Authors: James Axler
A person of unidentifiable sex and age, swaddled in many layers of cast-off, filth-blackened clothing, smelling pungently of his or her own bodily waste, pushed a shopping cart packed with assorted reclaimed rubbishâdiscarded toilet seat, lengths of rusty pipe, stacks of cardboard, rags, bottles, unmated shoesâinto Doc's headlong path down the alley.
Whether the lunge was meant to simply attract his attention or to cause him some kind of injury, he reacted without breaking stride, long legs nimbly sidestepping the front of the cart. As he did so, his silver-handled sword stick hissed through the air and cracked the cart pusher a modest blow across the right cheek.
As if he was flicking a fly out of midair.
“Bas-tid! You bas-tid!” the him or her shouted in outrage.
Doc kept running. The complaint barely registered over the cooing, achingly familiar, female voice in his head.
“Theo, Theo...”
As he sprinted alongside the companions, fragments of his past were coming at him like a hail of rifle bullets, zinging into the front of his head and out the back. A razor-sharp jumble of agonizing been-there, done-that's, memories that spanned the two-hundred-plus years of his unique existence: walking the grounds of Christ Church College with his Oxford dons in the late 1880s; picnicking with his family in Omaha on the Fourth of July, 1896; being trawled against his will to an underground prison in the late-twentieth century, then being cast forward in time beyond the coming Armageddon to Deathlands, and there, further degraded, forced to service hogs for the amusement of Baron Teague's head sec man, Cort Strasser.
He had a bit of a memory of later, chilling stickies by the dozens, as they hung in mating chains on the side of a ruined, predark highway overpass, until all he could smell was burned cordite and aerosolized blood.
And then there was the present existence.
His experiences in late-nineteenth-century London, England, and various cities of the United States hadn't prepared him for Manhattan in 2001. He had usually been kept sequestered in ultrasecret redoubts after being trawled to the 1990s. Though he had access to printed and digital media during that confinement, he never had been directly exposed to the realities of civilization in the twenty-first century. The surrounding noise, the wags, the smells, the tall buildings, the sea of pavement, all the people, added up to a full-sensory scour that grated his every nerve end raw.
“Theo, Theo...”
His dear wife Emily's voice vibrated softly inside his head. It was the voice of a ghost. She had died two centuries before, as had his beloved children, Rachel and Joylon. He knew it wasn't real, but he couldn't make it stop. He had traveled through time on three occasions now. A human body could endure only so much of it, he thought. He knew that the shock of transit did fundamental damage to the workings of the human mind. He had succumbed to insanity's embrace many times in the past, but of late, he had remained fairly lucid. Perhaps this occasion was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
For an instant, the black pit of insanity seemed to yawn before him, obliterating his awareness of present and past. As if they belonged to someone else, his legs kept driving.
No, not now, he told himself. Not here.
Not with the entire twenty-first-century New York police force and the full weight of calamitous history lined up against them.
For the sake of your companions, gather your wits, man! Doc urged.
To the steady beat of boot soles on pavement, he started singing a tune under his breath. It had been popular in Omaha, the year he was stolen from the embrace of his family.
“When you hear a dem bells...”
He couldn't help but crack a smile when he got to the chorus of the old minstrel song, “There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.” It was ironic, if a bit premature. The “hot time” in questionâat one hundred million degrees, ten thousand times hotter than the sunâwas still roughly a day away. And it was not going to be a party anyone returned home from.
In a single, blinding instant, everyone and everything around him was going to be deconstructed, erased from existence. He had no loved ones of his own left alive to contact, to warn, to say goodbye to. None of the companions did, except for Mildred. This was, after all, the time period in which she had been born and lived. He wondered if she would try to touch base with relatives. No, they thought she was in suspended animation in a cryo tank.
Maybe she still was?
That possibility gave Doc pause. Was a version of Mildred on ice, even as the Mildred he knew kept pace beside him, beaded plaits of hair bouncing in rhythm to her footfalls?
