Читать книгу Crimson Waters - James Axler - Страница 8

Chapter One

“Smoke!”

The cry penetrated the fog of ache and confusion that enveloped Ryan Cawdor’s brain and body.

“Need go! Now!”

Jak Lauren. He recognized the albino youth’s voice.

Also his urgency. Jak said little, even less than J. B. Dix, the group’s armorer. When he did speak, it was even more to the point.

Ryan made himself sit up. He wobbled. His head spun like a gyroscope. The mat-trans unit swirled with the usual jump mists, but the stench of ozone and burning insulation was cutting through the physical haze as well as that in his brain now. It made his eye water and his stomach feel even worse.

Jump sickness, he thought. The jump had been a rough one. Jumping outside normal space via mat-trans gateway was always a wrenchingly disorienting experience, but it seldom hit him as hard as this one had.

Someone tugged his arm. By sheer iron will he forced himself to move, despite the pain and nausea. He lurched unsteadily to his feet.

Another hand clutched the back of his coat. Before he could get his balance, he felt himself being towed forward. He had to speed-stagger to keep from falling on his face on the hard floor.

He tried to fight off his assistant. “Krysty!” he cried.

His voice came out a croak. Dense brown smoke watered his eye and scorched down his throat like lye.

“I’m fine, Ryan!” he heard her call. Her hoarseness didn’t encourage him to believe she was exactly telling the truth.

But the fact that she was awake and aware enough to respond reassured him. He put a hand down briefly to keep from collapsing despite what he was pretty sure was the wiry strength of Jak—a young man half his size—holding him up. Then he banged his left shoulder on the frame of the six-sided chamber’s door and was out.

At once the air cleared. He fell to his knees, coughing hard enough to bring up a lung. Jak let him go.

When the hacking fit passed he shook his head to clear it, then raised it to look around.

They were in the gateway’s antechamber. A few feet away his redheaded mate, Krysty Wroth, stood with one arm around the shoulders of Mildred Wyeth, helping her keep her feet.

Mildred was a black woman in her late thirties, with hair worn in beaded plaits. She was stocky, but after a few years of hiking across the Deathlands very little of that was fat. Despite Mildred’s weight, Krysty didn’t have much trouble holding her up. Mildred was also a freezie from predark.

Ryan became aware of Jak hovering at his side nervously. “Thanks,” he said to the youth, whose white hair had fallen forward to almost obscure his face. “I’m fit to fight. Help the others.”

“At last you rejoin us, my dear Ryan,” a deep voice said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Dr. Theophilus Tanner stood by a darkened bank of camp consoles, looking dapper, and surprisingly hale for a man who normally looked as if he were on his last leg after a jump. A tall stork of a man with silver-white hair hanging down to the collar of his old-time frock coat, he carried a black swordstick with a silver lion’s head.

His head still feeling as if it might go spinning off his shoulders at any moment, Ryan looked back at the mat-trans. The walls of the chamber were made of armaglass tinted a dull, nasty-looking mustard color. Smoke of a similar but darker hue still snaked out into the antechamber of the redoubt that housed the mat-trans.

“Not good,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

“What do we have here?” Doc asked.

“Looks like a map,” J.B. said. He was a little banty rooster of a man, in a battered, dusty bomber jacket, steel-framed specs and a fedora. In addition to being the group’s armorer and general gadget master, he was also Ryan Cawdor’s oldest and best friend.

It was a map, Ryan saw. Or at least part of one, anyway, hung on a sheet of particle board that showed a mess of holes. Some were small and precisely round. Others were more irregular.

“Somebody blasted the map for some reason,” J.B. said. “Bullets ricocheted off the wall behind. They tumbled and deformed. That’s why the funny holes.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the map they were shooting at,” Mildred said. “Maybe there was somebody standing in front of it at the time.”

J.B. shrugged. “Triple-stupe idea, either way. The ricochets were as like to chill the shooters as whoever they were shooting at.”

“From the scrap of map,” Doc said, reaching up to almost touch the faded colors of the paper with the tip of a finger, “we would appear to be here, in the Leeward Islands—the northern segment of the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean.”

“How you reckon that, Doc?” Mildred asked.

“Behold the symbol here,” he said. “An ocher hexagon. Does that suggest anything to you?”

He smiled, his winter-pale blue eyes dancing, and nodded toward the gateway.

Ryan stepped close. “So mebbe this one in the mountains is another mat-trans gateway?” he asked.

“It would certainly appear so. If that is indeed the case, my dear Ryan, then it would seem to be located on the island of Puerto Rico.”

He frowned. “Curiously, the mat-trans in San Juan we jumped to once upon a time isn’t shown. Perhaps it postdates this facility and the map was never updated.”

Ryan shrugged, uninterested. Knowing, not knowing—wouldn’t feed him, either way.

“So where are we now?” Krysty asked. She smoothed back her hair from her flawless face.

Doc shook his head. “Alas, dear lady, that I cannot say. The geography of the region was never of more than passing interest to me.”

“Well, let’s get rolling, people,” Ryan said. “Finding some kind of supplies in this rad-blasted redoubt is of more than passing interest to me.”

* * *

“WHAT COULD DO?” Jak asked.

A quick search had showed the redoubt’s stores were well looted, so empty they might never have been stocked in the first place. But that wasn’t what had them all standing and staring openmouthed in awe and surprise.

The albino youth asked a good question, Ryan judged. The walls of a redoubt could shrug off blaster bullets like spit, and it would take a powerful blaster to seriously scratch them.

The corridor ahead of them was pinched shut, like an old length of hose with a swag-bellied sec man standing on it.

