Devil's Vortex (24 page)

“Krysty!” Ryan shouted desperately. “What the fuck are you doing?”

To his horror he saw her march purposefully downslope.

Directly toward the cloud of complete oblivion.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Terror greater than any she had ever known filled Krysty to the point it felt as if she were about to explode.

She held out her arms to the sides. “Gaia! Earth Mother! Hear my prayer!” she cried. “I beg of you—lend me your strength!” Krysty urgently repeated her plea, and then the power of the Earth Mother flooded her being.

The unstoppable force of Gaia pushed out the fear. It was soothing in a way, yet Krysty also sensed rage smoldering within, as if Gaia knew this was one of the greatest threats the Earth Mother had ever faced.

“Krysty!” Mariah screamed. For the first time she sounded like herself instead of a teenaged Fury. “Get back! I—I’ll chill you last!”

“You won’t chill any of us,” Krysty declared. Her voice boomed with an unfamiliar menace.

But then, it wasn’t really her own voice anymore.

“I won’t stop! I’m warning you!”

The blackness was swirling mere feet ahead of Krysty now. She could feel it. Not hot, not cold. Not even the wind of its violent spinning. But a sense of nothingness. Of
negation
. Not merely nothingness, but...antisomething.

Uncreation.

Without the least hesitation she walked into the black cloud.

It hurt. It felt the way she imagined being burned alive had to hurt. The pain seared her skin, her eyes. It permeated her flesh, her bones. Her being.

And yet—she remained. She was not destroyed. She felt Gaia’s strength, Gaia’s will, opposing the force of uncreation.

She was aware that she slowed. It was like wading through molasses over her head—molasses that still burned like furnace flame. It took all of her strength joined to that of the whole world to continue.

But she did. One foot after another.

She felt her strength began to fail. Her body wasn’t being torn apart—not yet. Nor did the strength of the Earth Mother fade. But she was a frail vessel still—and channeling Gaia drained her energy in a way nothing else did. She felt her physical strength failing.

Another few heartbeats and I will fall. And die. And then my friends will die.

And then the world will die.

I—will—not fall.

And then she broke through. A few feet of air surrounded a startled-looking little girl in a white dress.

“Krysty?” Mariah asked in disbelief.

She stepped up to the girl. Feeble though her own shell was, the righteous strength of Gaia still clung on. It had the strength to crush her. To destroy her. To end the evil she had brought into the world and could continue to bring.

Instead she took Mariah in her arms and hugged the frail form hard against her breasts. She felt the skinny little body begin to tremble uncontrollably.

“Mariah,” she whispered, “I love you.”

And then her strength was gone, and the blackness rushed in to claim her.

* * *

R
YAN
 
STOOD
 
IN
plain view of most of the New Blood Nation. He didn’t care if anyone shot him down.

Not when he had just watched the woman he had loved for years, his life mate, walk right into her inevitable and terrible death.

The black whirlwind vanished.

Mariah stood in the middle of where it had been, just twenty feet downslope.

Impossibly, Krysty was there, too. She was on her knees, slumped against the girl with her arms hanging loose. And Mariah was clinging to her with tears streaming down her face.

“Krysty,” she was sobbing. “I’m so sorry I tried to hurt you.”

Mariah couldn’t support the woman’s deadweight. Krysty’s body slid from her grasp to slump on the soil of the Earth whose strength had somehow carried her through the cloud of annihilation.

Grimly, Ryan raised his longblaster.

“Dark night!” exclaimed J.B., who had joined his old friend to face death with him. “She’s still breathing, Ryan!”

So she was. He had only one eye, but it was eagle keen.

“What’s going on?” he demanded of Mariah. “Why didn’t you chill her?”

“I tried!” the girl wailed. She knelt to cradle Krysty’s head in her arms. “But I couldn’t. Because—in spite of everything—she loves me!”

“What in the name of glowing night shit is going on?” Hammerhand roared.

