Chrono Spasm (3 page)

The last member of Ryan’s crew was waiting in the doorway, his red eyes almost flashing in the flickering lights. “Don’t like pisshole,” he spit. “Stinks.” Jak Lauren, a man not yet twenty years old with the white skin and hair of an albino, and the thin body of a teenager. Jak’s eyes were twin orbs of a cruel, ruby red, and his face was a series of scarred white planes like some brutal sculpture carved by a careless knife. Jak’s chalk-white hair brushed past his shoulders, sweeping against the glistening razor-sharp slivers of glass and metal that he wore sewn into his camou coat—especially the collar and shoulders—to ward off any would-be attacker.

Though he followed Ryan, Jak was very much his own man. Semiferal, Jak had grown up in the swamps of Louisiana, where a cruel dictator called Baron Tourment had demanded absolute fealty. Jak’s father had rebelled against Tourment’s rule and it had cost him his life. At fourteen, Jak had assumed his father’s place, leading a revolution against the sadistic baron and overthrowing him with the help of Ryan and his companions. Other than the time Jak had spent with his now deceased wife, the albino had remained with Ryan ever since, and his exceptional tracking skill and his deadly use of a knife had proved invaluable. Jak saw the world in terms of black and white, but he was a good man to have at your side. Ryan had trusted Jak with his life more times than he could count.

Ryan nodded, agreeing with Jak’s assessment. “Okay, people,” he said, glancing around the control room. “Let’s check out what the local area has to offer.”

Doc helped Ricky get to his feet while the other companions grabbed their belongings and prepared to leave. Up ahead, the redoubt’s lights burned brightly, each concrete-walled corridor brutal and soulless beneath the unforgiving fluorescent glow. Ryan led the way, his companions following him through the familiar corridors to the redoubt’s exit.

It was always like this. The companions would travel from location to location, hopping across the Deathlands via the hidden mat-trans network, unable to program the system and so shooting randomly from point to point. Sometimes they would find a little oasis where kindness reigned and the locals welcomed their visit; more often they would walk slap-bang into yet another level of Hell, where the final remnants of humankind fought tooth and nail simply to see another sunrise, another day; where the weather patterns included acid rain that could strip a person to the bone, and where irradiated muties waited in ambush to tear a person apart. It was a life that knew little joy, but Ryan’s group carried on, always hoping for a better tomorrow, for a reprieve from this Hell on Earth.

They reached the main doors to the redoubt inside of four minutes. It was a small complex, just a dozen rooms in all, sealed since before the first nuclear strike had impacted on mainland American soil a century earlier. In the years that followed, whatever had remained had rotted or spoiled or simply disintegrated to dust, little seams of powder lining the rooms like sawdust where once there had been perishable goods. The redoubt had been understocked, “probably a real haven of last resort,” according to J.B. Perhaps it would have saved someone’s life if they had got here in time; it looked like no one had ever had the chance to find out.

Ricky struggled a little to keep up, hefting his DeLisle carbine in one hand.

Doc strode along with the youth, thrusting his swordstick out with a flourish. “How are you feeling now?” he asked as they neared the redoubt’s external doors.

“Like I ate something real bad,” Ricky admitted. “Is it always going be like that?”

“Probably not,” Doc replied. “But who knows? Maybe that was our last jump and we are about to step out into paradise, right behind that door.”

J.B. was at the door, punching the keypad with the numbers that would open it. After a moment, the door made a loud clunking sound before it started to ponderously slide open.

The companions waited at a safe distance, their weapons poised on the emerging gap before them as the door creaked open. The first thing that they noticed as the door drew back was the cold. It struck them like a wall of ice, taking their breath away even as it fluttered like mist in the air.

“If this is paradise,” Ricky told Doc, “then it sure is colder than I expected.”

But before anyone could say another word, a woman’s face, emaciated with dark circles under the eyes and ragged tangles of long hair, appeared in the open doorway of the redoubt. The dirt-smeared face was accompanied by a blaster, its dull metal glinting beneath the glow of the fluorescent lights.

“Pomoshch,”
she hissed, bringing the nose of the blaster up to J.B.’s startled face.

