Chrono Spasm (8 page)

“She looks so beautiful,” Doc continued, “as she bakes cakes in the kitchen for Rachel and Jolyon. And the smells, my goodness, the smells! That woman could tempt the angels down from Heaven to sample her wondrous pastries and iced delights.”

The old man’s voice wended on in memory, his words slurring as sleep gradually overcame him. Ryan’s mood lightened as Doc’s words tapered off. It had to be nice having memories of better times to slip away into, Ryan thought. All he had was death and loss, his own son snatched from him, only to return to his father to suffer heartache and bitterness.

The old man snored while Ryan sat still, his lone eye fixed on the stars glimmering through the open hole of the window. He could hear the restless noises of the mutie caribou from somewhere nearby, their lowing echoing with the ominous fury of a distant earthquake.

Ryan was weaponless, but he wasn’t helpless. If it came to it, he would revert to his fists, his muscular body trained by the hard school of the Deathlands. And Doc still had his swordstick, disguised as the walking cane. The old man had played up his infirmness when he had climbed the ladder, drawing attention to his need to use the cane to steady himself. None of these ice scavengers had given it a second thought, which left Ryan and Doc with one weapon between them.

Ryan’s mind worked furiously, plucking at the problem of their incarceration high up in this glacial roost. To escape from up here would require not simply getting access out of the cell, but also making their way through the caverns that had been drilled into the ice, past that grisly meat locker where men’s bodies swung in icy silence. There would be guards, Ryan knew, sec men, made strong by the cold weather. From his initial observation they appeared well-armed—almost everyone they had passed at this eerie ice ville bore a blaster or a knife of some kind.

Ryan replayed the location in his mind, mapping each turn they had taken, trying to work out which path to take should the opportunity to escape present itself. A few feet away, Doc snuffled, rolling over on his side and pulling the collar of his coat tighter over his shoulder to keep warm.

As he sat there, Ryan’s thoughts turned to Krysty, his lover. Perhaps one day they would settle somewhere, give up this hand-to-mouth existence, the constant cycle of running and chilling. Mebbe raise a family of their own just like the one Doc Tanner had left behind in the 1800s. “Memories are waiting to be made,” Ryan told himself quietly as the cold breeze blew against his tired face. “Just waiting to be made.”

* * *

J
AK
AND
R
ICKY
had been thrown into a larger cell in the warrenlike ville along with the three men who had been brought under armed guard to join the party. Jak had slumped to the floor, and he lay unmoving. This cell was much closer to the ground than the ones that their companions had been placed in, its walls made from compacted ice with seams of earth running through it in dark, dirty smudges. The room had no windows and no furniture. The only light came through the ice walls, the blurry flickering of a gas heater seen through layers of frozen water. The effect was like a painting or a child’s night-light, but it was enough to let them see their own misting breath hanging in the air.

There were two other figures hidden amid the darkness, Ricky realized as soon as the great wooden door was rolled over the exit like a screw-top lid. One lay sprawled against the wall farthest from the light, his skinny body bent in on itself to keep warm. The other pulled himself very slowly to his feet and greeted his new cellmates.

The other men were complaining, albeit timidly, one of them moaning about his missing wife. “She’s eight months gone,” he pleaded to the cool air. “If they harm the baby I’ll chill every last one of the bastards, I swear.”

Ricky looked at the man with disdain. He wasn’t the sort who would chill anyone. He looked more like the kind who hid at home while people like his uncle had done the real fighting.

Ricky turned back to Jak, whose pale flesh was painted an orange tint by the shimmering light of the nearby fire. “Jak?” Ricky asked quietly. “Jak, are you okay?”

For a long moment Jak didn’t respond. He lay still, sprawled half-on and half-off a threadbare rug that had been placed on the floor of the cell. He had taken an awful beating at the hands of the cannies, Ricky knew.

“Head hurts,” Jak said finally. “Feel like it went up against wag, headfirst.”

Ricky smiled at that.

While the other prisoners sorted out their sleeping arrangements, Ricky showed Jak the knife he had lifted from the sec man. “I bet he’s missing it by now,” Ricky said with a smug grin.

