Chrono Spasm (7 page)

The man passed then, grasping the hand of one of the sec men and laughing once more. Ryan watched them, his eye narrowed. The sec man saw Ryan watching and he laughed. “Curious, are you?” he asked in heavily accented English. “Be thankful it ain’t you, my friend. But that day will come, too, you can bet your good eye on that.”

* * *

J
AK
, R
ICKY
AND
THE
three nameless prisoners were marched to another ladder that led to a clutch of caves across from where their female companions had been taken. Made of splintering wood, the ladder reached all the way to the top of the glacier, halting at the uppermost cave entrance where a sec man stood swinging an iron chain around and around.

One of the hunters, dressed in rags with a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up onto the top of his hood, shoved Jak toward the ladder. “You climb, white man,” he said in a thick accent before turning to the next man, one of the disheveled-looking captives. “Once he’s up to your head, you follow. And you,” he said, jabbing at the remaining men with a gloved finger, “do the same once the man in front of you is at that height. Keep the line moving, no stragglers.” The man held a blaster in one hand and had a knife strapped in a leather holster close to his left buttock. He used the former to make it clear that he would shoot anyone who didn’t follow his commands.

At the rear of the group, Ricky glared at their guard, his teeth chattering in the wind.

“You have a problem, youngster?” the man growled, bringing his face up close to Ricky’s.

“Only your breath,” Ricky replied. “It smells of goat dick.”

The man’s face turned red with anger, and he balled his empty hand into a fist, knocking Ricky hard in the stomach and causing the handsome, dark-haired teen to double over with a gasp of expelled breath. Ricky staggered forward for a moment, slumping against the man with a groan of pain, holding his gut.

In response the sec man simply laughed, shoving Ricky away. Still doubled over, Ricky smiled to himself as he pocketed the hunting blade he had lifted from the sheath at the man’s side. He had a weapon now; he only needed to find the right opportunity to use it.

Down below, Ryan, Doc and J.B. had been freed from the wag’s yoke and they were commanded forward at a slow march under the watchful eyes of two guards. Doc used his swordstick to steady himself—an added consideration since both his wrists and ankles were still tied, causing him to waddle a little like a penguin.

The three companions trudged to one of the ladders that scaled the ice wall, followed a few steps behind by two armed sec men. Close up, the ladder looked rotted, its wood peeling paint and showing dark patches where the damp had seeped inside.

“Like winter in Vermont,” Doc said as he took a wary step on the frozen ground and secured his grip on a lower rung of the ladder. “When my mother would make me clear the leaves from the roof gutters.”

Doc’s reminiscing again, J.B. thought. The man’s mind was sometimes in two places at once, thoughts of his home two hundred years ago often intruding in his present life. It was hard on Doc, trying to carve a life as a nomad like the others when he was so far from the world he knew. He was a learned man with numerous qualifications from his own time. Yet here in the Deathlands, there were things he still had trouble processing, such as man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

Once Doc was a few feet up the ladder, the twin uprights shaking dangerously in place, J.B. was ordered to follow him, and then Ryan. The two men moved without complaint, but both remained alert to possibilities, searching for an escape.

The ladder towered sixty feet in the air, and as they climbed the companions got a closer look at the open mouths of the caves. People were huddled within, some peering out to see what the fuss was about. But the icy caverns seemed to stretch farther back than the faint starlight allowed them to see, and Ryan got the sense that there could very well be a whole community living within this block of ice; a ville in an ice tower block.

As they climbed, the companions saw, too, that there were shelflike ridges running horizontally along the front of the ice wall, just a couple of feet wide, connecting the cave mouths. Presumably, Ryan thought, there are more connections inside, like a rabbit’s warren.

In the lead, Doc reached the crest of the ladder first. A man and a woman waited there, watching the ill-matched line of men clamber up toward them. The man held a knife, the kind used for skinning small animals, and he thrust it in Doc’s face as the gray-haired man came within reach.

“You, keep moving,” the man growled. He wore warm, heavy clothes with a scarf over his neck that left his features bare, exposing the round face and ruddy features of an Inuit. “Hurry it up.”

Beside the man, the woman was working a longer knife with a wicked, serrated blade in her hand, using its point to work the dirt from under her nails in her other hand, which was clutched around the sleeping body of a newborn. She, too, had the black hair and features of an Inuit, and she spit something at Doc as he disengaged himself from the ladder, taking care not to drop his swordstick.

