Читать книгу End Program - James Axler - Страница 13

Chapter Six

“They call this place Progress,” J.B. explained.

Ryan sat with the Armorer in a vast lounge area with panoramic windows that looked out over a ville of towering dwellings and predark factories. Jak, Mildred and Ricky were with them, and they all sat around a low table furnished with drinking glasses. The factories pumped smoke into the air, clouding the skies with trails of gray. Ryan had been given clothes to wear, a dressing gown with a simple tie that he had knotted at his waist. He had been assured that his own clothes would be returned shortly. They were being held in storage after being cleaned.

One of the locals, a young woman with flawless skin and blond hair tied back in a braid, had asked Ryan if he needed anything, and when he told her he was thirsty she hurried away and returned a half minute later with bottle of clear water. The bottle didn’t smell of pollutants or of poison, so Ryan sipped at its contents warily as he took in everything J.B. was telling him. The blonde stood on the far side of the room, ostensibly admiring the view through the windows but actually keeping an eye on Ryan in case he went on another rampage. Other people from the ville had been sent to deal with the wounded that Ryan had left in his wake.

“Progress,” Ryan repeated, skepticism clear in his tone.

“Stupe name, I guess,” J.B. admitted, “but you get used to it. The ville was built around an old military base—redoubt, mat-trans, the whole enchilada. When we jumped out of that redoubt greenhouse from hell...you remember that?”

Ryan nodded, taking another sip of water.

“When we jumped, we wound up here,” J.B. continued. “We were all pretty beat-up when we arrived—”

“I remember the armaglass wall imploding,” Ryan confirmed.

“Yeah, you got a face-full of that,” J.B. told him regretfully, “and we all got cut up pretty bad. Some of the glass came with us too, and really did a number on us.”

“Where’s Krysty?” Ryan asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” Mildred told him, leaning closer. “Doc too.”

“Well, mebbe a bit more ornery,” J.B. added, “if you want my opinion.”

Mildred shot a look at J.B. “Everyone made it, Ryan,” she said. “We’re all okay. The people here in Progress went above and beyond to patch us up.”

Ryan nodded, reaching up with one hand to feel at the alien eye that had been placed in the empty socket. “So I see,” he said, the irony of the phrase lost on him. “What is this thing, Mildred? What did they do to me?”

“We’ve been here two weeks, Ryan,” J.B. replied before Mildred could speak. “Some of us were badly wounded by the armaglass. We’d all lost a lot of blood.”

“The locals treated us,” Mildred stated. “They saw the damage to your face, and they plucked out all the debris you’d got showered with. When they saw your missing eye, well, they improvised.”

“So, I can see again?” Ryan asked. He knew that he could, but he wanted to know how.

“The locals will explain it to you more fully,” Mildred told him, “but basically they’ve fused a computerized camera to your optic nerve, allowing you to use both eyes once more.”

“It has crosshairs,” Ryan said, glancing across the room to where the blonde stood. Jak was watching her too, he noticed; as usual, the albino was alert, suspicious of anyone he didn’t know.

“Your new eye has a lot of things,” Mildred replied. “From what they told me, that’s a pretty serious piece of hardware they’ve put inside your skull.”

“And they did this for nothing?” Ryan asked, knowing that everything had a price. He gazed out the window behind Mildred, focusing his vision, changing the depth. The artificial eye responded seamlessly, and when he drew a close bead on something in the distance those faint crosshairs reappeared over his left field of vision.

“As far as we can tell,” Mildred replied. “They have a philosophy here in Progress about changing the world and making things better again. They want to fix the mess that the nukecaust left us. They want to repair the Deathlands so people can live here and prosper.”

Ryan looked at Mildred, then turned to J.B. before addressing them both. “Where is this place?” he asked.

“California,” J.B. answered. “Some part of it that survived the San Andreas problem.”

Ryan looked out at the blue sky, wondering what they had walked into this time; wondering if they could survive in a place where survival didn’t seem to be a struggle.