He wasn’t talking through a loudspeaker now. He’d come up onto the top of the little mesa between his enormous camp and the ridge where his enemies were dug in to watch the fun. A mob of his most loyal warriors surrounded him in a dense human shield. Ryan had no shot at him.

His voice boomed naturally out of that prodigious chest of his to be clearly audible from where he stood. “Why aren’t you chilling them, girl?”

She turned her face to him. “I won’t! You used me to do—to do terrible things! And I’m through doing that!”

“Blast them down!” Hammerhand ordered his warriors. “All of them! Starting with the traitor witch!”

Ryan’s racing heart suddenly seemed to be beating in slow motion. Once. Twice.

And then the whole basin valley seemed to fill with fire flowers. Muzzles flamed from the bottom of the ridge and the mesa.

But the black cloud was suddenly there again, as wide as the ridge. The bullets all vanished without a trace.

The cloud narrowed again. It began to move once more, back down the slope. Mariah walked close behind.

“Shoot it!” Hammerhand shouted. “See if you can blast through it to the girl!”

The New Blood Nation obeyed. Those who didn’t simply turned and ran for their lives.

Hammerhand drew a blaster from his belt and aimed it at the black whirlwind. A line of pink light suddenly appeared between its muzzle and the swirling void.

“Laser blaster,” J.B. said in awe. “Read about them in a couple of predark novels. Didn’t know they were for real!” He sounded impressed in spite of himself.

“Cool,”
Ricky called from the ridgetop.

Ryan had run to Krysty’s side. He barely beat Mildred. As he gathered his lover in his arms, she was checking her pulse and feeling her cheek.

“She’s alive,” Mildred announced. “Not...fine, maybe. But this seems just like the other times she’s passed out after calling on Gaia. She’s come out of it okay all the other times. So she should be okay now.”

Her eyes almost pleaded with Ryan. “I hope?”

“She will,” Ryan said. “She’s too tough to chill.”

He looked back. The cloud was walking its hideous way straight up the mesa now. It spun its funnel of devastation barely a hundred feet from Hammerhand.

“Why?” the Blood chieftain cried. “Why are you doing this, Mariah? I took you in when they pitched you out!”

“They tried to stop me from turning into a monster,” the girl said. She didn’t seem to be shouting, but Ryan heard her plainly just the same. “You took me in
because
I was a monster. And you made me worse.

“So now you die, Hammerhand!”

In disgust he threw down the laser blaster. He did not run. Instead he tore off his fine buckskin shirt and cast it aside. Then he spread his brawny arms wide, threw back his head and began to sing in a language Ryan didn’t understand.

The cloud swept over him. Ryan thought he could see a few shreds of flesh and blood spin by. Then the last of Hammerhand was gone from the world, as completely as if he had never been.

“Singing his death song,” J.B. said. He took off his spectacles and polished them. “Say what you will about him, that’s a
man
who just died right there.”

“I’m just glad he’s dead,” Ryan rasped and lowered Krysty to the ground.

As one the New Blood Nation turned and fled. Ryan couldn’t blame them.

The cloud winked out again. Mariah turned and raced back toward them. Her pale bare legs seemed to twinkle beneath the hem of her doeskin dress.

“Shall I blast her?” J.B. asked.

“No,” Ryan said. “We got nothing to fear from her now.”

“Are you sure?” Doc asked.

The others were all gathered on the ridgetop now, Ryan saw. Even Jak.

“Yes.”

Ryan almost jumped out of his skin. “Krysty!” he said. “Don’t even talk.”

“I saw it, you know,” she told them, struggling to lean up on one arm. “I was floating above the world. But through the kindness of Gaia I came back. I’m so tired.”

Mariah ran up to them and tried to throw her arms around both her and Ryan.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “You were right, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mariah,” Krysty said. “I won’t leave you now.”

And then Ryan heard Ricky yell, “
¡Nuestra Señora!
It’s
them
again!”

