and yet still—somehow—he carried on. He was an inspiration to them all.
Gradually, the seven companions returned to the redoubt and made their way back to the mat-trans and whatever lay beyond. Whatever it was, they would face it as they always had—together.
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781460307083
Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library
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