Chapter Two

J.B.’s hand snapped up, grabbing the blaster before the pale-faced woman realized what he was doing.

“Makarov,” J.B. said emotionlessly, his eyes fixing on the young woman’s. “Neat little blaster for what it is but has a lousy double-action pull.”

The young woman glared at him, straining to bring up the blaster as he forced her hand to point at the ground. J.B. had overpowered her in a second.

“Yours, incidentally,” the Armorer finished as he revealed his own weapon, a Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun, “is all out of ammo. Thought you’d like to know.”

The woman looked at J.B. fearfully as he casually turned his shotgun on her, cocking the trigger. Behind him, she saw now, were a half dozen other people, each one training his or her own blaster on her.

“P-pomoshch,”
the woman repeated, her voice coming through clenched teeth.
“Pomoshch moi!”
She was a thin young woman, with sharp, narrow features and straw-colored hair that snaked down to the small of her back in a series of twisting spirals. Her face was streaked with dirt, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She wore a ragged old dress that ended just below her upper thighs, leaving her legs bare. She was barefoot and beneath the hemline of her dress, her legs were turning blue from the cold.
“Pomoshch!”
she cried desperately.

“Who or what is
pomoshch?
” J.B. asked, still holding the woman in his grip. He eased it a little, pressing the muzzle of his shotgun against her side.

“Pomoshch,”
the woman repeated, seeing the blank expressions that J.B. and the others wore. “Help me!” she pleaded. “They’re coming. They’re just behind me. Hide me, please!”

As she spoke, the companions became aware of hoofbeats from a little way to their right, which were accompanied by shouts coming from very close nearby.

“This way,” a man’s voice called. It sounded angry. “Don’t lose her.”

“I’m comin’,” another voice insisted and the hoofbeats drummed faster.

“Someone out there,” Jak hissed, eyeing the door. “Close.”

Outside the redoubt it was night, the clear sky above a rich shade of blue-black, like writing ink. The redoubt entrance was surrounded by an overgrown tangle of bushes, and in the illumination cast by the open doorway they could see a few bloated flakes of snow drifting languorously to the ground. The ground itself was a scrubby patchwork of green and frost, snow settling in clumps and clinging to the bushes tiny leaves.

J.B.’s brows knitted as he glared at the emaciated woman in the doorway. “You point a blaster in my face and come asking for help,” he drawled as he twisted her wrist in his grip. She squeaked in pain, dropping the Makarov to the concrete floor with a clatter. “Real friendly, sister.”

Then J.B. stepped back, pulling the young woman inside the corridor of the redoubt where his friends were waiting. Beyond the door, they heard more shouts, the words sounding muffled by the falling snow.

“She came through here,” a man said. “Maybe she jumped the fence.”

The young woman looked plaintively at J.B., her haunted expression speaking an encyclopedia volume of fear. “Help me,” she whimpered.

Around J.B., Ryan and the other companions had fanned out to cover the wide doorway into the redoubt.

Jak sidled up to the door, pressing his back to the wall, his trusted Colt Python blaster clutched in a two-handed grip. It looked massive in his relatively small hands.

On the opposite side of the doorway, Krysty had adopted a similar pose, pressing her back to the wall and drawing her Smith & Wesson .38, its muzzle aimed out into the open air. She was wearing her coat now, its shaggy fur design like something that had just been killed. She prowled like a cat toward the open door, footstep over silent footstep, her breath hanging in the air in cloudy puffs of mist.

Mildred and Doc had also moved forward, and the physician had dropped her satchel silently to the floor as soon as the shouting started. Doc had something of a unique weapon in his possession, a reproduction LeMat percussion pistol styled from the turn of the nineteenth century, its .44-caliber barrel augmented with a second shotgun-style barrel that could unleash an incredible burst of shrapnel capable of punching a good-size hole in a wall—or a human torso.

Ricky remained at the rear of the group. An experienced fighter despite his young age, he yearned to be on the front line in any combat situation. But his constitution following the mat-trans jump had left him compromised, and he was wise enough to know that trying to lead while unfit only served as a hindrance to his allies—and a potentially lethal one.

