James Axler: Homeward Bound

"It's dead."

Ryan Cawdor took the high-image intensifier away from his good eye, tucking it back into one of the pockets of his long, fur-trimmed coat.

"Nothing?" asked J.B. Dix, the Armorer.

"Nothing. From this high you can see for miles. Not a sign of life. When it's cold like this there should be smoke. Folks got to keep warm. There's wood enough around for 'em."

Across the steep valley the sun was sinking into a nest of tangled violet chem clouds. Ryan figured the temperature had to be already close to freezing. His breath plumed out ahead of him, and the skin on his stubbled cheeks felt tight. The slopes of the hills opposite from the cavern entrance were streaked with snow, and the small pools around the snaking lead-gray river were dulled with ice.

Running alongside the slow-moving water, Ryan had been able to make out the shattered remains of a two-lane blacktop, its edge eroded by a century of neglect.

Krysty Wroth's hand rested on his arm. He glanced at the girl, smiling at her startling beauty, his eye almost dazzled by the bright crimson of her tumbling hair. "It's Doc," she said quietly.

"What?"

"When we came out of the gateway he was throwing up. Face like parchment. Lori took him back into the main redoubt entrance to sit him down."

Ryan sucked on a tooth, looking to his left, where the original road to the concealed fortress had been destroyed — either by a landslip or the nuking that had devastated the entire length and breadth of the United States. Nearly a hundred years back.

In 2001.

A young boy stood on the rim of the sheer drop, head to one side as though he were listening to something. The bleak wind tugged at his long hair, blowing it across his face. His hair was whiter than the driven snow, his eyes red as polished rubies, set in sockets of honed ivory.

"You hear something, Jak?" Ryan asked.

"Thought I heard something howling, like a banshee back in the swamps."

Jak Lauren hadn't been with Ryan and his party for very long. They'd picked him up in the dank vastness of the Atchafalaya Swamp, in what had once been the state of Louisiana. His slight frame concealed a powerful, wiry strength. Ryan Cawdor, who was a good judge of such things, figured Jak as one of the most lethal hand-to-hand killers he'd ever seen.

Jak was fourteen years old.

J.B. Dix stepped to the edge of the cliff and joined the young albino. Squinting into the distance, concentrating, he said, "Could be a wolf."

Krysty Wroth's keen hearing enabled her to confirm J.B.'s guess. "Yeah. It's a wolf. And there's more of 'em, a pack of around a dozen. Four, mebbe five miles northeast of here."

"Where in fireblast are we, J.B.?" Ryan asked, hunching his shoulders.

The Armorer had a tiny folding comp-sextant in one of the capacious pockets of his dark gray leather coat, with its smart silky collar of black fur. He pulled it out and looked around, easing back the brim of his beloved fedora, and took the necessary sighting. He picked a crumpled chart and consulted it.

"Near as I can figure it, we look to have landed north of what they used to call New York State. And that river has to be the Mohawk."

Ryan glanced both ways along what remained of the roadway. Each end had been sliced clean off. "That's why the redoubt hasn't been entered," he guessed.

"Uncle Tyas McCann told me how the east and the northeast were hard-nuked," Krysty said. "All the big cities and most power places. There's lots of hot spots."

"Check the rad count," J.B. suggested. "Broke mine getting off Wizard Island."

Ryan flicked back the lapel of his coat, moving the end of the weighted silk scarf out of the way. He pressed the On button of the rad counter and listened to the faint cheeping of the machine. The glowing scarlet arrow veered erratically across the scale, wavering uncomfortably into the orange sector.

"Warm," he said.

"Closing in on hot," Krysty observed.

"Too late to leave 'fore dark," Jak said, moving back from the rim. "Be night in less than an hour. Better wait and find a way down in the morning."

Ryan wasn't sure that it was going to be that easy to get off the sheer plateau. When you found a redoubt that hadn't been entered since the long chill had begun, it meant it was hard to get at. Which generally meant it was also damned hard to get out of.

"Sure," he agreed. "Krysty says Doc's sick. We'll all go back in and scout for some food. I saw a shelf of self-heats. Reckon its soy meat." He grinned at the look of revulsion on J.B.'s face. "Know what you mean, friend," he said. "Can't say I like that tepid sludge myself. Let's get in and close off the rad doors. We'll make a clean start in the morning at first light."

The jump had nearly killed them all.

All over the Deathlands, which had once been the United States of America, there were a number of hidden fortresses. These redoubts had been known to Ryan Cawdor from his earliest days with the traveling guerrilla leader they called the Trader. But only in the past few weeks had Ryan learned of the other, secret uses of these redoubts.

Many of them concealed a small security fortress within the main complex, which was called a gateway.

The key to these installations had been Dr. Theophilus Tanner — Doc, a scrawny old man in tattered clothes who seemed to have come from the prenuke era. Doc's brains had been scrambled by some horrific experiences, but every now and again he came out with pearls of arcane wisdom that puzzled and fascinated Ryan Cawdor. And the most bewildering concerned something called Project Cerberus.

Eventually Ryan and Krysty had stumbled upon the secret of Doc Tanner. Back in the late 1990s, only a few years before the civilized world vanished in the war that ended all wars, American and Russian scientists were working on ways of moving human beings through space and through time. In the United States this was Project Cerberus. In max-sec labs attempts were made to trawl a living person from the past. Many attempts were made, and some of the results were ghastly. But one succeeded.

Doctor Tanner was born in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. He married in 1891 and had been successfully time-trawled and brought forward, alive, to the fading end of the twentieth century. Doc proved so unstable and difficult that he was eventually sent forward on a chron-jump, this time ending up in the heart of the Deathlands. His mind constantly tottered on the brink of madness, with only the occasional shard of crystal-clear memory remaining.

But slowly things had improved. His memory had grown stronger, and he had been able to give Ryan information about Cerberus, about the gateways and how they could be set for mat-trans jumps.

But the secret of time travel was still locked somewhere in the back of Doc's ravaged mind.

With his help the group had been able to make a number of mat-trans leaps, going from Alaska to Louisiana in the blink of an eye. But not all of the gateways remained undamaged. Doc had warned that their operation was completely unpredictable and that there remained the possibility they might jump to a gateway that was under a thousand feet of rock, or be drowned at the bottom of a California lagoon.

This last leap had brought that prediction frighteningly close.

The glass walls of the mat-trans chamber had been a deep red. The six friends had all entered the small room, sitting down on the floor of polished metal disks, readying themselves for the jump. All the references for controlling where the destination was had long been lost. All any of them knew was that the act of closing the gateway's inner door triggered the mechanism and sent them hurtling on a trip into the unknown.