Jak agreed. “Be careful with that. Our time come.”

Ricky nodded, his smile disappearing and his face turning serious. Jak had far more experience in these situations than he did; while he wanted to mount an escape he figured that his friend would know when the right time to strike was, just like a mountain cobra waiting for the climber to pass.

Jak leaned back down, pulling up his jacket so that it bunched under his shoulders to give him a little padding to lie against.

“You hurting, Jak?” Ricky asked. “Is there anything I can do?”

Jak shook his head, wincing as a burning pain raced across the back of his skull. “Sleep,” Jak told him.

“Please stay alive,” Ricky whispered as he laid his slender body beside Jak. For a moment, his hand reached to the blade he had lifted, where it was hidden in his waistband. He pushed it around to the crease at the small of his back, making sure he wouldn’t roll onto it in his sleep.

Around them, the men continued to mutter and complain. At some point, one of them realized that the figure lying against the wall farthest from the illumination hadn’t responded to any of their questions and he went over to check on him. The man’s eyes were open and there was a thin film of ice over each one. He had been dead for a week, his body perfectly preserved by the subzero environment. His corpse made for an uncomfortable cellmate.

* * *

W
HEN
THEY
FOUND
THEM
they were close to death, sheltering among the dead trees whose branches scraped at the air like arthritic claws. Cupped in her father’s arms, the girl had a film of ice over her clothes and the exposed skin of her face, and the snow had begun to settle where she had closed her eyes. Her father clung to her like a precious treasure he had pulled from the frozen ground, his arms wrapped around her, his coat open, better to press her against his body. There was ice in his hair where his hood had slipped, and his scarf had frozen to his face, an icy line across his mouth and nose.

“Wake up,” the man who found them said. He was a broad-shouldered man with skin like tanned leather and the perpetual stoop of one who had been walking against the wind for too long. He had climbing equipment, including a thick rope, strapped to his furs. Beside him, a second man and a woman surveyed the area with weapons poised. “Are you alive?”

The man in the snow grumbled, the layer of ice on the scarf splitting in the folds as he moved his jaw. “Alive, yes,” he mumbled, his words accented thickly with Russian. “Alive.”

“I’m Piotr,” the man who had roused him said. “We need to get out of here now. It’s not safe here.”

Lying in the snow, Symon Vrack moved his aching limbs, so cold he could no longer feel them, checking that his daughter was still there. “Tarelya,” he whispered, “wake up. Quickly now.”

In his arms, Tarelya roused with a groan. “So cold,” she said.

“Yes, it’s cold,” Piotr agreed. “Come on, before the crows get here.”

Symon looked askance at Piotr as he stood. “Crows? You think birds can fly in this?” The snow was falling in thick clumps now, billowing in the strong wind that rushed against the slope with the determination of a prizefighter’s punches.

“The crows walk and leap,” Piotr explained as he helped Tarelya up. “They’re not birds.”

Standing at the edge of the tree line, the woman dipped her head at the newcomers in greeting. She wore goggles over her eyes and her head was wrapped in woollen scarves that covered her mouth and her hair, leaving just the bridge of her nose exposed. “You’ve seen the mouths?” she asked, and Symon and his daughter nodded. “Crows is what we call them,” she explained. “Short for chronovores. They eat time.”

“How can something eat time?” Symon asked, woodenly brushing the snow from his clothes.

“We don’t know,” Piotr admitted, shaking his head. “End Day keeps on going, getting more compressed with every moment it continues. We are living in Hell.”

Symon nodded. He had heard his place called by many names, one of which was the land that God had abandoned for darkness. Hell fitted the place as well as any other.

Chapter Seven

They were awakened when two burly sec men drew back the pluglike door and began beating them with sticks. It was still dark outside the cell, and Ryan was catnapping, alert to the movement of the door. Doc mumbled complaints as he came to, swiping the sticks away from his torso again and again, the men laughing and jeering. The men ignored his complaints, jabbing and poking him, issuing unintelligible taunts in their native tongue.

