Authors: James Axler
Chapter Twenty-Three
The wind was howling. Snow was swirling through the air, clogging their view. Mildred, J.B. and Nyarla had been walking a long time in the cold. They didn’t know how long. Perhaps appropriately, they had lost track of time. The sun had sunk, giving up on what little effort it had made to rise, leaving the whole terrain in a sort of bleak grayness, as if filtered through old film stock that had been left too long to develop, its colors expired. The cold was biting at them, too, like a living thing that kept trying to take chunks out of their faces.
At first they had been speaking, buoying one another’s spirits with anecdotes and jokes, remembrances of shared times in days gone. Nyarla had been more dour, of course, worried about her father and sister, about how anyone could survive in this deranged plot of real estate. But the cold worked its magic on them all after a while, freezing the conversations before they could take hold, turning them into unstructured sentences spit from broken keyboards.
In silence then, they moved on, mutually agreeing that they would keep going, stay in one direction with J.B. taking the lead. There was no way to reach Ryan’s group. The quake had drawn such a valley behind them that they would never be able to climb it. Instead they followed the incline of the newly formed valley, working their way up toward what they perceived as ground level, miles from where they had begun.
The weather became worse and icy mist washed over them in clouds, each one cold enough to make one’s bones ache.
The Armorer hunkered down, trudging forward, one foot after the other, looking up only occasionally to see where they were headed. The snow clung to the shoulders and sleeves of his jacket, webbed across his boots and the cuffs of his pants. The cold bit at his face.
There was something wrong about the way the snow fell. It seemed abrupt. Yet when Mildred watched it, it fell languidly, as if it had all the time in the world—as if it knew that she was on to it, that it was being watched. It was disquieting somehow.
How long they walked, none of them could say. The cold made it seem like an eternity, one without a start. It felt as if they had been walking forever, clock hands returning to twelve-noon, twelve-midnight, caught on the endless rotation of the clock’s face.
The landscape was simply snow with trees. Some of the snow was patchy and thin, showing the frozen ground that hid cowering beneath it. In other places it reached up almost to their knees, making them wetter and colder without respite. They knew they needed to find shelter, someplace to warm up, and find it soon.
“Makes no sense,” J.B. said through chattering teeth.
“What doesn’t?” Mildred prompted. It had been so long since she had spoken that her mouth ached from the cold air as she opened it.
“Snow falls thick then thin,” J.B. said as he kicked through another clump of the frozen white carpet. “Yet snow falls evenly. We know it does.”
“Maybe it’s what it’s landing on that’s making the differences,” Mildred said. “Different rates of melting, like the way snow settles on grass before it settles on stone.”
J.B. shook his head, unconvinced. “Weather like this.” He sighed. “It’s not natural, Millie. I tell you it isn’t.”
The snow continued to swirl around them, catching in the howling winds. Without warning, J.B. stopped. He stopped so abruptly that Mildred almost walked into him while Nyarla just seemed to flag and halt, the collar of her coat frozen stiff in an upright position by her ears.
“What is it?” Mildred asked, doing nothing to hide the irritation in her tone.
J.B. pointed, and through the swirling miasma of snow Mildred saw the dark shape that clung to the horizon like a snail shell on a garden path. It was a building, boxy in shape, and even at this distance it was unquestionably man-made, its straight lines and incongruousness in the landscape a tribute to man’s battle against the elements.
The building sat in the middle of the wastes, a dark box on the blank horizon. J.B. looked at it, looked at Mildred, then looked back to the building. More buildings were materializing behind it, peeking shyly through the billowing snow like a bride though her veil.
The snow was swirling in the air, stabbing at their skin like a handful of tossed quills. It didn’t feel like snow, it felt harder than that, more like ice in the air. Its patterns were visible if you took the time to stop and watch, the flecks of snow falling too slow here for the drag of gravity, then too fast there, as if a speeded-up recording on an old video cassette.
“Weather’s shot,” J.B. said, his eyes fixed on the building up ahead. “We need to get inside, warm ourselves up. Warm up you—the girl, too.”
“I don’t know, J.B.,” Mildred disagreed. “This place doesn’t feel right.”
J.B. looked at Mildred then, his mouth a grim line. “If we stay out here much longer, we’re going to freeze to death. We’re no use to Ryan dead. And even if we survive, Nyarla there is just skin and bones—she’s practically an ice block even now.” He didn’t say what he was really thinking—that Mildred had been under the snow long enough to get hypothermia before any of them. She’d turn down his concern, he knew, try to bullshit him with medical speak. She wasn’t thinking straight out here; maybe none of them were.
Reluctantly, Mildred agreed, nodding. She couldn’t let Nyarla die. They trekked across the ice-flecked path to the low buildings.
