Breakthrough Page 8

  Doyal estimated there were at least seventy-five of the bastards. More than enough, considering their firepower and defenses. As terrifying as the light weapons were, it was their defensives that shook his mind to its core. Experience told him that bullets couldn't be deflected without first striking a solid object, nor could LAW rockets for that matter. What he had seen with his own eyes made no sense.

  As he sat there, trying to puzzle it out and failing, two more enormous black wags rolled up to the parking area. They towered over the attack vehicles. Their single trailers were longer than a triple semi, and their tractors were the size of earthmovers. The combined weight of the two trucks cracked the ancient pavement like a thin glaze of ice. As soon as the vehicles had stopped, some of the black creatures rushed over and began unrolling long hoses from them, which they then coupled to the parked wags and aircraft. Doyal concluded they were being refueled.

  Without any apparent signal, the rest of the creatures began separating the captives into two groups at blasterpoint. A pair of them loomed over Doyal, looking closely at his injured hand for a moment before walking on. The slaves and sec men who had lost a leg or an arm, or who had been blinded or severely brain damaged, about thirty in all, were brutally dragged away from the others, to the far side of the parking lot. They didn't go quietly. There was a lot of screaming; some of it from the pain caused by rough treatment, most of it from their abject terror.

  When the prisoners had been divided, one of the creatures stepped between the two groups. It stopped in the middle of the parking lot and a disembodied, electronic sounding voice boomed forth, "I want obedience. If I don't get it…" It made a sweeping gesture toward the wounded.

  At the signal, four of the black monsters with tanks strapped to their backs undipped the nozzles on their hips and strode through the injured, squirting a creamy yellow foam over them.

  The effect was horrific. The yellow foam dissolved both flesh and bone on contact. As it was heaped upon the feebly struggling wounded, it melted them like guttering brown candles, into so much sticky goo. When the foam stopped bubbling and shrank away, all that was left of thirty human beings was a slowly spreading wet spot on the asphalt.

  "You will perform hard labor for me," the monster in charge told the stunned captives. "If you meet your individual daily quotas, you will be given water. If you don't, you will go without. If you fail to meet your work quotas three days in a row, you will be foamed."

  Sec men and agri-slaves knew a death sentence when they heard one. They began to weep and moan.

  "Where is the baron of this place?" the creature demanded. "Is he still alive?"

  Doyal's stomach dropped. He had been hoping to blend in with the others, to avoid being singled out for some special punishment. He prayed that the others would say that he was dead.

  All around him, his former supporters and friends somehow found the strength to raise their arms and point in his direction. He bared his teeth at them like an animal.

  The talking monster loomed over him. "Stand!" it commanded.

  Charlie Doyal rose shakily to his feet. He could see his own reflection in the surface of the opaque visor, his gray hair in wild disarray, eyes already pleading for mercy.

  The electronic voice boomed again. "Laser cuff this one first."

  Two creatures grabbed him. A third attached dull silver bands to his wrists and ankles. Then they let him go.

  Doyal stared uncomprehendingly at the ornaments. They weren't connected to each other. They didn't limit his movement like manacles. What they were supposed to do, or prevent him from doing, he couldn't imagine.

  "Can you run, Baron?" the monster said.

  Doyal looked up at visor. He nodded. "I can run."

  "If you make it past the fence, off the parking lot before I can zap you with this," the creature said, patting the side of its laser weapon, "I will let you live. Otherwise you will die where you stand. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," Doyal said.

  The monster then addressed the other captives, "This is a lesson meant for all of you. Watch closely." To the baron, it said, "Feel free to start whenever you're ready."

  Doyal had butterflies in his stomach and the muscles in his legs were locked tight. He couldn't do anything about the butterflies, but he stretched his thighs, first one, then the other, all the while looking over his shoulder at the monster. He had no doubt that clearing the parking lot was his one and only chance to survive.