Ryan watched all this through one slit eye, his back crushed against the wall of the room beneath the open window, his legs stretched out before him across the cell. There was a third sec man standing at the door, Ryan noticed, this one armed with what appeared to be a rapid-fire longblaster, possibly an AK-47, Ryan wasn’t sure from that angle. He readied himself as one of the men stomped across the tiny cell toward him, a cruel sneer on his face. The man held a paddle-like stick, as wide as a hand and fifteen inches long. Ryan guessed that it was salvaged from somewhere and had served another purpose years before.

“Heh, One-Eye,” the man growled as he drew the paddle back, preparing to strike Ryan to awaken him.

As the paddle swung, Ryan’s left hand snapped up and grabbed it above its wide end, yanking it upward away from him. The move surprised the paddle’s wielder and he stumbled into the wall, striking his head just to the side of the open window. Still in his sitting position, Ryan’s other hand snapped up and grabbed the man by his throat.

“Try that again and I’ll chill you,” Ryan snarled in the man’s face, “right here in front of your girlfriend.”

The man’s face showed genuine surprise, his eyebrows rising comically on his forehead.

“Yeah, you droolies understand English, don’t you?” Ryan continued, shoving his hand deeper into the man’s throat and pushing him away.

With a wounded expression, the sec man pulled the paddle back, his sadistic game over before it had begun. Ryan pulled himself from the floor as the man backed away toward his partner. The other sec man had stopped jabbing at Doc and simply stood there, his own paddle hanging forgotten in his hand.

When Ryan stood he found he was almost a foot taller than either of the guards. “Now,” he commanded, taking charge of the situation, “you have some reason for waking us or what?”

The men spoke to each other for a moment, then one of them—the one who hadn’t tried to rouse Ryan—pointed his wooden stick at the one-eyed man. “You come with us. You follow, yeah?” His accent was so thick it made the words grate against Ryan’s ears as he tried to make sense of them.

“Yeah, okay,” Ryan said, and he checked on Doc, helping up the old man.

Outside the cell, they found themselves back in the ice-walled corridor, the strong smell of gas emanating from the dim, flickering lamps that were dotted along the floor.

J.B. was already standing out there, his hands bound and his hat crooked on his head. When he saw Ryan emerge from the other cell he smiled grimly. “Good to know the gang’s all here,” he said. “My cell was bastard cold. Is Doc all right?”

Before Ryan could reply, Doc emerged from the cell, ducking his head under the lintel and smoothing his frockcoat. “That’s quite all right, Ryan, I can answer for myself. My night’s slumber was as restive as one would expect,” he explained as one of the sec men bound his hands loosely, “but this old body of mine is not ready to give up quite yet.”

Once they had been bound, the three men were led down a series of icy corridors to the exterior of the glacierlike ville, using slopes and occasional ladders to descend to ground level. Once there, they joined other gathered prisoners, including Jak and Ricky, who waited in a pen overseen by three armed guards dressed in furs. Jak looked exhausted to Ryan’s eye, and his face displayed a line of nasty purple bruises running from brow to jaw where their captors had beaten him the night before.

Catching Ryan’s eye, Jak shrugged indifferently. “Looks worse than is,” he assured the one-eyed man.

Before long the group was marched away from the ville. There were thirty prisoners—all male—in the party and they were guarded by five men, three of whom rode on the backs of mutated caribou, their curling antlers daubed with bright paint in tribal design.

The sky was still a dark shade that Ryan took to be dawn, though later he would come to realize that the sun never really rose in these parts at this time of the year, leaving the days a sort of grim twilight even at the height of noon. The sec men didn’t bother to explain where they were being taken, but one of Ricky’s and Jak’s cellmates, a pasty-faced, drawn-looking man who had been incarcerated in the ville for several weeks, enlightened them.

“There’s an old bomb site just to the east of here,” the prisoner began, “close to where one of those earthshaker missiles came down, I heard. Place was an army base once, before the nukecaust turned it into shit. Right now the site looks pretty much what you’d expect, but there’s still some good stuff to be found there, blasters and so on. These ice demons been pushing us deeper and deeper into the ruins, seeing what shit we can scavenge up.”