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER THAT, two of the locals joined Ryan’s group in the lounge, carrying his clothes—repaired and freshly laundered—as well as his combat boots and his familiar weapons.

The locals were a man and a woman, the man was quite young while the woman looked to be approaching middle age, slivers of iron gray in her hair, wrinkles clawed around her eyes. They seemed pleasant enough, albeit subservient in their attitude. They reminded Ryan of his childhood, growing up as a baron’s son in Front Royal, where his every need was attended to by servants.

Ryan began to disrobe there in the lounge, but the woman held her hand up before her and suggested he follow her to a separate room, where he might dress in privacy. He followed her out of the lounge, into a white-walled hallway to a door. It slid aside at the woman’s touch, and Ryan looked at her confused.

“How’d you do that?” he asked.

The woman held up her left hand, and Ryan noticed the unobtrusive band of silver she wore on her middle finger like a wedding ring. “The doors are programmed to respond to this,” she said.

Ryan nodded, not really sure what to say. He had seen technology before; of course he had—the redoubts he and his companions used to travel the secret roads of the Deathlands were graced with working technology that dated back over a hundred years, and seemed far in advance of anything humankind was capable of these day. He had also fought with mechanical devices before now, robotic things that walked like norms but chilled with the coldheartedness of machines. Even so, this was new—this ville with its hidden locks and uncluttered, almost sterile environment.

The room’s walls were painted white like the other parts of the complex that he had seen, with illumination gradually manifesting from a low dimness. The room had a small window at one end, and it featured a single bed, walk-in wardrobe and a small basin for washing.

“Let me know if you need anything,” the woman told him as she placed his weapons on the bed. “I’ll be just outside. My name’s Roma, by the way.”

“Good to meet you, Roma-by-the-way,” Ryan said with a self-deprecating smile.

Roma left and the door to the room sealed behind her. Alone, Ryan paced, deep in thought. There was a mirror located on the wall beside the basin, set at a height to shave by, and when Ryan paused before it a hidden light tucked into a fold in the mirror’s frame glowed brighter, lighting his face for the reflection. He looked at himself, assessing his appearance as if for the first time. Black curly hair, a little disheveled where he had been sleeping in the coffin-drawer. Chin, clean shaved for the first time in weeks.

Eyes—two.

The right one was an intense shade of blue, the left a little duller perhaps, but a close enough match. He looked at it in the mirror, the way it rested in his socket as if it had been there forever. As he looked, staring more and more intensely at the workmanship that had gone into that artificial orb, the crosshairs reappeared over his vision, like a faint blurring in the air, forming a central point that had been left open to view.

As Ryan continued looking, the vision in his left eye magnified—x2, x5, x10—running through the magnifications in rapid succession, so quick it made him feel nauseous. Ryan’s right eye, his real eye, remained at normal focus, unable to magnify, leaving him with the disorienting double image of distant and close-up at the same time.

He closed his eyes, brought his hands up to his face, breathing fast.

“What did they do to me?” Ryan muttered, trying to keep from being sick.

Behind him, there came a light tapping at the door followed by Roma’s voice. “Mr. Cawdor, are you decent?”

“Decent?” Ryan asked the air.

“Are you dressed? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Raising his head tentatively, Ryan opened his eyes and reached for the SIG Sauer blaster that rested on the bedcover beside his piled clothes. “Yeah, I’m decent,” he said, flipping off the safety.

The door slid back on near-silent runners and Krysty stepped into the room, while Roma waited obediently outside. Krysty looked beautiful—more beautiful than Ryan had remembered, he would swear. Her vivid red hair swirled around her pale face like a flame, her eyes the green of sunlight through emerald. She was dressed in a version of her usual clothes—blouse, jeans—but they were white. Only her familiar blue cowboy boots remained as Ryan remembered, and even they had been reheeled and polished to remove the scuffs from walking thousands miles of the Deathlands. The boots looked almost new. Ryan held his breath as he saw her, his heart pounding.