But what Doc saw at the top was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks.

“I said hurry it up,” the dark-faced man beside him growled as Doc stared.

Human bodies were hanging from the ceiling. Doc counted seven in all and each one was naked, the flesh turned a pale gray-pink from the cold, and each had a great hook thrust through their chest. Three women were there, their plump breasts sagging between either side of those vicious, two-inch-wide metal hooks.

Chapter Six

Reluctantly, Doc took another step forward, and J.B. and Ryan followed behind him. The old man took another step into the icy food locker—for it was clear that that is what it was—past the bodies in the darkness. He tried not to look at them as he walked through the room, feeling the acrid taste of bile biting at the back of his mouth.

“Keep walking,” the flat-faced man snarled from behind him, “all the way through.”

Reluctantly, Doc walked onward, his right shoulder brushing against one of the bodies where it jutted in the ill-lit storeroom. The body swayed back and forth at his touch, the hook creaking on its thick chain. There, up ahead, Doc saw another doorway, its arch low, carved directly into the ice wall.

“That’s it, old-timer,” the man behind him chided. “Keep going.”

With a palpable sense of relief, Doc stepped through the far door and out into the space beyond. He stood in what appeared to be a small lobby from which a half-dozen low doorways spoked in various directions, including the one that led to meat locker behind him. A man was seated there, thankfully alive and wrapped in a fur coat with a blanket of fur over his legs. The man held a snub-nosed .38 in his lap, pointing it vaguely at Doc as he stepped through the doorway.

“Welcome to the rest of your life, meat,” the man growled, before using the barrel of the blaster to indicate one of the open doorways. “Go through. Two of you.” He peered into the meat locker, where Ryan and J.B. were just striding in Doc’s wake. “Third one, you with the hat—you wait, I’ll show you where.”

With his wrists still bound, J.B. took a moment to adjust the brim of his fedora and smiled bitterly at Ryan.

“Sounds like you’re getting special treatment,” Ryan told him, keeping his voice low.

“Pays to wear a hat,” J.B. replied, sotto voce. “Makes a good first impression.”

A moment later, the two men had joined the gunman in the ice-walled lobby, and Ryan strode on, following Doc into a frozen chamber just four feet square. Behind Ryan, the gunman was busy sealing the doorway with a wooden sheet that swung in on some kind of track-and-pulley system.

The chamber’s walls were carved from ice, and a single glassless window was stuck in the far wall of the room, like a ship’s portal. Doc stood at the open window, taking deep breaths of the chill air that blew through it. But he stepped aside to let Ryan take a peek. It was dark out there, too dark to see.

“Any idea where we are?” Ryan asked.

The old man looked queasily at Ryan, still sucking in deep breaths. “Hard to say. You saw what was back there as well as I. Do you think that mayhap they plan to eat us?”

Ryan’s expression was staunch as he eyed the old man in the darkness of the cell. “Don’t know, Doc,” he admitted. But he suspected that the old man was right. Judging by the locker of hanging corpses, they were in the hands of cannies—the nukeshitting dregs of the Deathlands.

* * *

M
ILDRED
, K
RYSTY
AND
Nyarla had been incarcerated in a warm room deep in the bowels of the ice fortress, where five other women were already sleeping. Twelve feet by ten, the room was roughly hewn from the hard-packed ice, and featured a small brass heater in its center in which coals and incense glowed. The incense filled the room with its cloying pungency, a scent so thick that it caused Mildred to cough when she was initially thrust into the room and drew her first breath within. From their journey through the icy corridors of the ville, Mildred surmised that the incense was used to hide the stench created by the gas heaters, masking the smell of burning animal fat.

The walls of the room were hung with silks and carpets, both to provide decoration and to help trap the heat. The carpets looked old and worn, their colors muted over time. Behind them, a wide wooden door was rolled back into place, sealing the room like a jar. A single window was set in the outside wall. It looked out into the darkened ice and snow beyond and featured a pane of glass so thick that it had ripples across it. It was hard to make out anything, Mildred found as she parted the curtain to look through the window. All she could see was the towering structure of the glacier ville a little distance away, surrounding a courtyard on all sides.