Doc tsked with surprise. “A mining operation,” he said in a low voice. “We’re miners, indentured laboring miners.”

Ryan shot him a warning look. “At least we’re alive, Doc,” he said. “Till we can get to Krysty and Mildred, that’s the best we can hope for.”

Doc nodded apologetically. “Of course, I quite forgot myself.”

As he spoke, one of the guards leaned over from his caribou steed and lightly rapped Doc across the back of his head with his rifle butt. “You, be quiet.”

Chastised, Doc fell to silence and continued to trek out eastward with the other prisoners under the instruction of the dour-faced sec men. Snow littered the ground in sickly little patches like a rash amid the frozen soil, great untouched swathes of white running in a long line where a frozen tributary of the Nome River lay sleeping.

Ricky sidled up to join Ryan and J.B., his head turned against the chill wind. He checked for a moment, making sure none of the sec team was watching before turning to Ryan with a cunning smile on his face. “It’s okay, Ryan,” he whispered. “I have a plan to get us out of here. Just follow my lead.”

Before Ryan could reply, a sec man shouted something at the group and they were forced to thin out again. Ryan didn’t like it. Ricky had only recently joined the group, and was inexperienced. The kid had the arrogance of youth, too, which was fine in its place. But when you had a team to worry about, going off half-cocked could sure as shooting end up with someone chilled. Ryan made certain to find time during their forty-minute march in the bitter temperatures to instruct J.B. and Doc to keep an eye on Ricky. J.B. had been with Ryan right from the start, and Ricky seemed to idolize the man. Putting the two together made a certain amount of sense, at least until they reached their destination.

* * *

H
AD
ANY
MAN
in the group of prisoners had the frame of reference to think it, they might have wondered if they were looking at a Salvador Dali painting brought to startling life. A great basin had been carved into the land, runnels of snow streaking across its surface as it stretched three miles across into the distance. The giant pit had sunk into the earth by at least half a mile, trees and the remains of buildings clinging to its sloped sides like pus on the head of a popped boil.

Beyond the vast indentation in the earth, the air in the distance seemed to shimmer like a mirage, occasional flecks of color running across the dark sky. Ryan wondered if these were the fabled Northern Lights or if they might be something else. So much of Earth’s environment had become scragged by the nuclear exchange that it was often impossible to judge what was going on in the atmosphere anymore.

The thick tail of a missile poked out from the center of the basin, a metal tube painted yellow and black with four fins studded equidistant around its sides. The fins tapered down toward the buried front of the missile, disappearing in a mound of snow and churned-up soil. A radial pattern of cracked earth spread from this epicenter, thick lines of broken soil running outward like cracks on a windshield. And around this, a mining colony had been set up—a great structure of underground tunnels held in place by metal scaffolding and thick wedges of wood, some of them still discernible as the tree trunks they had started life as.

Three sec men waited at the main entrance where it burrowed underground, wrapped in furs with blasters resting on their laps or beside them. They looked up as the group appeared, and one of them shuffled over on wide-soled snowshoes.

“About time you got here,” he said. “We’re freezing our balls off out here.”

“What’s the shift haul?” one of the mounted guards of Ryan’s group asked, leaping down from his mutated steed.

“Not great,” the man in the snowshoes said regretfully. “New seam over here—” he pointed “—but we’re still trying to shore up the walls.”

The dismounted rider jabbed back at the group of prisoners with his thumb. “We’ve got some new muscle. We’ll get to it, see what’s inside,” he boasted.

The man with the snowshoes looked up at that, eyeing the prisoners more carefully for the first time. “Some of these slaves are new?” he asked with a broad smile. “Hearing that almost warms my frozen balls. Maybe we will get a decent haul out of this dump before sundown.”

Overhearing that, J.B. eyed the dark sky with disapproval and leaned over to whisper to Ryan. “You reckon sundown will be any time this week?”

Ryan smiled at the comment despite himself.