“Seismic activity, at a guess, dear boy,” Doc said.

“Talk plain, Doc!” Jak admonished.

“Earthquakes,” J.B. said.

“I thought most of the really massive quakes happened along the Pacific Rim,” Mildred said.

“The West Indies and Central America have been traditional hotbeds of such upheaval,” Doc said, used to Jak’s outbursts.

While he could sit stone still for hours on guard or on a hunt, Jak wasn’t known for patience where his fellow humans were concerned, particularly the time-trawled professor. Still, Ryan eyed the old man closely. He also had a habit of drifting in and out of reality.

Mildred grunted. “Oh. That’s right. I remember back in the early twentieth century there was a terrible eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. Mount Pelée, the volcano was called. Wiped out the city of Saint-Pierre the way Vesuvius did Pompeii.”

“On the island of Martinique, then,” Doc said. “That would lie south and perhaps somewhat east of here, if my reading of that map fragment was correct.”

J.B. rubbed the back of his neck. “We sure got bellies full of eruptions when we were in Mex Land,” he remarked.

“Gaia is restless here,” Krysty said, frowning. Her emerald-green eyes were pointed at the crushed corridor, but Ryan saw they were focused on nothing in particular.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find a way out of here.”

“Find food,” Jak said. “Hungry.”

“How can you even think of food?” Mildred demanded. “My stomach’s still doing slow rolls from that damned jump.”

J.B. squinted critically into the dark depths of his upended canteen. “I wouldn’t sweat the grub, Jak,” he said. “The water’s about gone. Dehydration’ll chill us before hunger gets a proper start gnawing our vitals.”

“So,” Ryan said. “Out.”

“I hope the doors aren’t blocked by the same forces that did this,” Mildred said. “Whatever they were.”

Jak shook his head. “Open. Air fresh.”

Mildred eyed him. “You sure about that, Jak?”

“Power’s still on,” J.B. added. “Or didn’t you notice we’re not stumbling around in darkness blacker than twelve feet up a stubbie’s bowels?”

Jak shook his head irritably. “Air fresh,” he repeated. “Not filtered. Not smell?”

J.B. drew in a deep breath. “Mebbe not,” he said, “compared to you.”

Ryan grunted. “So lead the way,” he said to Jak. “Get us out of here.”

* * *

J.B. SQUINTED THROUGH his minisextant at the sun, which was about halfway up a blue sky free of chem clouds. “You were right about the map,” J.B. said, lowering the device. “We’re in the Caribbean, all right.”

The companions stood on the highest point of the island, which was as bare as a baby’s backside and not a whole lot larger, if not nearly so smooth. In fact, the rock beneath their feet was black, hard and porous—lava. Though it didn’t rise more than forty or fifty feet above the dancing green water that surrounded it, its regular shape unpleasantly suggested that it was the cinder cone of an actual volcano.

The breeze up the west side of the island, off a beach where stretches of white sand alternated with rusty-brown, smelled of salt and decaying sea life.

“What now?” Krysty asked.

“We could try the mat-trans,” Mildred said. “It hasn’t exactly taken us a long time to find out there was nothing but rock and sand on this damn island. Might be able to get back inside the time limit of the LD button.”

The gateways had a feature that allowed a user to return to the originating point by pressing the “last destination” button within half an hour of a jump.

J.B. frowned at his wrist chron. “We’d be crowding it,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not rightly sure I want to trust a malfunking machine.”

“Do you like the idea of dying of thirst here, with water, water everywhere, and not a drop to damn well drink?” Mildred asked.

“Not starve, anyway,” Jak said. “Sea here—food always.”

* * *

MILDRED GLARED AROUND at the others. “Why not try the gateway? We can always jump to a random destination. It got us here, after all.”

J.B. shook his head. “Bad idea, Millie. There’s something wrong with it. I don’t think it’s safe.”

“Safe?” Doc whinnied the word like a laughing horse. Mildred noted the way his blue eyes rolled. He was losing his grip on reality, which was never rock solid to begin with. “Jumping through time and space by such unnatural means is never safe, J.B.! Never safe at all.”

Doc slumped suddenly, his face crumpling like an old newspaper. Mildred knew he was remembering his lost family and life, before he’d been time-trawled away from everything he knew or held dear by the scientists of Operation Chronos.

“We’re not trying the mat-trans,” Ryan said. He wasn’t a man who minced words; while he might consult his friends on decisions, once he spoke in that tone, as flat and hard as slate, it was final. “We’re getting off this nuke-withered rock. Alive.”

Krysty had walked down toward the beach to the northwest. It wasn’t a long trip.

“There are islands off this way,” she said. “Some of them have trees.”

“Might be game,” J.B. added.

“Trees mean fresh water,” Jak said.

“Not necessarily where we can get at it,” Ryan said. “But yeah.”

“This is an area, as our youthful friend so astutely points out, that abounds in edible sea life,” Doc said. He seemed to have snapped back to the present; he tended to do that when confronted with a problem he found interesting, Mildred had noticed. “That suggests humans live here, too.”

“That’s so,” Ryan said. “People go where there’s chow. So we start working our way from island to island. Only question is, how?”

“Nearest island’s a good mile, mile and a half off,” J.B. said. “Anybody feel like a swim?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me, John Barrymore,” Mildred said. The armorer was her lover. “I can’t swim that far. We don’t know what the current’s like, anyway.”

“Sharks,” Jak stated.

“Just joking, Millie,” J.B. said.

“Down here!”

Everybody looked to where Krysty was standing on the beach with her back to the sea. She was waving.

“I think I found a way!”