* * *

L
IKE
 
EVERYBODY
 
ELSE
, Ryan looked where the boy pointed.

A giant mirror, easily a dozen feet top to bottom by ten wide, had appeared in thin air beside the ridgetop.

It cleared to what seemed to be a window to another world: a dark unnatural womb lit by screens and blinking, multicolored lights.

“It is time to end this farce,” the bald male whitecoat said. He stretched out a clawlike hand. “Come with us now, Mariah.”

She turned to face them, holding her fists clenched by her sides.

“I won’t,” she screamed. “I never will.”

“You have no choice, child,” the female whitecoat said.

“If you refuse,” the gaunt man said, “we promise we will hunt your friends down and destroy them. Whatever it takes, and then we’ll collect you.”

“You have to sleep sometime,” the woman stated. “So come with us now, Mariah.”

She smiled. At least, Ryan reckoned, she thought that was what she was doing. It looked more like the expression you’d see on the face of a chill who had not died easily.

“We don’t care what you do to us,” Krysty said. She battled to her feet. “We’re not letting her go with you! She stays with us.”

“Yeah,” Ryan added. To his surprise, he meant it.

“No.”

He started down at the girl.

“Mariah, what are you saying?” Krysty asked.

The girl looked at the portal that hung in the air. “I’ll go with you if you promise to leave my friends alone.”

The whitecoats glanced at each other. “Oh, we do,” the gaunt man told her. “We have run the projections. They are of little or no consequence in this timeline.”

“Come with us, Mariah,” the woman said.

Mariah stepped forward. “I’m ready.”

“Wonderful!” the whitecoat said. “Shaughnessy, lower the Aperture to the ground so that our new subject—I mean, our new guest—can cross over.”

“Yes, Dr. Sandler.”

“Ryan,” Krysty said. She swayed. He caught her around the shoulders and held her as if he’d never let her go. “We have to do something!”

He shook his head. “Her choice.”

The strange portal touched the ground a few feet downslope from them.

The woman held open her arms in a ghastly parody of maternal welcome. “Mariah, come to us!”

Mariah walked forward through the gateway.

She stepped into the other world, then she turned to face her friends.

“Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”

“Goodbye is right,” Dr. Sandler told them. “Major Applewhite, destroy these genetic culls.”

“No,” Mariah said. “You won’t.”

Suddenly it was around her: the black cloud, swirling. The tall black-armored man who had stepped up at the whitecoat’s command screamed horribly as he was sucked in.

“No!” the female whitecoat shrieked. “You can’t do this! Baronial America will be delayed or canceled completely on this timeline! All the work we’ve—”

Her words ended in a crescendo of wordless agony.

The cloud began to expand. Techs screamed as it devoured them. Electricity sparked from violated panels.

“You little fool!” Sandler howled. “This is a sealed environment! You don’t know...what are you—!” Sandler shrieked in horror.

Mariah turned. “Goodbye,” she said again. “I love you. Think happy thoughts of me.”

There was an explosion of white light. The portal winked out.

“Well,” J.B. said, “that’s something you don’t see every day.”

Krysty slumped to the ground. Ryan only just caught her in time to stop her shoulders and head from hitting the ground.

Somehow she rallied to lift her head.

“Farewell,” she called to the sky where the strange gateway had been. “And thank you for all you’ve done for us. And wherever you are, keep believing, and mebbe we’ll be together again someday!”

The redhead looked back at her lover.

“Ryan,” she breathed, “for the first time, I have—
hope
.”

Krysty slumped. She was well and truly out cold now.

“Bloods’re running,” Ricky reported.

Ryan glanced up and saw that it was true. The basin had all but emptied of visible humanity.

“Ace on the line,” he said. He squatted and gathered Krysty’s limp form in his arms. Then he stood.

“Let’s get out of this place,” he growled.

And so they did.

* * * * *