“We’re a story up from ground level,” Mildred told Krysty, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the sleepers in the room. “Maybe we could jump or climb down?”

“If we could get this open,” Krysty said, pressing her hands against the cold glass and working them along the edges of the windowpane. It was locked solid with no catches that could be worked. “Big if,” she added grimly.

Nyarla had hurried over to the brass burner, and Krysty and Mildred could see she had been here—or somewhere very similar—before. The other women were huddled close to the heater, too, sleeping where the warmth was strongest. Two of them stirred for a moment, surveying the newcomers before rolling over and going back to sleep. They were clearly used to a lot of comings and goings in this room, and a steady turnover of new faces, Mildred guessed.

Mildred and Krysty looked at the room with distaste, knowing pretty well what it was. “Gaudy house or harem,” Mildred said, voicing what the other thought.

“Looks like there’s just the one door,” Krysty said, searching the room and moving several woven tapestries aside.

Mildred’s dark eyes scanned the door itself, her hand unconsciously moving to where a holster should have been strapped to her hip. Holster and blaster had been removed when the companions had surrendered to the hunters, while Mildred’s bag of medicines had been thoroughly searched and potential weapons removed before she’d been allowed to keep it. The door looked sturdy, made of a solid wood such as oak and rolled on a chiseled track outside the room like a train wheel, sealing the chamber like a stopper. The door was entirely blank, just the unaltered grain of the wood showing on this side, with no handle or turning device. That left them with no facility to open it from the inside and also meant there was no way of telling whether they were being watched, or when someone might be listening outside.

Mildred’s fingers clenched as she brushed the side of her leg where her blaster should be, and she shook her head with irritation. Their captors had also given her and the rest of them a pat down, checking for any additional weapons. They had discovered Jak’s stash of knives that way, but they had missed the surgical scalpel that Mildred habitually carried in a sheath in her pants pocket next to a pencil; it was so small that it might easily have been mistaken for another pencil by cold-numbed fingers.

For now, there was no way out of the room, not until someone on the other side of the door decided to open it. The noise of the door opening would be enough to alert them, so Mildred joined Krysty beside the heater, where several of the women were moaning in fitful sleep. Nyarla hugged herself, trying to get the warmth back into her frozen body. Krysty kneeled while Mildred adopted a position behind her and briefly examined her head where she had been pistol-whipped by the man in the woods. There was a lump there, a little swelling that bulged in her hairline.

“You feel anything? Light-headed, any trouble focusing your eyes, things like that?” Mildred asked as she pressed two fingers lightly to the swelling.

Krysty drew a sharp breath at Mildred’s touch, then assured her she felt okay. “Felt a bit sick at first,” she said, “but it’s passed now.”

Mildred ran her hand through Krysty’s hair again, checking for any other signs of damage. There was no blood, and just the one swollen lump at the back of her skull, like a robin’s egg trying to break through the skin. Krysty winced when Mildred ran her fingers over it, but it didn’t seem to be anything too worrisome. There was, of course, always the chance of internal bleeding with a skull injury like that, but Krysty was strong. And besides, there was nothing that Mildred could do while they were stuck there.

Mildred then moved across to check on Nyarla, keeping her voice low as she asked some simple questions about how the young woman was feeling. Like Krysty she seemed fine. It transpired that she had been rendered unconscious using a drug of some kind, sounding to Mildred like chloroform or similar from the way she described it.

After that, Nyarla returned to her spot next to the heater, and Mildred and Krysty could feel the heat radiating from it as they crouched to join her. Mildred was pleased to note that some color was coming back to Nyarla’s cheeks, but she still looked exhausted and scared.

“It’s okay,” Mildred soothed. “We’re safe for now.”

“No.” Nyarla shook her head. “They’ll come for us. The men. They always do.”

Krysty fixed Nyarla with her emerald eyes. “We’ll look after you,” she promised. “No one will come tonight.”

Slowly, the young woman nodded, but her fear remained palpable. Krysty thought it best to change the subject, to take Nyarla’s mind off of the threat of being raped here in this awful hive of ice. She recalled the thing that she had said earlier, about the place where time had frozen.

“When we spoke earlier,” Krysty began, “back in the woods, you said something about a frozen area where time itself had stopped. You gave it a name—
Yegok Rask...?
”

“Yego Kraski Sada.”
Nyarla nodded.