The final member of the group, Ryan trusted his colleagues to keep the door covered. He had his SIG-Sauer poised not on the open door but on the young woman in J.B.’s arms.

“Who followed you?” Ryan growled. “Quickly, tell me.”

The young woman looked at him fearfully, still struggling in J.B.’s grip.

“Quit struggling and answer him,” J.B. urged.

“Mytante,”
the girl responded with her strange accent.
“Mytante groupa.”

“Fireblast!” Ryan growled. “Muties.”

As the words left Ryan’s mouth, two muscular steeds came crashing through the tangled briars at the front of the redoubt, tossing broken branches aside and snow in their wake. The steeds looked almost black in the unforgiving illumination spilling from the doorway. Each was shorter than a horse but more bulky, with sturdy bodies like great walls of muscle and a curling set of thick horns branching out from their wide, triangular heads. A honking noise issued from each creature’s snout, accompanied by a cloud of warm breath, and each steed carried a rider bareback.

The riders were dressed from head to toe in strips of material and fur, with hoods covering their heads and dirt-streaked scarves bunched over their mouths and noses. The two riders wore goggles over their eyes, the familiar green tint of night-vision lenses recognizable to the companions straightaway.

“Caribou,” Mildred said, startled. “They look like caribou.”

* * *

T
HE
FIRST
RIDER
leaped from his steed, wielding a vicious-looking pike with a cruel blade attached to one end, a second spiked arm running in parallel beneath it for added penetration.

“What the hell is this place?” he asked his comrades. “You ever see this before?”

Astride his own mutie caribou, the man shook his head. “Maybe she went inside,” he called as he unstrapped a blaster from its leather sheath at the side of his boot. The weapon was some kind of abbreviated carbine, its barrel sawn so short that it could only possibly be effective at close range.

The first rider clomped over the snow-brushed scrub, holding his pike at a horizontal in line with his waist. “Come on out, sweetie,” he cooed. “Your little game’s all over now.”

“Pomoshch,”
the frightened woman in J.B.’s arms whispered. “Please.”

As the first rider reached the doors, Krysty emerged from her position behind the door frame, bringing her blaster up to the man’s temple with a click of the cocked safety. “You want to drop the stick and reach for the sky?” she suggested.

The man reacted far quicker than anyone expected, whipping the pike around and swiping at Krysty with the long haft. The redhead grunted as the rounded metal pole struck her across the rib cage, and she stumbled forward with a lurch.

“Bad choice,” J.B. stated as the other companions began firing, peppering the figure framed in the doorway before he knew what was happening. The mysterious figure stumbled back as a half-dozen bullets struck him. In Deathlands the best rule was to shoot first, and the companions hadn’t lived as long as they had by taking chances.

As the figure went caroming to the ground, the second rider brought up his abbreviated carbine—the chop-shop remains of a Simonov SKS—and began blasting. A stream of vicious 7.62 mm bullets came singing from the weapon’s stubby nose, drilling through the doorway like the expulsion of a shotgun rather than a rifle.

Krysty skipped back, her boot heels scraping across the hard floor as chunks of concrete were kicked up from the walls and floor under that deadly assault.

“Back,” Jak barked, targeting the rider in the sights of his Colt Python and pulling the trigger. The weapon coughed, blasting the first of three .357 Magnum bullets at the rider. But Jak’s angle was wrong. His bullets struck the thick head of the mutie caribou. The creature reared up, snarling with a low rumble as three bullets skipped across its hide.

Atop the beast, the rider was working the carbine one-handed, resting its grip on his leg as he reached into his ragged cloak for something else. Nearer the door, both Krysty and Jak saw just what it was in the second it appeared—a round metal pineapple no bigger than a man’s palm. A grenade.

In a single instant, the rider on the horned caribou tossed the bomb at the open doorway of the redoubt, where his partner lay in a bloody heap.

“Gren!” Krysty shouted, leaping back from the doorway with her arms outstretched.

“Protect yourselves!” Doc gasped, dropping back against the nearest wall.

The other companions backed away as the grenade landed inside the open doorway, striking the floor with the low tink of metal on concrete. Jak, however, leaped through the doorway and out into the snow.