Time travel was a riddle wrapped in raw bacon. After you had turned it over and over in your mind, examined it from all sides, just when you thought you had it figured out, it slipped from your grasp.
They ran and ran, stopping only when they had to come out of an alley to cross a wide street. The scale of the city as seen from ground level was dauntingâseemingly endless blocks of towering buildings jammed side by side.
Head lowered, panting hard, Doc waited with the others at an alley mouth while a daisy chain of police cruisers roared by, roof lights flashing. After letting the wags pass, they hurried to the opposite side of the street, then continued down the alley.
After another 150 feet, Vee signaled for a stop. “This is my work building,” she said.
The bottom floor had no walls, as such. Behind heavy wire, steel bars and an electronic gate, many shiny wags sat parked in painted, numbered spaces on an immense pad of polished concrete.
Vee stepped up to the keypad beside the gate and punched in a code. Something clanked and then the gate smoothly rolled back.
“There are motion-detector video cameras in the parking lot and elevator,” she said. “They're connected to the building-security desk in the lobby. Keep your heads down and guns well out of sight. There's an audio mike in the elevator, too, so it'd be best to keep quiet.”
Doc buttoned up his frock coat so the LeMat buckled on his hip wouldn't show.
There was a second keypad next to the elevator. Again, Vee entered the correct code. The doors slid open and everyone piled in. Then she hit the button for the twenty-second floor.
When the car stopped, they stepped out onto a plush, dark red-carpeted hall, on the far side of which was a wall of glass that looked out onto the street. It was almost dark, the opposing sides of the man-made canyon dotted with tiny rectangles of light. So many cubby holes stacked one on top of the other and edge to edge. Moving closer to the glass, Doc got a bit of a bird's-eye view of traffic on the wide avenue below. Because of the effective soundproof construction, he couldn't hear the noise it made.
The name of the publishing company was emblazoned across the wall behind him in foot-high, stainless-steel letters.
The others lined up in front of a water tank, taking turns at the tap. The paper cups it provided were ridiculously small. He was so thirsty.
Hungry, too. Light-headed.
Doc cleared his throat to get Vee's attention, then nodded at the food and drink behind the heavy glass of massive machines farther along the wall. “We could use some sustenance, as well,” he said.
“I don't have any money,” she confessed. “I didn't think to bring a purse to a gunfight.” After a second's pause she said, “The world is really going to end? You're sure about that?”
“Touch my hair,” Krysty said.
“Why?”
“Just touch it.”
Vee raised her hand and reached out with her fingertips. Before she could make contact, the hair on that side of Krysty's head retracted, winding up in tight coils. She jerked back. “It's alive! My God, it's alive!”
“That's the legacy of what is about to happen here,” Krysty said. “I was born a century after the nukecaust.”
Without another word, Vee took a red fire ax from its glass case on the wall and, bracing her legs, applied it liberally to the fronts of the machines. Plastic bags and bottles and aluminum cans cascaded to the floor among a shower of bright fragments.
“Help yourselves,” she said. Then she turned to Ricky and said, “But why don't you go wash up first? The restroom is through that door.”
“Rest room?” Ricky queried.
“A place where you can find water and paper towels,” Vee explained.
“Yeah, kid,” J.B. said, “you're going to put us off our feed. Go rinse the dried puke off your face.”
Ricky was blushing as he pushed through the door.
When Mildred shot J.B. a disgusted look, he said, “What? He needed to clean up, didn't he?”
“He isn't the only one, pal,” Mildred stated.
They each gathered up handfuls of bags and drinks, then Vee led them to a large room with a long table surrounded by well-padded chairs on wheels. One wall was plate glass, floor to ceiling; the other three were covered with framed, poster-size blowups of book covers and smaller portraits, presumably photos of the books' authors.
Doc spread out the bounty on the table in front of him. He had only a rough idea of what was inside each package. Salty or sweet, or both, he didn't really care. He started ripping open the plastic and stuffing the contents in his mouth.
Krysty pointed at a photo on the wall and said, “Ryan, isn't that...?”
