James Axler - Apocalypse Unborn

Having found Doc Tanner at last, over such a distance of time and space, against astronomical odds, Kirby and Bell couldn’t bear to let him out of their sight, and in fact were keeping tabs on him in four-hour shifts. If the ancient academic fell overboard and drowned, if some ex-sec man suddenly took it into his head to shoot him in the back, all was lost forever. In the final months of the twentieth century the physicist and the mathematician had devised a second chance for their world. It was a last chance. There would be no subsequent zipping back and forth in time, working the problem on a trial-and-error basis, until they finally got things right. Each zip created an infinitesimal snag in present reality. When overlaid, the zips stretched the original snag into a hole, then a rip. The fabric of existence was far more delicate than anyone ever imagined.

The ship’s crew were the only takers for the breakfast of mixed fried small fish, squid, anchovies, herring and sardines were dropped whole by the bucketful into a wide caldron of boiling oil. After a minute or two, the floating, golden-brown clumps and clots were sieved out with a ladle and dumped in great mounds onto long enameled trays.

A one-course buffet.

Seated islanders hunkered over the tabletops, guarding their plates, eating bare-handed, warm grease running down their forearms.

The sight and the smell crushed what little appetite Kirby had. He climbed the companionway and went on deck. He stood for a moment, face into the wind, sucking down the cool, fresh air. To the northeast, turquoise sky was shot through with black wisps, the remnants of the chem storm they had endured. The orange disk of the sun was just breaking the horizon, above a thin, jagged ribbon of land. There was no way to tell how far they had come overnight; much of it had been spent without sails, bobbing in heavy waves. The sea all around was dark blue with a two-foot chop, scattered whitecaps and a blustery wind running from behind. The swell had fallen off to next to nothing.

He and Tanner weren’t the only passengers on deck, but they were among the few standing upright. Most of the others knelt in front of the scuppers, heads in hands, faces corpse-white, beards matted with dried vomit. Rainfall and sixty-degree seawater had melted the blue hail and washed away its residue. Ahead of him, Doc Tanner advanced to the bowsprit, the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. That wasn’t all that was flapping. His long gray hair momentarily stood straight up, like one of those gee-whiz, static charge demonstrations.

Doc looked to be in his sixties, yet he was actually in his thirties. His forced jumps in time had produced intense submolecular stress. That Doc Tanner was not stark raving mad was testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Though Dr. Antoine Kirby had arrived in the hellscape via cryotank, he faced the same stressors as the skinny Victorian—the same plus one. Doc was a blameless victim of circumstance; Kirby had helped facilitate the end of civilization. He entered cryosleep as an upper middle-class intellectual, a button-downed, closet-full-of-tailored-Italian-suits, Lexus-driving, happily-single, time-share-condo-in-Maui kind of whitecoat. A century as an ice block and four years fruitlessly roaming Deathlands had changed him beyond recognition. And not just externally.

Since his football days, Kirby had consciously repressed his own propensity for violence. He was a big, powerful, physically gifted man who hated aggression. He hated it because it was the easy way out. Because it was mindless and irrational. Because it contributed nothing to human understanding or betterment. The National Football League, which would have gleefully drafted him in the first round, sold diversion, sublimation and manipulation. That was something he wanted no part of. In his view, a life without a search for truth was a waste.

Thanks to cryogenics, the cerebral Dr. Kirby found himself thrust into a shattered and lawless world. He was suddenly forced to fight, and not just a dozen times a year on weekends, but almost daily. And not to win a game. In the process of some of these battles, he had taken human lives. Sometimes with his bare hands. To survive and further the vital mission, he had to unleash the demon within.

A case in point. Kirby and Bell hadn’t found the brood of scagworms they now carried. They had shared a cookfire with the pair of mutie hunters who’d found them, men they had buried the next morning in shallow graves hacked into the desert hardpan. The mutie millipedes gave them cover, identities, a way to get close their quarry without raising his suspicion, or the suspicion of his companions.

Dr. Theophilus Tanner was a classically educated man, which meant he was trained in science, history, logic, literature, mythology and dead languages. He had suffered terrible, unthinkable losses, yet stubbornly held on to life. Kirby and Bell knew they couldn’t force a man like Tanner into anything; and if they tried, their mission would fail, half completed. The action they required of him had to be performed of his own free will. There was no way around that fact. Accordingly, they had work with care and subtlety to convince him that it was the right and only thing to do. Before they could hope to do that, before they could reveal who they were and what the goal was, they had to gain his trust. They had already begun to lay the foundation.

It had come as a pleasant surprise to Doc Tanner that he and his new acquaintances had experiences in common. In their conversation the previous day, it turned out the mutie hunters had wandered the same territories, knew firsthand many of the villes, the baronies, the hazards Doc and the companions had faced. Tanner thought it was a coincidence—the small world syndrome.

It was not.

Kirby and Bell had been on the trail of the companions from the moment they were reanimated. They had picked up the scent by following tall tales, gossip and rumors from gaudy to gaudy, campfire to campfire. Then they had started tracking the carnage Tanner and the others left behind. It wasn’t just the size or wildness of the country that made the task so challenging. The companions had access to the predark network of mat-trans gateways, housed in nuke-safe, subterranean redoubts. Using this still-operational, automated technology, they could jump from coast to coast in a matter of nanoseconds. Though Kirby and Bell used the mat-trans gateways, too, arriving onsite even a day late meant the trail was already cold. Just when it had begun to seem like they were never going to close the gap, they got their lucky break.

For four long years Antoine Kirby had relied almost exclusively on violence and intimidation to advance his cause. Stifling his impatience as he approached the tall, skinny man on the bowsprit was difficult.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, pointing at the sea far ahead. “What in God’s name is that?”

Kirby followed the line of his arm and hand to a dark shape hanging above the distant wave tops. Long and slender, it was tapered at both ends. “It’s a bird, and a hell of a big one,” he said. “Wingspan has to be at least fifteen feet.”

“It’s flying against the wind,” Doc said.

And the wind was considerable. The creature was making no headway, but the ship was rapidly bearing down on it.

From the crow’s nest came the shout, “Manu tangata!”

“Manu tangata! Manu tangata!” The crew picked up the cry.

Captain Eng noted the position and turned the wheel for an intercept course.

The islanders rushed to the bowsprit, no longer taciturn and withdrawn. They laughed and spoke excitedly, slapping one another on the back and shoving one another playfully.

As the distance to intercept closed, Kirby could see the creature’s head was definitely lighter in color than its body or wings. Like a bald eagle. Only five times larger. With the ship traveling about fourteen knots and the bird thing essentially standing still, a collision was imminent.