Chrono Spasm Page 6

  “This is tiring work,” Doc admitted, flashing his oddly perfect teeth to his one-eyed colleague. “But we press on, do we not?” He sounded out of breath.

  Ryan stared past Doc, taking stock of his captors and their weapons. They were a well-armed bunch, dressed for the freezing weather and clearly used to working as a team. They spoke among themselves, employing a mix of Russian and English just as Nyarla had. Ryan tried to piece together what had happened. He guessed that Nyarla had been their captive, probably working in some menial capacity—by her dress he would guess she could be a gaudy slut. But she had been brought along with the hunting party when they had gone questing for food, probably as live bait just like the naked bastard who had been nailed to the ground where Ryan had located Ricky just prior to the ambush. Using live humans for bait in a dead environment like this meant one less mouth to feed when they butchered whatever it was they caught, Ryan realized.

  But Nyarla had said something else as well. She had called the hunters “frozen men” and had said that they had come from Yego Kraski Sada, the fields where time stands still.

  Ryan puzzled over that as he, J.B. and Doc were unlatched from the yoke under the wary surveillance of armed guards. His other companions, along with Nyarla and the three ill-dressed prisoners, were led off toward the glacier. He watched as Krysty, Mildred and Nyarla were led up one ladder, encouraged by the jeers and whistles of two of the patrolling guards who had come to watch. They were splitting off the women, he realized, which inevitably meant trouble.

  “Hey, eyes front,” one of the fur-wrapped men growled as Ryan watched Krysty disappear into one of the high caves, her red hair receding from view in the darkness. “Hey,” the sec man called again. “I’m talking to you, prick. What, are you deaf as well as half-blind?”

  Ryan glared at the man, fixing him with his lone blue eye, his mouth a slash of barely restrained fury. “Where are you taking my friends?” he demanded.

  “None of your business,” the fur-wrapped man replied, leveling his Kalashnikov in unspoken warning. “You wait here.”

  Behind the man, fur-wrapped locals were hauling the carcass of the great wolf from the back of the primitive wag, dragging the creature across the hard-packed soil with the assistance of several of the more burly hunting party. Beside them, two women were dragging the body of one of the hunters’ fallen colleagues across the icy terrain, pulling him by his splayed feet and leaving a bloody smear on the icy ground. Neither woman appeared to be particularly emotional and Ryan watched for a moment, wondering what they would do with the body. Were they going to bury him or was there some other ritual that these brutal ice dwellers would perform on their dead? Ryan wasn’t surprised to see them begin stripping the corpse’s clothes away. Nothing was wasted in the Deathlands, and warm clothes in any environment, especially one as cold as this, would be recycled over and over.

  “Not exactly the meek sort, are they?” J.B. observed as he stood beside Ryan, watching the women remove the corpse’s clothing and personal effects.

  “We’d best be careful,” Ryan said quietly. “Scavies like this are liable to take our boots soon as we take our eyes off them.”

  J.B. nodded his agreement. “You keep close to Doc. Left on his own, he can get a mite too trusting, if you ask me. Remember what happened the last time he was in the frozen north.”

  Ryan silently agreed. Doc was a valuable asset to their group and his marksmanship and ruthlessness in battle were faultless, but he had grown up in another era, over two hundred years before, where trust of one’s fellow man came easily. Even now, after the years he had spent trekking the Deathlands, Doc could let his guard down too quickly, longing to find a glimmer of humanity in this cruel new world. Old habits died hard, it seemed.

  While Ryan and J.B. watched, the two women were joined by a man wrapped in furs and carrying a long shaft of wood. Ryan guessed that the shaft had begun life as a tree trunk—it was roughly six feet long and three inches in diameter, with its bark stripped away and one end sharpened to a vicious point. The man dropped the pole, leaving it on the snow with the women as they stripped the last of their dead colleague’s clothes from his pale body, which was already turning blue, the flesh puffy with cold. In a hotter climate, it didn’t take long for a corpse to decompose, Ryan knew. But out here, decomposition could take months or more to set in; corpses could remain almost unsullied for a whole season until the frost started to thaw.