  As he turned away, preparing to make his sprint, the creature lowered its weapon, pointing its muzzle at the ground. The weapon stayed down as Doyal took off running. Arms pumping, legs driving, he dashed as fast as he could for the line of monsters that stood between him and the downed fence. As he approached them, the monsters stepped aside to let him pass. Doyal immediately began zigzagging, figuring that their leader had its weapon up and a clear line of fire.

  His legs started to give out fifty feet from the crushed fence. At every stride he thought surely he would be hit. Wheezing from the effort, Doyal threw himself across the finish line. He stumbled over the mesh and turned to face the parking lot. Still backing away, he had enough energy to thrust his balled right fist into the air. A gesture of victory.

  Cut short.

  His legs buckled under him and his right hand sailed away from his wrist, arcing back toward the parking lot. The baron sat down hard on his backside. At first, he didn't understand what had happened. His brain couldn't make sense of what his eyes were seeing. The silver cuffs lay on the dirt beside him, along with both of his severed feet and one of his severed hands. Awful truth and awful agony struck in the same instant.

  The monster in charge turned its back on Doyal's shrill screams and snarled an order to its subordinates. "Now that they understand how short the leash is, cuff them all."

  Chapter Six

  Ryan Cawdor awoke in pitch darkness, gasping for breath. The air reeked of ammonia. It burned like cold fire inside his nose, his throat, all the way to the bottom of his lungs. Though he couldn't see anything, he sensed he was in an enclosed, crowded space.

  Sitting up, Ryan fumbled at his belt for the rubberized grip of a battery-powered flashlight. When he turned it on and played the bright circle of light over his surroundings, it revealed a confusing world of green on green. Slick, convoluted drapes hung like baffles from the high ceiling and trailed down to the floor, blending into the landscape of erratic folds and rounded humps.

  It was quiet.

  So quiet Ryan could hear the pounding of his own heart.

  He knew exactly where he was. Somehow he'd materialized in the Slime Zone of the parallel Earth, a whitecoat created no-man's land deep beneath the surface. With every breath he was sucking in spores of genetically modified cyanobacteria. Unless he found a way out and quickly, the microscopic organisms would fill his lungs like wet cement and suffocate him.

  He used his free hand to push up from the ground. As he did, his fingers slid off a solid object hidden beneath countless layers of bacterial membrane. Whatever was hidden, it shifted under his weight. It shifted, then slowly twisted back. Automatically, he swept the flash beam over it.

  And to his horror saw the dead face of Krysty Wroth.

  Her pale white cheeks, which his touch had cleared of slime, were smeared with streaks of green-black. Trickles of the same color oozed from her nostrils, and out from between her bloodless parted lips. Her prehensile red hair lay dark, matted and still.

  His beautiful Krysty was wrapped in a living shroud.

  Ryan coughed and the pain, like an icy dagger, twisted deep in his lungs. Overcome by the lack of oxygen, by the wet weight of the spores already blooming inside of him, he felt the urge to lie down beside his lover, to close his good right eye and join her in death. As powerful as the urge was, he couldn't make himself do it.

  With a groan, Ryan hurled himself away from her corpse. The instinct for survival was something he'd been born with, something that the intense violence of his
life had only served to hone. It wouldn't be denied. As he ran, he slogged knee deep through heaps of the out of control agricultural bacteria. A maze of hanging folds blocked his view on all sides, heavy, membranous curtains that fell upon his head and shoulders as he furiously batted them out of his path. Ryan didn't know which way was out. He didn't know if there was an out. With no landmarks to guide him, he could only choose a likely direction and try to stay on course.

  He had thrashed and slogged no more than twenty feet when his boot heel hit something buried and he lost his balance. He went down on his hands and knees, plunging into the slunk up to his armpits. Somehow he held onto the flashlight. As he jerked himself out, a thick coating of slime fell away from yet another face, directly in front of him. It was Dean.

  It can't be, Ryan told himself, reaching out and gently touching the cold forehead with his fingertips. It can't be… But it was.