“Yego Kraski Sada,”
Mildred repeated.

From the floor beside her, one of the women spoke up, her eyes still closed and a thin woolen blanket pulled up tightly to her chin. “We call it His Ink Orchard in English,” the woman said.

“Yes,” Nyarla agreed, “it is dark place where God sows time like crop. My father, he tell us to stay away from place. People, they go there and we don’t see them again. They get...held.”

Mildred looked from Nyarla to the sleeping woman. The woman had short hair dyed a vibrant shade of rusty red by some food coloring. She looked about twenty, maybe twenty-five, and her face was flat and tanned in the familiar manner of an Inuit. As if aware that she was being stared at, the woman’s eyes flashed open.

“Do you know about this place?” Mildred said. “His Ink Orchard?”

The woman nodded, her eyes narrowed in the flickering light of the burner. “Everyone knows about it,” she said quietly. “Whole herd of babas got lost out there once, couldn’t get them back. After that no one would go there.”

Mildred didn’t know what babas were but she guessed it was local dialect for sheep or cows or goats, most likely something that could be farmed and eaten in the unforgiving climate. “How far away is this place?”

The red-tressed woman closed her eyes and gave her head a visible shake of irritation. “Closer every day,” she said with a resigned sigh. After that she rolled over, pulling the blanket over her head intending to go back to sleep.

“So, what do we do now?” Krysty asked, pitching her voice low so as not to wake the other women in the room.

Nyarla had fallen asleep already, her tired body curling into a fetal position, light snoring emanating from her open mouth. Mildred looked at her and smiled. “We sleep in shifts,” she said, “and try to avoid getting surprised again.”

Krysty nodded in wordless agreement, and she made her way back to the door to assume the first watch, crouching there with boot heels touching her rear.

Mildred was grateful that her friend had volunteered without asking. She needed sleep. The cold seemed to have drained the last of her energy.

* * *

J.B.,
MEANWHILE
, had been locked in a similar cell to the one that Ryan and Doc had been forced to share. His also had a small window that was open to the elements, and it looked out onto an open area to where he could just barely make out the twinkling lights of the stars.

The sour-faced Inuit sneered at J.B. as he shoved him in the back, forcing him to stumble into the room due to his bindings. Off balance, J.B. crashed to his knees with a whoosh of expelled air, causing the bored-looking Inuit to guffaw. He got up again slowly, reaching for his battered fedora where it had tumbled from his crown.

“Don’t get too comfortable in here,” his captor taunted. “Not enough meat on your bones to get you anything but a short stay.”

With those ominous words still ringing in J.B.’s ears, the man stepped back through the doorway and sealed the cell shut with a great plug of carved wood. The wood had been tooled to show figures, barely visible in the faint light. J.B. studied them for a moment as he brought himself up off the floor. They showed men and women with naked bodies and devils’ faces, the work of some deranged mind.

Wary of the restraints he wore, J.B. sidled to the window. He felt the ice breeze of the north wind pound against his face as he peered out into the night. The area appeared to have been burrowed out of the center of the glacier, which suggested that the ville had a donut shape.

Freezing cold, the open area was large enough to generate its own sound, a low hush where the wind played through it from outside. J.B. gazed at the night sky, locating Orion’s Belt and, from there, Taurus and Canis Minor, all the while wondering just what the hell they had walked into this time.

Eventually, the sky still dark, J.B. fell into a restless sleep, his body shivering and quaking to remain warm.

* * *

“F
UCKING
CANNIES
,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head as he stared out the window of the tiny cell.

The ice chamber was so tight that they would have to sleep sitting up. Ryan, a tall man by any reckoning, leaned his back against the wall, thankful for the blanket effect of his fur coat, while Doc lay as best he could, his legs bent against the wall with the window, his frock coat covering him like a bedsheet.

“Did I ever tell you about my dear Emily?” Doc asked, his hushed words breaking into Ryan’s thoughts of escape.

In the darkness, Ryan nodded. He had, many times. But the old man didn’t seem to remember. It was like this sometimes with Doc—he would drift away from them, into a fugue of memory, where the past became more real than the now. He was getting better as time went on, but occasionally his mind still slipped away.