The nearest building looked to be just one story, but as they neared it they saw that it had two floors, but they had become buried in the piling snow. The exterior walls were painted a drab olive color, with stenciled yellow lettering at the doorway that indicated it had been constructed for military use. J.B. reached into his jacket, placing his hand on the butt of his mini-Uzi.
“Army hole,” J.B. said.
Beside him, Mildred nodded and plucked the ZKR 551 from where it was holstered at her hip. Behind her, Nyarla cowered in the lee of the building, keeping out of the biting wind. She didn’t offer to pull her own blaster out; she was simply too cold to do that now.
“Still feels wrong,” Mildred muttered.
“It’s dry,” the Armorer replied. “That’s enough for me.”
There were other buildings close by, a little cluster of them meeting in a junction. The mess hall was the nearest, but the others were just a little way from them now, appearing and disappearing through the flickering snow.
All around them, the snow seemed to billow then wait, billow then wait. For a moment, Mildred could have sworn she saw it stop dead in the air, held there as if in a photograph; a frozen image of frozen water. She almost laughed at that, despite the way it worried her. Natural reaction, laughing at what scares us, Mildred reminded herself. Maybe J.B. was right, maybe she was delirious.
The building had a curved roof with a corrugated pattern across it, and it stretched back sixty feet. Wide-spaced windows ran along its sides, but the ones they could see had blinds drawn over them, likely to keep the heat in. Behind the building, J.B. eyed the other buildings, dotted around a central hub, materializing through the falling snow like a stalker’s shadow.
J.B. stopped at the doors, reading the words that had been stenciled there. “Mess hall,” he read aloud. The name was followed by a serial number that he figured meant nothing to anyone not a part of the army base.
After checking a few of the windows, Mildred hurried back to where J.B. waited at the main set of doors with Nyarla. Once she was within hearing range, she raised a concern in a quiet voice. “Are you sure this is a good idea, J.B.? Can’t see shit inside and it’s awful quiet. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“Me, too,” J.B. agreed, “like snakes running up and down my spine. But the weather out here is seriously harsh. I haven’t ever seen its like. And I’ve seen toxic rains that could strip a man to his bones quicker than a stream full of hungry mutie fish.”
Nyarla balked at that, her eyes going wide.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Mildred reassured. “That’s not going to happen out here.”
Then Mildred turned to look behind her, eyeing the falling snow and the way it seemed to stutter and stop in the air for a moment every few seconds. J.B. was right—there was something seriously wrong with this place. “Guess we won’t find out anything out here,” she agreed after a moment’s consideration.
J.B. nodded, pleased. “That’s my girl.”
He pressed his hand to the doorknob and pushed. It took a moment—the ice had frozen to the edges of the door—and J.B. had to shove against it to break the light film of ice that had sealed it in place.
“One thing’s for sure,” J.B. said. “No one’s been in or out of here in a while. Guess we take what comfort we can from that.”
Comfort, perhaps, but J.B. still entered the building with the Uzi extended in a ready grip before him.
Inside, the building was dark, and it took the companions a moment for their eyes to adjust. The place smelled of burning dust. The smell wasn’t coming from anywhere in particular, as far as J.B. could tell—it simply
was,
the smell all around them, the smell of the air. They were standing in a lobby, just an anteroom that held a desk and an area presumably for storing coats and bags. The area was empty and J.B., Mildred and Nyarla stepped inside, kicking snow and ice from their boot treads as Mildred pushed the door closed. It was warmer maybe than outside—they were too numb to really say right then—but still cool enough that they could see their breath in the air.
J.B. crept forward, his movements appreciably silent. Mildred aimed the blaster over J.B.’s right shoulder as he prowled into the next room. This room was larger, taking over maybe two-thirds of the floor space. Canvas shutters had been pulled down over the windows, he saw now, but from inside enough light peeked around their edges that J.B. could see in the gloom. Long tables were arrayed in rows that stretched four tables to the length of the room, and three across; twelve in all. There were seventy, eighty, maybe a hundred soldiers sitting at the tables, poised over their food trays, cutlery in hand.
* * *
R
YAN
, K
RYSTY
AND
Doc traveled across the white blanket of snow for several miles, leaving a trail of footprints that slowly filled in with fresh snow. It was bitterly cold and they couldn’t help wondering about J.B. and the others, whether they were doing the right thing to leave them in the crevasse.
Early on, Ryan made a decision to find the highest ground. Perhaps from there they would be able to see what was going on here, and maybe get a better idea of how to stop it. He led them up a slope where no path existed other than the one Ryan made with his footsteps. It was slow, laborious walking, but over time they found themselves high enough to get a clearer idea of
His Ink Orchard
.
