Chrono Spasm
Authors: James Axler
SURVIVAL INSTINCT
Remnants of humanity have managed to regroup after a global nuclear showdown that decimated the planet. But life in Deathlands is a far cry from actual living. And the survivors must believe they’ll find something better, because surrendering to the inhospitable forces of a nuked world means giving in to death. Or worse.
HELL FREEZES OVER
Fear and human depravity permeate the frigid air in a once-dynamic Alaskan city. Ryan Cawdor and his group of survivalists go on red alert the moment they set foot on the forbidding tundra, but regardless, they find themselves rounded up by cannibal coldhearts. The companions quickly discover there’s a fate much worse than becoming food. Dangerous new experiments are taking place in a long-abandoned military base and, in the bitter heart of the frozen North, new horrors reach out to poison their hope for a better tomorrow.
Their clothes dusted with snow, twelve ragged figures emerged from their hiding places in the trees
Each man was dressed in the thick layers that the frozen climate demanded and each one held a weapon, which included semiautomatic pistols and a pair of Kalashnikov AK-47s with their stocks removed. At the back of the group, Ryan saw Jak, held tightly by a man dressed in rags with a pair of night-vision goggles visible above his scarf. Jak stood limply, as if dazed.
“You want to try it?” the man with the goggles snarled. “Be my guest. All the more food for us after we’ve chilled you.”
As the man spoke, two more figures clambered down the slope from the copse of trees, carrying the slumped forms of Krysty and the girl in their arms.
Outnumbered and with his colleagues’ lives in danger, Ryan ordered his team to stand down.
Ricky looked agitated, shooting Ryan a furious look. “We can take them,” he whispered.
Ryan shook his head no. His people were at risk, too much so for him to start a firefight at such close quarters. For now, they would stand down.
And wait for a better opportunity to arise.
Other titles in the Deathlands
saga:
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark
Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s
Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow
World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage
Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow
Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon
Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil
Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death
Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual
Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
Strontium Swamp
Shatter
Zone
Perdition Valley
Cannibal Moon
Sky Raider
Remember
Tomorrow
Sunspot
Desert Kings
Apocalypse Unborn
Thunder
Road
Plague Lords
(Empire of Xibalba Book I) Dark
Resurrection
(Empire of Xibalba Book II) Eden’s Twilight
Desolation
Crossing
Alpha Wave
Time Castaways
Prophecy
Blood
Harvest
Arcadian’s Asylum
Baptism of Rage
Doom
Helix
Moonfeast
Downrigger Drift
Playfair’s Axiom
Tainted
Cascade
Perception Fault
Prodigal’s Return
Lost
Gates
Haven’s Blight
Hell Road Warriors
Palaces of
Light
Wretched Earth
Crimson Waters
No Man’s
Land
Nemesis
Time...is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion.
—H.P. Lovecraft &
E. Hoffman Price,
Through the Gates of the Silver Key,
1932
Contents
Prologue
This much he knew for certain: traveling through time always came with a cost.
Don Nectar knew all too well the cost of sailing passage on time’s stream. He had lost so much to get here. He had lost everything he had ever been.
He had been a family man once, with a wife and children, a house that was more than just walls; a house that was also a home. He recalled these things only vaguely now, they seemed so distant to him that it was as if he was recollecting only a story he had been told, and he could no longer put the faces in place.
This much he knew for certain: his wife had been beautiful and he had loved her very much.
But the details—it was like trying to discern a painting through the fog. The details, the subject matter, all of it lost in the blur, nothing now but an abstract pattern of darkness and light. That was an apt description of his whole life—no details remained.
He couldn’t remember how the journey through time had begun, nor where. He suspected that he had been forced on the journey, for why would a man give up so much—his whole life—for so little reward, simply to visit Hell? Perhaps it had been a punishment, he pondered, perhaps a sentence for some great ill he had been responsible for somewhere in the great forgotten past.
Perhaps he had killed a man.
How would he know? How could he remember? Even if he was told, would the details stick in his memory or would they simply fade away as everything had faded away, a broken thing that no longer made sense, a watch that could no longer tell the right time no matter how many times one wound it.
Don Nectar looked at the equipment before him, as he had a thousand times before. The days became weeks, and, conversely, the weeks days. The time machine would take him home, would fix the things he had lost from his Swiss-cheese memory.
This much he knew for certain: each time he engaged the machine, it sliced another chunk of his fractured soul away.
He would cry sometimes, when he realized how far he still had to go, when the futility of the whole exercise seemed to bear down on him with too much weight, some bastardized Atlas struggling beneath the weight of all of muddled, muddy time. Each attempt that he ran the time machine it spit debris into the atmosphere, shards of ruined time that clung to the surrounds in craters, like pockets of some gas that was heavier than air.
Things had stepped through the time window, too, things that should never have been, things that lived and fed and consumed. Things that made no sense outside the sense of the distilled time he had captured and purified. Don Nectar had studied the things. He was a man of learning, an authority on several disciplines of science; though he could no longer remember where he had obtained such knowledge, where he had studied. The creatures lived as parasites who fed on time, consuming the frayed edges where his bold experiments had caused pockets of chronal collapse, where the chrono spasm wouldn’t cease.
The facility had been built to survive that, of course. When Nectar had arrived, the place had almost burned down, its walls alight from the trauma of his time shunt. He had survived, running out into the snow. And, later, he had damped down those fires with the snow, finally putting out flames that had raged for days. He felt unable to leave then, so he turned his attention to the machinery, employing all of his extensive knowledge to repair it, all the while struggling to remember just who he had really been. He felt like a shadow, a thing without true substance, just a mockery of a man. He had lost so much.
Once repaired, the machinery could open windows into other eras, provide smooth passage through the time stream, navigating its ebbs and its flows. The colossal generators towered before him, their low humming shaking his body within the radiation suit, feeling like a young colt yearning to break free of its reins. He gave the wrench another quarter turn, watched as the displays ran through their start-up sequence again, the towering generators shuddering against the thick gloves of his radiation-wear. The dials whirred in slow rotation, each one following the proscribed path that would assure the traveler a clear window into the past. It hadn’t worked yet. But it had to,
it had to.
This much he knew for certain: to return through time was the only goal he could have. To have any other would be to dilute his purpose, and without that determination the project would never be completed and he would die here in the Deathlands, having never seen his wife again. His mind was already too altered to allow himself the luxury of being distracted. He needed to focus to survive and to succeed in his escape through time.
Each endeavor, each time he got closer, it brought a little more disruption, turning the region all around him into a pockmarked mass of broken ages, of time spilled from the stream. To think...that time was a physical thing, to be molded and shaped.
And dumped.
The voice called to him through time, his wife calling him home for dinner, as it had called every day since he had arrived in this place all those years-weeks-seconds ago. But there was another voice this time, one that spoke with the fractured resonance of the time displaced, just like him. He couldn’t mistake that sound, it was the sound of his own voice when he caught himself cursing aloud the time machinery. The words seemed to filter to him from a distance, weaving through the air and into his skull, a poisoned arrow targeted straight for his brain.
For a moment, the lost time traveler known as Don Nectar cocked his head, trying to hear through the protective layer of his radiation suit. The words were lost. It was like trying to comprehend someone through the taffeta layers of a dream. But the sense of the speaker was clear in his mind’s eye. It was the missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that would turn the machine on its axis. He felt sure of it.
This much he knew for certain.