“Ryan, I’m so happy to finally see you!” Krysty ran the last few steps and flew into Ryan’s arms, hugging him fiercely. She pressed her face into his neck, as if she could not get close enough. “You’re okay,” she sobbed, “you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” Ryan assured her, stroking her red hair with his free hand. She smelled of soap and cleanser, fresh like mountain air.

With his other hand, Ryan slipped the safety back on the SIG Sauer and dropped the blaster back onto the bed before bringing his arm back around to hold Krysty to him. “I’m all right,” he told her again. “What about you? Are you okay?”

Krysty nodded her reply; Ryan felt the movement against his neck.

“What did I miss?” Ryan asked, his eyes locked on the door to the room to check it had closed, and that they were alone.

“Two weeks,” Krysty said, the words coming out like a sigh. “You were two weeks in that bath, Ryan—”

“Bath?” Ryan asked, confused.

“Nutrient bath,” Krysty said, pulling herself reluctantly from Ryan’s strong arms. “When we got here, you’d been hit by the imploding wall of the mat-trans—did they tell you that?”

“J.B. and Mildred said something about it,” Ryan confirmed, reaching for his pants. They had been freshly laundered and smelled—well, they smelled clean, which was nothing short of remarkable, considering how long he’d been wearing these particular duds.

“You were badly injured,” Krysty explained. “We all were. A great chunk of that glass had jumped with us when the mat-trans activated, and we brought it with us in the jump. When we materialized, the glass was still moving. You got the worst of it, but Doc and Jak got a couple of nasty cuts too.”

“And you?” Ryan prompted.

Krysty shook her head. “A few cuts and grazes,” she said, pushing her right sleeve up and showing him the skin there. It was unmarked. “Had a few scabs here a week ago, but they’ve healed.”

“Sore?”

“No.”

Ryan nodded, slipping out of the dressing gown and reaching for his shirt. As he did, Krysty pressed her hand against his chest, running her fingers through his chest hair.

“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

Ryan was a pragmatist. He desired Krysty in that moment, but he wanted to stay alive too. He knew that staying alive sometimes meant foregoing the things he wanted. Right now, he needed to know all the facts, before someone put a bullet in the back of his head or dumped him back in that coffin where he had woken up.

“You said about a nutrient bath,” Ryan said thoughtfully, pushing Krysty gently away.

“After you were hit by the glass, you fell unconscious,” Krysty said, picking up her story. “You’d lost a lot of blood—were still losing it. We were all in a mess.”

“What happened?”

“Someone outside the chamber somehow opened the mat-trans door. Doc figured they did it with a comp,” Krysty said. “It was the people here, a team of them, and they came to help us. They took us away, nursed everyone’s injuries. Mildred said they did a commendable job.”

“What about me?” Ryan pressed.

“You’d suffered the worst of us,” Krysty told him, and he saw worry in her face as she thought back. “There was a whole pool of your blood on the mat-trans floor. They took you away on a gurney, rushed you over to their medical center—”

“And you let them?” Ryan bit off the rest of his comment. It wasn’t an accusation or criticism; he was merely surprised to hear his companions would have been so trusting.

“Like I said, we were pretty messed up after the jump,” Krysty explained. “J.B. questioned them, tried to stop them, I think, but none of us was in a state to put up much of a fight. We didn’t need to, thank goodness.

“They took care of you, lover. They took you straight to surgery and removed the glass, then they started patching you up. They have advanced techniques here—that’s according to Mildred. She understands more about it than I do. She says they used nanobots to repair your body, dunked you in a nutrient bath full of them to give you time to recover.”

“How long?” Ryan asked.

“Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.

“Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him. “They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile state.”

Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the eye?” he said.

“I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him. “None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident, I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”

Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.

“It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process it?

“The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

“There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”

Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.

Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall for you all over again right now.”