James Axler: Ice and Fire

Ryan Cawdor's fingers flexed, brushing against the polished metal floor of the mat-trans chamber. He was still struggling back from the dark depths of unconsciousness. The tip of his right index finger touched something sticky and warm, a little below body temperature. The finger moved a crabbing inch farther, investigating the substance.

Ryan's one good eye blinked open for a moment, looking down at his hand.

"Blood," he said.

Blood it was — a dark pool of it, nearly eighteen inches across, crusting at the edges. Ryan touched again, checking that he was conscious, feeling the too-familiar stickiness.

The chamber still smelled flat and bitter from the gases released during the jump, and the metal disks in floor and ceiling were creaking faintly as they cooled down.

The armaglass walls were a pallid, translucent gray color. The gateway that they'd just left had been walled in a deep, brilliant turquoise. Ryan remembered that, remembered it because it had reminded him so much of the Indian jewelry of the far Southwest.

He closed his eye again and took slow deep breaths, trying to speed his recovery. The jumps always scrambled everyone's brains, making them feel as if the contents of their skulls had been drained, freeze-dried, sandblasted and then returned. While Ryan had been out, his head had slumped and the patch over the blind socket of his left eye had become uncomfortable. He lifted a hand and adjusted it, opened his right eye and tried once more to focus on the crimson puddle.

Blood meant that someone was bleeding — Ryan could deduce that much, despite the mind tremor of a gateway jump. He blinked and followed the blood to its source.

"Fireblast," he sighed.

Doc Tanner had suffered one of his sporadic nosebleeds during the period of blackout. Blood ran from his hawkish nose, through his grizzled stubble, down the furrows of his chin. It dribbled across his neck and over his stained blue denim shirt, pattering in an uncertain trickle onto the floor.

Trying to collect his thoughts, Ryan looked around the hexagonal room. Despite the bleeding nose, Doc seemed to be all right.

Doctor Theophilus Algernon Tanner looked to be around sixty years old. By one measure of time he was only about thirty. By another kind of temporal yardstick he was somewhere close to two hundred and twenty-eight.

During the 1990s — eight or nine years before the skies had darkened with missiles and the civilized world disappeared forever, American scientists were working on different aspects of a top-secret program, under the umbrella name of the Totality Concept. The aspect that affected the life of Doc Tanner was a part of Overproject Whisper, called the Cerberus Project.

The hidden gateways — mat-trans chambers — were in closely guarded fortresses or redoubts, which were scattered across North America.

But they didn't just transport a man in a flicker of frozen time from place to place. The scientists believed they could also be used to breach the last barrier. Time. And in that misguided belief, they experimented in trawling a human being from the past.

The failures were many, and horrifying. The one partial success was Doc Tanner.

Married with two young children, Doc had been a respected man of science, in the year of Our Lord 1896...

Ryan's reminiscence was checked as the old man coughed, spluttered and wiped a gnarled hand over his chin, bringing it away smeared with blood.

November, two hundred years ago: the young scientist had been tugged forward through time to become the prize guinea pig in Project Cerberus. But Doc had never been the sort of person to sit quiet. After a number of combative years he became so troublesome that the faceless men had a choice. Terminate him with extreme rectitude or chron-jump him again. So Doc had been flung a hundred years into the future. A few weeks later all of the scientists he had left behind perished in the rad blasts of the last world war.

Ryan had known him for about a year. Now Doc's mind was reasonably reliable, but the shattering events of his life had permanently tipped the balance of his brain and he was known to wander mentally.

His girlfriend, Lori Quint, lay stretched out on the floor next to him, her blond head in his lap. Some of his blood had dribbled into her long hair, clotting and tangling. Though she was only seventeen years old, Lori had endured an appalling background of incest and violence. Her affection for the elderly scientist had been appealing, but over the past few weeks Ryan had begun to notice signs that all wasn't well between them. The girl was becoming easily irritated and sulky.

But Ryan had learned from his old friend and boss, the Trader, a great and inalienable truth about women: "What women want from men is what men happen to be right out of," Trader had said.

Sitting cross-legged next to Doc and Lori was the only other person of the group, other than Ryan, who'd ridden and fought with Trader. Now shaking his head to destroy the clinging fog in his brain, J. B. Dix, the Armorer, was recovering consciousness.

Under five feet nine in height, slim built, J.B. was closing in on his fortieth year. His complexion was sallow and unhealthy, and his wire-rimmed glasses were hooked safely in a top pocket of his dark brown leather jacket. His beloved and much-traveled fedora lay between his feet. The Armorer was perhaps the greatest expert on weaponry in all the Deathlands. His preference was for a mini-Uzi and a Steyr AUG pistol. A Tekna fighting knife at his hip completed the obvious fighting gear. But his clothes and combat boots also concealed a wealth of hidden equipment: fuses, picklocks and stilettos; wire and a little plas-ex, as well as a folding sextant.

J.B. was a walking arsenal.

As Ryan looked across the chamber at his oldest friend, the man's gray eyes flicked open. He glanced around at the others.

"Doc got a bloody nose," he said. "Rest look okay to me." The Armorer was never a man to use two words when one would do the job.

There were two other people in the mat-trans room, both of them still unconscious. Next to J.B. in the circle was the youngest member of the traveling group of companions, a lad fifteen years of age. He weighed 110 pounds soaking wet and was five feet four inches tall. His long mane of spun silver hair cascaded across his skinny shoulders like a winter fall of Sierra melt-water. His mind blanked by the jump, the boy looked like a sleeping child, at peace with the world.

To Ryan's knowledge, Jak Lauren had killed upward of a hundred human beings and probably as many muties. When it came to close-quarter butchery, Ryan had never seen anyone to match the teenager. A satin-finish .357 Magnum was tucked in his belt. The torn leather-and-canvas jacket he held in his lap, in camouflage brown, gray and green, had tiny shards of razored steel sewn into it. He also carried several — Ryan never knew how many — leaf-bladed throwing knives. The youngster's ruby-red eyes remained stubbornly closed, though movement of his fingers showed that Jak was coming around.

Krysty Wroth leaned against the armaglass wall, close by Ryan, still in the classic lotus position, the palms of her hands flat upon her thighs. Her fiery crimson hair was bunched protectively around her neck. Krysty's body trembled and she sighed. Then she opened her dazzling green eyes, turned her head and half smiled across at Ryan.