The prisoners were walked into the gaping mine shaft and led, under armed guard, through the underground complex. The place was shored up with creaking wooden poles and metal struts, a series of dim gas lamps poised along the low ceiling at steady intervals. The burning lamps made the air stink, but they were too widely spaced to provide good illumination. As such, the line of prisoners-turned-miners had to pick their way slowly along the uneven floor of the mine shaft while the sec men berated them and hurried them along.

Spreading from a single entry point, a number of mine shafts had been dug deep into the earth beneath the sunken basin. As Ryan and his colleagues moved through them, they saw the walls had been shored up with metal plating scavenged from old military vehicles and packaging, the familiar olive-green paint scuffed almost to oblivion, but still visible to the trained eye. J.B. noted a fragment of stencilled lettering similar to that he had spotted on their arrival at the redoubt the night before. He had to tilt his head to read it, but when he did so he laughed. Upside down, the stencil read This Way Up.

After a couple of minutes walk through the underground passageway, they reached a fork and the prisoners were split into two groups. Ryan and Doc found themselves among the group following a wide pathway leading to the right of the underground development while J.B. was tossed in with a group of twelve prisoners that included Ricky and Jak. He hurried to join them, but one of the guards pulled him back.

“What’s the rush, speedy monkey?” the man taunted. “You’ll get where you’re going, just have some patience.”

It rapidly became evident to J.B. that the mines had been burrowed into an existing military complex, and he suspected that it had already been underground before the subsidence resulting from the missile attack. Some of the original corridors still existed among them shored-up mine shafts like ghosts of another era.

The group was split again shortly thereafter, leaving two groups of six captives, each group guarded by a lone sec man. Their guard was armed with a compact pistol that he displayed proudly in his belt, trusting he needed nothing else to keep them in line. He was probably right—most of the captives were worn down from days or weeks in the frozen cells of the ice fortress, and all of them had their wrists loosely bound with cord or metal links that granted enough freedom of movement for them to work but would still hinder them from overpowering their captors.

J.B. eyed the sec man’s blaster, recognizing the weapon from his vast catalog of knowledge as a Colt Anaconda, a vicious six-shot pistol with plenty of punch. If he could get his hands on that then mebbe...

The mismatched party moved on, passing caved-in storerooms that had been stripped bare, the last of their broken contents strewed across the floor or heaped in piles along the walls. The only reason to come down here was to find weaponry, J.B. knew, and it looked like these ice pirates had been scavenging this site for years. No wonder that just about everyone in the ice ville had been armed to the teeth. They had the twenty-first-century equivalent of a munitions factory here, a fully stocked museum of death that they could raid at any time.

Little wonder then that they were top dog in the local territory—who would stand a chance against a heavily armed ville?

* * *

R
YAN
AND
D
OC
meanwhile had been placed with a larger group of prisoners. Within a few minutes, however, the prisoners had been split into smaller groups and, accompanied by one sec man per group, were led into different sections of the underground complex. Ryan made sure to stay near Doc. It wouldn’t do for them to become any more split up than they already were.

A five-minute walk brought them to a hollowed-out chamber whose low, curved ceiling echoed their footsteps. Six people were in the group now, including Ryan and Doc, along with a sec man dressed in thick furs and armed with a Kalashnikov longblaster and a Smith & Wesson he had rammed into his waistband beneath the furs.

“Now you work,” the sec man spit. “Find ammunition, yes?”

One of the other prisoners spoke up and Ryan recognized him as part of the group that had been picked up along with his team outside the redoubt the night before. Despite the cold, the man was sweating profusely, his eyes wide with distress. “H-how much?” he stuttered. “How much do you expect us to find?”

Ryan looked around the vast chamber, assessing their surroundings. The man had a point. Even in the dim light of the wide-spaced lamps, it was clear that this storage area had been plumbed almost dry. The overall effect was more like a dump now than a military warehouse. There were stacks of crates and all of them had been broken open and emptied, many so carelessly that they were now little more than firewood. The floor was uneven with debris strewed everywhere, including ragged clothes and a mound of electronics—circuit boards and wiring whose copper lines glinted as they caught the illumination of the nearest gas lamp.