  Ryan watched in grim silence as the women placed the dead man on the spit, emotionlessly driving it through his anus and up into the cavity of his bowels. The shaft was shoved with some force, a grim explosion of blood leaking down the dead man’s bare legs as one woman worked the wooden pole into his sprawled body, tapping its blunt end with a wooden hammer while the other guided it into the cavity of the corpse’s back passage.

  Satisfied, the man strode away, clomping past Ryan in his heavy fur boots. The man noticed the one-eyed stranger watching, and he snarled something in his guttural tongue in Ryan’s face before laughing. Ryan didn’t understand the words but he recognized the language—Russian, like his old enemy Major Zimyanin.

  The man passed then, grasping the hand of one of the sec men and laughing once more. Ryan watched them, his eye narrowed. The sec man saw Ryan watching and he laughed. “Curious, are you?” he asked in heavily accented English. “Be thankful it ain’t you, my friend. But that day will come, too, you can bet your good eye on that.”

  * * *

  JAK, RICKY AND THE three nameless prisoners were marched to another ladder that led to a clutch of caves across from where their female companions had been taken. Made of splintering wood, the ladder reached all the way to the top of the glacier, halting at the uppermost cave entrance where a sec man stood swinging an iron chain around and around.

  One of the hunters, dressed in rags with a pair of night-vision goggles pushed up onto the top of his hood, shoved Jak toward the ladder. “You climb, white man,” he said in a thick accent before turning to the next man, one of the disheveled-looking captives. “Once he’s up to your head, you follow. And you,” he said, jabbing at the remaining men with a gloved finger, “do the same once the man in front of you is at that height. Keep the line moving, no stragglers.” The man held a blaster in one hand and had a knife strapped in a leather holster close to his left buttock. He used the former to make it clear that he would shoot anyone who didn’t follow his commands.

  At the rear of the group, Ricky glared at their guard, his teeth chattering in the wind.

  “You have a problem, youngster?” the man growled, bringing his face up close to Ricky’s.

  “Only your breath,” Ricky replied. “It smells of goat dick.”

  The man’s face turned red with anger, and he balled his empty hand into a fist, knocking Ricky hard in the stomach and causing the handsome, dark-haired teen to double over with a gasp of expelled breath. Ricky staggered forward for a moment, slumping against the man with a groan of pain, holding his gut.

  In response the sec man simply laughed, shoving Ricky away. Still doubled over, Ricky smiled to himself as he pocketed the hunting blade he had lifted from the sheath at the man’s side. He had a weapon now; he only needed to find the right opportunity to use it.

  Down below, Ryan, Doc and J.B. had been freed from the wag’s yoke and they were commanded forward at a slow march under the watchful eyes of two guards. Doc used his swordstick to steady himself—an added consideration since both his wrists and ankles were still tied, causing him to waddle a little like a penguin.

  The three companions trudged to one of the ladders that scaled the ice wall, followed a few steps behind by two armed sec men. Close up, the ladder looked rotted, its wood peeling paint and showing dark patches where the damp had seeped inside.

  “Like winter in Vermont,” Doc said as he took a wary step on the frozen ground and secured his grip on a lower rung of the ladder. “When my mother would make me clear the leaves from the roof gutters.�
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  Doc’s reminiscing again, J.B. thought. The man’s mind was sometimes in two places at once, thoughts of his home two hundred years ago often intruding in his present life. It was hard on Doc, trying to carve a life as a nomad like the others when he was so far from the world he knew. He was a learned man with numerous qualifications from his own time. Yet here in the Deathlands, there were things he still had trouble processing, such as man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

  Once Doc was a few feet up the ladder, the twin uprights shaking dangerously in place, J.B. was ordered to follow him, and then Ryan. The two men moved without complaint, but both remained alert to possibilities, searching for an escape.