  Ryan shoved off the encasing slime and drew the limp body into his arms. He dropped the flashlight and it rolled away. He let it go. It didn't matter anymore.

  Nothing mattered anymore. The future was gone.

  Rocking back and forth, Ryan cradled his dead son. Each breath was more difficult than the last. After two or three minutes, he began coughing up dark, bitter fluid and little clots of fibrous matter. Pain skewered his chest, and the spreading chill in his hands and feet matched the cold that squeezed around his failing heart.

  RYAN JERKED as he suddenly regained consciousness. Waves of nausea slammed him, his throat opened, and it was all he could do not to splatter himself as he projectile vomited. Minutes later, when the sickness finally passed, he found himself curled on the floor of a mat-trans chamber. Its armaglass walls were bright yellow with gold flecks, and cottony wisps of jump mist still clung to the ceiling. Krysty, Dean and Mildred were out cold on the floor beside him. They hadn't even begun to stir. He checked Dean's breathing to make sure the boy was all right. Jak, J.B., and Doc were awake, but not yet recovered from the ordeal of rematerialization. In separate corners of the chamber, they retched on all fours, like dogs.

  His head swimming, Ryan struggled to his feet.

  Traveling via the mat-trans gateways was never pleasant, but it was the only quick way for the companions to move from place to place. More than a century ago, the nukecaust had destroyed the rail lines and the shipping and airline fleets. They had never been rebuilt. Without constant repair, the interstate highway system had mostly turned to sand. The network of secret mat-trans gateways, high-tech artifacts of the military industrial complex, was blast protected, self-powered, computer controlled and automatic—you got in, you closed the door and you were transported to another gateway chamber somewhere else.

  No one knew what the long term health consequences of using the system might be. But short term, there was both physical and psychological discomfort, and they were directly connected. As Doc had explained it once, the gateways reduced human consciousness and physicality to a stream of electrical charges. During the mat-trans deconstruction process, all the buffers, the self protective partitions of the brain fell away.

  Which meant that things surfaced in jump dreams.

  Ugly things the conscious mind refused to face.

  The companions rarely discussed the details of their dreams, other than to say, "Whew, that was a bad one!" These were private horrors better left to private contemplation, or even better still, plain forgotten. None of them had ever shared the fear that they each felt, that one of these times they wouldn't wake up. That they would get stuck between gateways, existing only as streams of charged particles, forever trapped in their own worst nightmare.

  There was nothing subtle about the meaning of Ryan's jump dream. His unconscious and conscious minds were on the same page: he not only faced his own death, but the death of hope for his world. All that he loved, all that he valued, was on the verge of being smothered.

  Ryan started to feel queasy again—the smell of vomit, the smell of the smoked catfish they carried in their day packs and the sharpish, unpleasant odor of mat-trans by-product chemicals was getting to him. He stepped carefully over Krysty's legs and found the chamber's exit door.

  Outside was a rectangular floor of poured concrete surrounded by rough hewned red rock walls and a very high rock ceiling. In the light of a caged electric bulb over the door of the chamber, he could see the spiral metal staircase leading up. Ryan checked his weapons, adjusted his pack, then climbed the stairs. At the top was another level of cave and more concrete floor, which narrowed at its far end and led him through switchbacked walls of rock.

  As he rounded a turn, bright sunlight from the cave's opening stabbed into his eye. He let his vision adjust before he stepped out. In front of him, the bone dry Utah desert stretched off in all directions; behind him was a towering red mesa.

  Though the creators of this gateway had tried to match the bedrock around the artificial entrance they had constructed, they hadn't figured on the effects of the chem rain, which had aged the synthetic and natural materials differently. Jak Lauren had been the first to notice the strange discoloration in the rock formation. When he had checked it more closely, he had found the man made cave.

