James Axler - Ritual Chill

The words exchanged with Krysty the night before also nagged at his mind. What were they doing this for? Where were they going? Were they cursed in some way to wander forever and never to find peace?

Ryan looked around him at the stark rocks, the deceptive snowbanks that looked solid yet could suck you in meters deep. No sign of wildlife yet, but that growling instinct deep inside told him it was here somewhere. He couldn’t afford to let these things take over his mind.

Ryan looked back over his shoulder at the others as they followed. All seemed to be lost in their own thoughts.

All the more reason for him to stay on triple red.

JAK LOOKED UP as Ryan turned back, and for a moment the albino’s red eyes flashed as they met with the single blue orb of the man at their head. Ryan never looked back; he was always focused entirely on keeping alert to their surroundings. The fact that he was acting out of character just confirmed what Jak had been thinking.

There was something very wrong with everyone. Something to do with landing in that particular mattrans. Jak hadn’t been to this place before, but it was too cold for his liking. The food in the redoubt had been poor and there hadn’t been much of it. Plenty of everything else, but not of anything that really mattered. And there wasn’t much out here. His finely honed senses told him that there was some wildlife, but it kept out of the harsh conditions as much as was possible, emerging only to forage for food. Difficult to tell anything from smell, as the rank odor of the sulfur from the volcanoes around them overlaid everything, making it hard to distinguish scents.

Jak could feel the air of gloom and despair that seemed to overlay everyone, but he didn’t care. It would pass, like all things. Jak had seen those he cared about most taken from him and chilled. He had traveled forth in search of those who had perpetrated the deed and exacted revenge. And then it was gone. Yes, he remembered. And yes, it hurt. But it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could do about it. The only important thing was to stay alive.

In many ways, Jak couldn’t understand why the others seemed to be feeling and acting as they did. Things affected him, but he was always very sure of what was a priority. There was a time to think about such things, which was usually in the dark of the night. But not now. Not out here.

If everyone else was going to allow themselves to be distracted by what they had felt back at the redoubt, then Jak was going to have to keep himself on triple red. For the rest of them as much as for himself.

J.B. WAS UNEASY. He knew how everyone was feeling—he’d felt it himself—but now they were out in the wild and it was time to cut the crap and get with the plan. If they were going to reach the settlement called Ank Ridge, then they would have to set a strong pace. He looked up at the sky, pausing to wipe the ice from the lenses in his spectacles and to pull down the brim of his fedora. It would have made a little more sense to stow the hat away and use the hood on his coat—it had a snorkel like the one Mildred was wearing—but it would take a lot to dislodge the Armorer from his beloved hat. It was a part of him, and if you couldn’t be yourself, then what was the point of going on?

Dark night, he couldn’t believe that thought had just gone through his head. It was like some kind of mental virus that had spread through them, making them slack. They couldn’t afford to be slack. Life was too precious, too easily snatched.

Looking up at the clouds, he could see no indication of which part of the sky held the sun. He had a rough idea of their location, but they hadn’t made Ank Ridge last time they were here, and he really needed to get a reading so that they could plot a course. His hand went to the minisextant in one of his pockets, reassuringly feeling the contours. Once he could get a reading, then he would feel a little less anxious. The heavy clouds above them looked about ready to unleash a storm. Before that happened, he’d rather know exactly where he was.

Unusually he was in the center of the loose line. Another indication of how things had gone to shit this time out. They were in no fit condition to defend themselves if a danger arose, and this concerned him. But that wasn’t all. It still rankled him that they had left so much behind in the armory. Blasters and ammo that weren’t their usual weapons but could have been useful. It was a constant struggle to keep their supplies in any kind of firefight-ready state. A few more blasters wouldn’t have gone amiss: but no one had been willing to consider that, wrapped up in the gloom of the redoubt and their memories.

For the most part J.B. didn’t know what they had to worry about. Looking ahead to Krysty, Jak and Ryan, he felt they were all at the same point. They were alive, and nothing else mattered. He kind of figured Jak may feel that way, too.

But it was when he looked behind him, at Mildred and Doc, that he truly wondered. None of them could imagine what Millie or the old man had been through. None of them could know what was going on in their heads. They could only hope that they could keep it together.

TOGETHER. THAT WAS THE KEY. If they could keep together, they could get through this. Krysty was sensitive to other people’s moods. It was a blessing and a curse. Right now, it felt like the latter. There was an oppressive weight—like the clouds above them, she thought with a wry grin—that hung over the group. It had begun when they had realized where they were, and had worsened as they had moped around the redoubt, letting the memories get to them, letting the lack of activity cause them to dwell on what had gone before. But Mother Sonja had taught her that regrets were useless. The only thing to do was to use the mistakes, to use the past to learn and move on.

At least they were moving physically. Mentally, she wasn’t so sure. She could still feel the overall mood, and it was still dark. It affected the others as much as it affected her, she was sure. It was merely that they were unaware of the subtle way in which it permeated them.

It would pass. When something happened to jolt them from it, it would dissipate and they would be themselves once more. Most of them. Mebbe not Doc. Fragile at the best of times, coming back to where they had met Lori may be too much for him.

Doc worried her. She shivered from more than just the subzero temperature and pulled herself farther into the fur coat.

DOC KEPT PACE, but only physically. His eyes were staring ahead, but in truth he didn’t see the people walking ahead of him as anything more than a series of shapes. They maintained their size as long as he kept equidistance: therefore he adjusted his pace accordingly to theirs. It was simple. It allowed his mind to wander.

Lori. So sweet. Beautiful and blond, with the most astoundingly long legs. Those eyes, always wide with amazement and wonder. He would talk to her, tell her things, and he was sure that she couldn’t follow his discourse. Yet sometimes she would understand one thing, then a while after, another, and she would make the link between the two. The expression on her face: the joy of understanding, of having a point of communication between herself and the man who had become her protector. Those moments had been sublime. And they had been so few before she had been cruelly taken from him. As he had been cruelly taken from Emily.

As his life had been cruelly taken from him.

There was only cruelty. Nothing more. The rest was a pretence to lull him into a sense of security that was no longer justified.

There was—He stopped, looked up as a distant rumble was followed by a sudden flurry of snow and ice on the wind.

Storm.

Within seconds the air around them became an impenetrable mass of ice and snow, whipped to a ferocious speed by the sudden squalls of wind. The lightly numbing sensation of ice on the skin became the pinprick whiplash of seemingly solid particles hurled against the face and hands with venom by the elements. Where they had been able to see in front, to the back and sides, to identify where the others stood, now they were all alone, each of them lost in the sudden blanket of white that the storm threw up around them.