  The ladder towered sixty feet in the air, and as they climbed the companions got a closer look at the open mouths of the caves. People were huddled within, some peering out to see what the fuss was about. But the icy caverns seemed to stretch farther back than the faint starlight allowed them to see, and Ryan got the sense that there could very well be a whole community living within this block of ice; a ville in an ice tower block.

  As they climbed, the companions saw, too, that there were shelflike ridges running horizontally along the front of the ice wall, just a couple of feet wide, connecting the cave mouths. Presumably, Ryan thought, there are more connections inside, like a rabbit’s warren.

  In the lead, Doc reached the crest of the ladder first. A man and a woman waited there, watching the ill-matched line of men clamber up toward them. The man held a knife, the kind used for skinning small animals, and he thrust it in Doc’s face as the gray-haired man came within reach.

  “You, keep moving,” the man growled. He wore warm, heavy clothes with a scarf over his neck that left his features bare, exposing the round face and ruddy features of an Inuit. “Hurry it up.”

  Beside the man, the woman was working a longer knife with a wicked, serrated blade in her hand, using its point to work the dirt from under her nails in her other hand, which was clutched around the sleeping body of a newborn. She, too, had the black hair and features of an Inuit, and she spit something at Doc as he disengaged himself from the ladder, taking care not to drop his swordstick.

  But what Doc saw at the top was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks.

  “I said hurry it up,” the dark-faced man beside him growled as Doc stared.

  Human bodies were hanging from the ceiling. Doc counted seven in all and each one was naked, the flesh turned a pale gray-pink from the cold, and each had a great hook thrust through their chest. Three women were there, their plump breasts sagging between either side of those vicious, two-inch-wide metal hooks.

  Chapter Six

  Reluctantly, Doc took another step forward, and J.B. and Ryan followed behind him. The old man took another step into the icy food locker—for it was clear that that is what it was—past the bodies in the darkness. He tried not to look at them as he walked through the room, feeling the acrid taste of bile biting at the back of his mouth.

  “Keep walking,” the flat-faced man snarled from behind him, “all the way through.”

  Reluctantly, Doc walked onward, his right shoulder brushing against one of the bodies where it jutted in the ill-lit storeroom. The body swayed back and forth at his touch, the hook creaking on its thick chain. There, up ahead, Doc saw another doorway, its arch low, carved directly into the ice wall.

  “That’s it, old-timer,” the man behind him chided. “Keep going.”

  With a palpable sense of relief, Doc stepped through the far door and out into the space beyond. He stood in what appeared to be a small lobby from which a half-dozen low doorways spoked in various directions, including the one that led to meat locker behind him. A man was seated there, thankfully alive and wrapped in a fur coat with a blanket of fur over his legs. The man held a snub-nosed .38 in his lap, pointing it vaguely at Doc as he stepped through the doorway.

  “Welcome to the rest of your life, meat,” the man growled, before using the barrel of the blaster to indicate one of the open doorways. “Go through. Two of you.” He peered into the meat locker, where Ryan and J.B. were just striding in Doc’s wake. “Third one, you with the hat—you wait, I’ll show you where.”

  With his wrists still bound, J.B. took a moment to adjust the brim of his fedora and smiled bitterly at Ryan.

  “Sounds like you’re getting special treatment,” Ryan told him, keeping his voice low.

  “Pays to wear a hat,” J.B. replied, sotto voce. “Makes a good first impression.”

  A moment later, the two men had joined the gunman in the ice-walled lobby, and Ryan strode on, following Doc into a frozen chamber just four feet square. Behind Ryan, the gunman was busy sealing the doorway with a wooden sheet that swung in on some kind of track-and-pulley system.

  The chamber’s walls were carved from ice, and a single glassless window was stuck in the far wall of the room, like a ship’s portal. Doc stood at the open window, taking deep breaths of the chill air that blew through it. But he stepped aside to let Ryan take a peek. It was dark out there, too dark to see.

  “Any idea where we are?” Ryan asked.

  The old man looked queasily at Ryan, still sucking in deep breaths. “Hard to say. You saw what was back there as well as I. Do you think that mayhap they plan to eat us?”