  Ryan sat down inside the shade of the entry and waited there for the others, grateful for a few moments alone to think. He figured that the companions' best chance of winning the fight, and perhaps their only chance, was to find a way to confront the enemy from the parallel Earth head on, and the sooner the better. If the invaders were distracted or confused by the strange new environment, they might make tactical mistakes, and therefore be vulnerable. It was a long shot, and he knew it. From what Ryan had seen, both on this world and its near twin, the opposition was whitecoat efficient and bastard ruthless. If the invaders had already gotten used to their new home, there would be no escape for those who resisted.

  For the thousandth time, Ryan asked himself whether he should send Dean away with Krysty or Jak. Or with both. That way the boy could avoid what was looking more and more like a suicide mission, and perhaps enjoy whatever remaining life fate offered him. It seemed a simple, straightforward decision, but it wasn't. Ryan knew Dean's heart as well as he knew his own. Dean wanted more than anything to prove his worth to the group, to be valued as his own person by his father and the others, all of whom he hero worshiped. Under the circumstances, Ryan knew his son would take being sent away as the ultimate rejection, the most terrible event in his life. It was like telling him, "Boy, you aren't fit company to die with, so go off and die by yourself."

  For a father who loved his son, that was the ultimate lie.

  In the end, Ryan concluded that it wasn't his place to force his son to go or to stay. When the time came that the decision couldn't be put off, he would offer Dean a man's choice: die now, fighting at your father's side. Or die later, without him.

  RYAN AND THE COMPANIONS arrived at the rim of Moonboy ville's box canyon early in the morning of their third day of march. Shouldering his Steyr, he used its telescopic sight to scan downrange. The sun was angled behind him so flare off the front lens wouldn't give away his position.

  Before Armageddon, Moonboy had been a bedroom community of Salt Lake City; now it was a shamble of huts, lean-tos and rubblized lots where a development of upscale, three-story tract homes had once stood. Four of the ville's original streetlight poles still stood more or less upright, their gutted sockets trailing pigtails of severed power cord. The poles cast long, crooked shadows over the jumbled roofs of rusting corrugated metal.

  Moonboy had once prided itself as being a "pure norm" ville. Which meant that in the vicinity it was always open season on muties, or suspected muties, who happened to wander by. It was the kind of place that accumulated human trash like the corner of a back alley. Hopeless marginals—over the hill black-hearts, inbred droolers, assorted triple stupes—swirled randomly around Deathlands for years only to wind up in this or some similar blind canyon graveyard. With their backs to the wall, literally, at the
end of the road, literally, they could tell lies in the shade and safely rot.

  Or so they had thought.

  Unfortunately for them, the first expeditionary force from the parallel universe had made Earthfall smack in the middle of the ville's main street. The drunken residents had mistaken their black battlesuits for some kind of mutie insect shells, and had opened fire in a wild but ineffectual free for all. After easily subduing Moonboy's inhabitants, Colonel Gabhart and his crew examined the survivors for brain viruses and for invisible but inheritable mutation caused disorders. Ironically, they found that all the "pure norms" were incurably diseased.

  A quick survey of the landscape told Ryan that no one had moved into the vacant huts since he and the companions had been there last. That didn't surprise him much. Even in broad daylight, Moonboy ville had a bad feel to it. It wasn't just deserted; it was tainted, spoiled. And if there were no visible signs of life below, there were still plenty of visible signs of death. Since Ryan knew what to look for, he could find them even at a distance of six hundred yards. They were nestled in protected places where the chem rain couldn't wash them away—under the collapsed roofs of lean-tos, inside the doorways of hammered down hovels.

  And if a passing would-be squatter didn't realize what the oblong brown blotches in the dirt signified, one whiff of the sick sweet stench that hung over Moonboy like an evil fog would be clue enough.

  Because Colonel Gabhart was afraid of contagious diseases spreading to his crew, he had used carniphage foam on the dead and the dying to sterilize the place. Ryan had witnessed the foam in action. He could still remember the way the cannie had squealed as he tried to drag himself out from under the mounds of ravening microorganisms, as muscle and bone dissolved into a brown liquid that apparently even wild animals wouldn't touch.