The gren went off, sending a shock wave through the air with a great clap of noise. Nearby trees and bushes trembled, tossing snow from their branches as the wave of pressure rolled over them. Jak ignored it, using its power to drive him forward toward the riderless caribou that waited twenty feet in front of the redoubt. His breath came harsh in the cold air, each inhalation burning against his nostrils and throat like ice.

The remaining rider had turned his head as the gren exploded, sending bloody chunks of his own partner through the air in a spray of mangled flesh and bone. He looked back in dismay as Jak raced across the powdered snow, his white skin and hair so pale it seemed almost as if an empty set of clothes was running across the snowy ground.

Jak tossed his Colt Python aside, brushing it from his mind as it sunk into the powdery snow. It was no use against these creatures and their thick hides. To deal with them he needed to get up close and personal—just the way he liked it. The albino sprinted, pulling back his jacket and reaching inside with both hands in a practiced movement, drawing loose two leaf-bladed throwing knives.

First one hand then the other whipped forward, throwing the vicious little blades ahead of him as he ran toward the nearer of the beasts. The first blade struck the creature’s black hide and bounced off it to no effect. The second blade fared a little better, clipping the mutated caribou just above its lip and carving a rent through its right nostril.

Jak was a master of the throwing knife, expert at judging the weight of the metal. The creature reared in pain, its breath puffing out in a damp cloud of water vapor.

Then Jak was on it, jumping into the air, another twin set of blades already materialized in his chalk-white hands. He carried countless blades about his person, hidden in wrist and ankle sleeves, strapped to his torso and stitched into every accessible tuck of his jacket’s lining.

Jak leaped at the caribou, plunging one of his drawn knives into its face as his feet struck the animal’s flank. The creature huffed in pain as Jak’s knife grazed its eyeball, tearing a great gob of flesh from its flat nose. Above its triangular head, Jak twisted, kicking out at the startled rider and knocking him from his mount. The rider shrieked in surprise as much as pain, his carbine going off again as he sank from the creature’s side.

Jak was astride the creature now, and with a quick shift of his weight he kicked his heels against its flanks and drove both of the blades he held into its back, where the head met with its stubby, armored neck. The monster growled deep in its throat, the sound like a goose’s honk as it began to charge wildly ahead. The second of the monstrous caribou was just a few feet away, and Jak dug his heel in once more to aim the panicked creature at the other. The mutie caribou reacted instinctively, ducking its horned head low as it spotted the other charging it. Between them, the fallen rider struggled to roll free of the destined clash, but he was too late. Suddenly, he found himself trampled by his own steed, leg bones and ribs shattering as the mighty caribou stomped over him.

Jak leaped free as the two-horned monstrosities butted heads together in a thunder crack of bone, blood still spurting from the first creature’s knife wounds. Beneath them, the mutie rider was screaming in agony, his body a mangled and bloody mess as the angered creatures crashed together in a contest of supremacy.

Inside the redoubt entrance, the companions were just recovering from the shock wave that had struck the redoubt’s door. Positioned at the rear of the group, Ryan and Ricky were the first to recover. Ricky had one hand up against his ear, trying to stop it from ringing. Ryan looked about, scanning the entrance to the redoubt and checking that his friends were all accounted for.

“Everyone okay?” Ryan asked. “Where’s Jak?”

“I believe our pale-skinned companion decided to take the fight outside,” Doc said, dabbing cement dust from his brow with a blue handkerchief.

“Sounds about right,” Ryan grumbled. “Everyone else okay?”

They were shaken by the blast but otherwise unharmed. Ryan hurried over to check on Krysty, but she confirmed that she had gotten clear of the blast with seconds to spare. “Well, maybe one second,” she admitted when Ryan gave her a dubious look.

“The entry took most of the impact, by the looks of it,” Mildred said as she made her way to the doorway. A blackened crater marred the floor where the grenade had gone off.

Doc was at the doorway now with Mildred at his side, scanning the bleak landscape for Jak. Two mutated caribous were butting heads in a smear of blood and pulp, while Jak, with considerable aplomb, crouched in the snow to pick up his discarded Colt Python while still watching the fight. The albino looked like a kid who had snuck into a prize fight.