James Axler: Dectra Chain

"Gaia!" Krysty shivered. "My bones are turning into pack ice, lover. Doc and Lori won't make it through another tide. Maybe I won't. We'll die if we stay here."

He nodded, feeling the stiffness and deadly numbness sapping his energy. "Sure. Let's move out."

Ryan led the way, wading to the doors. The gap was festooned with long tendrils of leprous-pale weed, and he was aware of sand beneath the soles of his combat boots. It was impossible, with the dazzling lights of the redoubt at his shoulder, to see anything at all outside, beyond the gleam of water on rock a couple of paces beyond the entrance.

J.B. went to the control wheel and threw his weight against it. He shook his head grimly. "Locked for ever an' a day."

"I'll go first," Jak said. "Follow tight."

The young albino had excellent night vision, and Ryan was happy for him to take the lead, moving easily between the rubber-sealed doors. J.B. went second, with the rest of the group close behind. Ryan brought up the rear, glancing back down the bright corridor, wondering whether they might have done better by going back and trying the gateway. But the water seemed to be rising once more, and if they got trapped again, the cold and wet would surely take its toll among them.

"Nobody ever gets anywhere going backward," he said quietly to himself. He pushed past the fronds of seaweed and walked out into the cool night breeze.

They stood on the crumbling remnants of an old jetty, with huge, rusting iron mooring rings set in the weathered concrete. The turning tide was already a foot or more over the surface, and Ryan guessed that the vicious nuking of the last of wars must have caused a local earth shift. When it was first built, the quay would have been a good many feet proud of the high-tide level.

The night was piercingly black, with only scudding white clouds staining the oppressive darkness of the sky. Ryan found it difficult to see through the blown spume off the ocean, but he had the impression of a vast distance out beyond the edge of the jetty, and of monstrously high cliffs scraping upward behind them.

"Stairs. Iron. Up there." Jak pointed up by the side of the pair of doors. "Not safe. All rotted down."

"Just what I needed," Ryan said, baring his teeth in a mirthless grin. "Always loved climbing up a crumbling ladder in pitch-dark over rocks and sea. Nothing fucking nicer in the world."

The rungs and side supports of the ladder had been worn down until many of them were thinner than a child's finger. Despite the bitter chill and the rising wind, Ryan found himself sodden with sweat, which was running down the small of his back and was making his hands even more slippery.

He lost track of how long and how high they'd been climbing. For the first few minutes he'd been able to peer down between his boots and see white water breaking over the quay's rough edges. The next time he looked down, all that had vanished. There was nothing to be seen above him and nothing below.

Every now and again Ryan felt Krysty, climbing second, touch his foot, but for most of the spidering ascent he felt utterly alone, suspended in the yawning chasm between Earth and Heaven. Once a rung broke under his foot, and he swung for a heart-stopping second by his hands, conscious only of the frailty of the metal and the appalling distance he would fall.

The wind was rising, tugging at his clothes, trying to jerk the G-12 off his shoulders. His hair blew about his face.

A large gull burst shrieking from a cleft in the rock, nearly dislodging his grip and sending him spinning into the void. But he held on and kept climbing remorselessly upward.

The ladder could only possibly have been built there for emergency purposes. There was no human way of making the climb, except in the direst of needs.

The wind had become almost a full-blown gale, howling like a cemetery banshee, deafening him to every other sound. It blanked out all of his senses except the ones that gripped the rusting iron and hauled him painfully upward, a trembling step at a time.

Ryan paused and blinked the spray from his eye, staring up. He was able to see only a few feet, but seeing… thinking he was seeing… the sharp edge of concrete only a half dozen rungs above his head. It had to be the top of the climb.

The sides of the ladder rose up and over in a semicircle of freezing, pitted metal. Ryan, drained by the struggle of leading the others into unknown blackness, clambered clumsily over the rim and collapsed on hands and knees on smoother stone. Krysty joined him a moment later, her breathing surging harshly.

"I've done easier things, lover," she panted. "Hope the others can make it."

"Only one way. Can't go down," he said, feeling strength already seeping back into his body.

It seemed an eternity before the next head loomed into sight, mirrored glasses making it appear like a bizarrely mutated stick insect.

"Doc's… close behind. Near falling. Lori tied herself to him with belt. Told him if he let go he'd… take her with… with him. Been pulling from above. I would not do that again for immortal life."

With a great effort the three of them managed to heave the old man and the girl over the brink onto the flat platform. Doc collapsed, totally exhausted, and Lori fell behind him, retching on hands and knees, threads of vomit dangling from her sagging mouth.

"Five up and two to go," Ryan said.

Jak was next, hair plastered to his angular skull like a snow-plas mask. He was sobbing for breath, and he joined Lori, doubled up.

Last was J.B., his trusty fedora jammed down the front of his jacket. His glasses were totally misted with sea spray, but he climbed the last few steps as sprightly as if he'd been out for an afternoon scramble with a pair of maiden aunts.

Ryan had found a small iron door, covered in lichen, at the rear of the platform, and he left the others and pushed at it, finding that it swung open easily. His eye winced at the brightness of light inside, startling after the long blackness.

But he could see enough to make out a slackly grinning mouth and shadowed eyes that seemed to mutter brain death. And below that the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.

"Hi. Whooooo you?"

The fluting, owllike voice was like that of a young child. But the face above the scattergun was at least sixty years old, lined and furrowed, with a pale, unhealthy sheen to it, overlaid with a gray patina of dust and grease. The crazed eyes stared at Ryan out of pits of scoured bone, deadly flat and so dark a brown that they blurred into black. There were no teeth in the yellowed gums that leered at Ryan Cawdor. His hair was the color of rotting corn, pasted thinly over the crumpled scalp. Both ears pointed backward instead of forward. The man wore a shapeless suit of crudely woven wool, dyed a sickly green-yellow. Ryan wrinkled his nose at the foul smell of damp and decay that billowed around him.

"Whooooo you?" the voice repeated.

"Name's Ryan Cawdor. What do they call you?"

"Don't knooooow. Nooooo name for meeee. How you come?"

"Up the ladder. Had a boat wrecked below on the rocks. Climbed up. Long way, ain't it?"

The head nodded, but the gun never shifted. The stranger's finger never moved off the twin triggers of the battered Remington.

"Long waaaaay. Sure is. Upanupanup."

The man was a perfect target for anyone behind Ryan, with that bright light haloing him, and he wouldn't be able to see any of the others in the blackness outside. However, any of the other six would also be able to see the shotgun pointing just below Ryan's breastbone. It was way better than evens that a bullet through the toothless mouth could also mean a hole in Ryan's guts.

"Why the gun?" Ryan asked, taking care not to let his own fingers stray toward the blaster in his belt.