  Ryan’s expression was staunch as he eyed the old man in the darkness of the cell. “Don’t know, Doc,” he admitted. But he suspected that the old man was right. Judging by the locker of hanging corpses, they were in the hands of cannies—the nukeshitting dregs of the Deathlands.

  * * *

  MILDRED, KRYSTY AND Nyarla had been incarcerated in a warm room deep in the bowels of the ice fortress, where five other women were already sleeping. Twelve feet by ten, the room was roughly hewn from the hard-packed ice, and featured a small brass heater in its center in which coals and incense glowed. The incense filled the room with its cloying pungency, a scent so thick that it caused Mildred to cough when she was initially thrust into the room and drew her first breath within. From their journey through the icy corridors of the ville, Mildred surmised that the incense was used to hide the stench created by the gas heaters, masking the smell of burning animal fat.

  The walls of the room were hung with silks and carpets, both to provide decoration and to help trap the heat. The carpets looked old and worn, their colors muted over time. Behind them, a wide wooden door was rolled back into place, sealing the room like a jar. A single window was set in the outside wall. It looked out into the darkened ice and snow beyond and featured a pane of glass so thick that it had ripples across it. It was hard to make out anything, Mildred found as she parted the curtain to look through the window. All she could see was the towering structure of the glacier ville a little distance away, surrounding a courtyard on all sides.

  “We’re a story up from ground level,” Mildred told Krysty, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the sleepers in the room. “Maybe we could jump or climb down?”

  “If we could get this open,” Krysty said, pressing her hands against the cold glass and working them along the edges of the windowpane. It was locked solid with no catches that could be worked. “Big if,” she added grimly.

  Nyarla had hurried over to the brass burner, and Krysty and Mildred could see she had been here—or somewhere very similar—before. The other women were huddled close to the heater, too, sleeping where the warmth was strongest. Two of them stirred for a moment, surveying the newcomers before rolling over and going back to sleep. They were clearly used to a lot of comings and goings in this room, and a steady turnover of new faces, Mildred guessed.

  Mildred and Krysty looked at the room with distaste, knowing pretty well what it was. “Gaudy house or harem,” Mildred said, voicing what the other thought.

  “Looks like there’s just the one door,” Krysty said, searching the room and moving several woven tapestries aside.

  Mildred’s dark eyes scanned the door itself, her hand unconsciously moving to where
a holster should have been strapped to her hip. Holster and blaster had been removed when the companions had surrendered to the hunters, while Mildred’s bag of medicines had been thoroughly searched and potential weapons removed before she’d been allowed to keep it. The door looked sturdy, made of a solid wood such as oak and rolled on a chiseled track outside the room like a train wheel, sealing the chamber like a stopper. The door was entirely blank, just the unaltered grain of the wood showing on this side, with no handle or turning device. That left them with no facility to open it from the inside and also meant there was no way of telling whether they were being watched, or when someone might be listening outside.

  Mildred’s fingers clenched as she brushed the side of her leg where her blaster should be, and she shook her head with irritation. Their captors had also given her and the rest of them a pat down, checking for any additional weapons. They had discovered Jak’s stash of knives that way, but they had missed the surgical scalpel that Mildred habitually carried in a sheath in her pants pocket next to a pencil; it was so small that it might easily have been mistaken for another pencil by cold-numbed fingers.

  For now, there was no way out of the room, not until someone on the other side of the door decided to open it. The noise of the door opening would be enough to alert them, so Mildred joined Krysty beside the heater, where several of the women were moaning in fitful sleep. Nyarla hugged herself, trying to get the warmth back into her frozen body. Krysty kneeled while Mildred adopted a position behind her and briefly examined her head where she had been pistol-whipped by the man in the woods. There was a lump there, a little swelling that bulged in her hairline.

  “You feel anything? Light-headed, any trouble focusing your eyes, things like that?” Mildred asked as she pressed two fingers lightly to the swelling.

  Krysty drew a sharp breath at Mildred’s touch, then assured her she felt okay. “Felt a bit sick at first,” she said, “but it’s passed now.”