Doc turned to look. The book in question was from the Slaughter Realms series, entitled
Iroquois Armageddon
. Beside it was a photo of a man smiling smarmily; it was someone he recognized.
Daniel Desipio.
The very same Fire Talker who'd nearly got them chilled by the Matachìn pirates. Not a time traveler, per se, he had been put in cryostasis to protect the world's population from the genetically modified, viral poison that lurked in his blood. A century later, the Lords of Death had thawed him out to serve as their weapon of war. Going from ville to ville, telling campfire stories to earn his keep, Desipioâwith the help of local mosquitosâspread the deadly plague.
“How could you possibly know
him
?” Vee said. “The slimy little weasel disappeared a couple of years ago, took his multiple-book advances and vanished off the face of the earth. The publisher keeps his photo up there to remind us that writers can't be trusted.”
“We don't know him,” Ryan said flatly.
“But we did happen across some of his novels in the future,” Doc continued, even though Ryan's expression said “Shut the fuck up.” In Doc's opinion there was no harm in a diversion from the current, dire situationâa brief respite would afford them the opportunity to regroup mentally. Besides, he wanted a better picture of how Vee's mind worked.
“A century after nuclear war, the books still exist?” she asked.
“It turns out their construction and materials are very resilient,” Doc said. “The books resist burning. Starting a campfire with torn-out pages is an exercise in futility. The paper smolders and blackens and gives off a good deal of dark smoke but that's about it. I found the main characters in the stories very imaginative. Iroquois Ninja Princess. Ragnar the Viking. Nav Licim, the goggle-eyed leader of the Celery people. How did the author come up with all that extraordinary detail?”
“He didn't,” Vee said. “It was handed to him by our in-house team. We call it work for hire. The company owns the intellectual rights.”
Doc looked from one garish book cover to the next. Some of the genres hadn't existed in his day. What on earth was a
Clanker
?
“I'm curious,” Vee said. “How did you all manage to get here if the world in your time is destroyed?”
“Technological remnants of this time that were protected from nukeday's EM blast are still functional,” Mildred told her. “Some are so top secret very few people in your day knew of their existence. In the future, no one knows how to repair these systems. Replacement parts are nonexistent, and their operation is pure guesswork.”
“We were chasing Magus and his enforcers,” Ryan said. “We didn't realize we were stepping into what turned out to be a time hole.”
“It was an accident,” Doc added.
“Which one is Magus?” Vee asked.
“The little spindly one,” Krysty said.
“Why were you chasing him?”
“Actually,” Doc said, “Magus is more of an
it
than a
him
, my dear. At some point in the past, when it was still a
he
, perhaps certain bodily injuries were sustained. Or it is possible they are an accumulation of smaller insults over the span of a lifetime. Or perhaps parts wore out and had to be replaced. The end result is a creature half metal, half flesh and bone, perhaps with a computer-assisted brain. Whatever human sensibilities it had before this unholy transmogrification, it is entirely devoid of them now.”
“It sounds like the series' character Clanker, only he's entirely steam powered,” Vee said.
“Steel Eyes is real,” Mildred said, “like Hitler or Pol Pot. Only with less of a conscience and all of the continental United States to make nasty in. Not for a political cause. Or a social agenda. Or for economic gain. For fun. Because it amuses.”
“No one stands up to this Magus?”
“That's easier said than done,” Mildred said. “Deathlands has no centralized government. No standing army or police force. Pockets of civilization are organized like a feudal system, where the most ruthless rise to the top and defend their turf with bands of armed sec men. There are no heavy industries, trade is limited. Boundaries between what's known as baronies are loose and always in dispute. The human population is small, widely spaced, and the only communication is by word of mouth. The general chaos makes survivors vulnerable to organized, mobile, systematic mayhem.”
“What is Magus doing here?” Vee asked.
“There have been rumors going around for decades,” Ryan said, “that Magus routinely time travels to before the nukecaust to gather weapons and supplies required for operations in Deathlands. Raw materials that are no longer available. Things that aren't made anymore.”