With the sun—what little they had seen of it—dipped below the horizon, the world was turned into a pale blue blanket of moonlit snow. The moon looked cold, a silver coin flicked into the air in some cosmic heads-or-tails wager.
There was something else, too, visible even through the falling snow. “Look,” Ryan said, pointing to the thing his keen eye had spotted.
In the distance, all but masked by the falling snow, a lightning storm seemed to be in progress. But as they watched, Doc and Krysty realized that there was something odd about the storm.
“The lightning is traveling upward,” Doc said. “Which means it is being launched by something on the ground.”
“Exactly,” Ryan confirmed. “And I figure if we locate the source, we’ll be a step closer to figuring out just what the hell it is we’ve walked into here.”
Agreed, the group moved onward, pacing slowly down the slope as the wind whipped all around them, heading toward a wide, icy river that could be seen in the far distance wending its course through the land.
* * *
J.B.
GASPED
before he could stop himself, halting in place with the Uzi ready. The air, the smell, the dust; J.B. didn’t like it.
Inside the dining hall, no one moved. For a moment, J.B. stood there, watching the diners as they sat poised over their meals. Like the anteroom, the mess hall had that same distinctive smell of burning dust, the dead smell of dried-up insects left on sunny windowsills.
J.B. paced warily into the room. The diners were all soldiers, dressed in olive drab fatigues with peaked, soft caps on their heads. But there was something strange about them, J.B. realized as he walked up to the first table in the half light filtering through the shuttered windows. They were all in various stages of decomposition, like corpses torn from the ground. And whatever had once been served on their trays, the meals had turned to dust, grease spots and dried residue all that remained.
J.B. stared at the occupants of the nearest table for a few seconds, trying to figure out what had happened. Could a weapon do this? The result of the Megachill, mebbe?
“J.B.?” Mildred called from the antechamber of the mess hall, where she stood with Nyarla. “Everything okay in there?”
J.B. swivelled his head back to address Mildred. “It’s fine—” He stopped himself. From the corner of his eye, one of the figures at the closest table had moved. J.B. was sure of it.
As he turned back, the diners began to rise, each one a desiccated corpse coming horrifically to life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Run!” J.B. shouted, scampering back from the nearest table.
At the lobby entrance, Mildred watched J.B. race across the room, shadowy figures rising from their seats behind him.
“Wh-what are they?” Nyarla asked, peering into the gloom.
Mildred saw J.B. spin back, bringing up the mini-Uzi and unleashing a rapid burst of blastfire at the nearest figure. “Nothing good,” she assured Nyarla, bringing up her own weapon to target another soldier-corpse.
Within the vast mess hall, J.B. watched as the lead corpse crumbled to the ground, his face a wound of dried flesh cut to ribbons by 9 mm slugs from the Uzi. The next corpse was moving across the room at a frightening clip, bringing up rotted, talonlike hands to reach for J.B.’s face. The Armorer swung his compact weapon around on its strap, sent a burst of fire into the dead thing’s belly.
How the hell they were alive, he couldn’t even begin to guess. What J.B. did know, however, was that they sensed him as an enemy, and whatever they planned to do once they caught him he’d bet shells to sand was nothing he’d appreciate.
There were ninety dead figures standing in the room, and they were surrounding J.B. in a swift pattern. The Armorer looked from one to the next, seeing their ruined faces, white eyes sunken deep into deteriorated sockets. Even as he watched, the first figure he had shot drew itself back up from the floor, rising in a wavering, unsteady fashion on rotted legs.
The dead soldiers swarmed at J.B., leaving him no time to pick targets. He sent another burst of bullets in a low arc, cutting the animated corpses at chest level, commanding Mildred to duck even as he squeezed the trigger.
At the lobby doorway, Mildred targeted one of the rear-most corpses and sent a flat-tipped wad-cutter bullet into the back of its head. It impacted with the corpse’s skull in a spreading circle of debris, sending shards of bone and leathery flesh across the room.
Mildred ducked back as J.B. brought his own attack around in a rapid arc, cutting down the corpses in powdery bursts of dead skin and flesh. Behind her, Nyarla crouched against the farthest wall, her hands cupped over her ears to drown out the cacophony of flying bullets.
They weren’t zombies, J.B. realized as he sidestepped the reaching arms of one of the soldiers. They were dead things, pure and simple—people who hadn’t realized that they were dead yet, who remained obstinately animated despite their senses and their consciousness having long since rotted away.
He kneed the nearest soldier in the gut, driving his leg up with such force that the figure in the olive fatigues jumped up off the floor.
They had to have died here, J.B. knew. When time began going askew, these poor bastards had either been caught in the time bubble or drawn up into it from whatever era that they had started at, trapped in static place as time held them in its unforgiving grip, squeezing the life out of them as they struggled to resist.
Whatever had triggered them to move now, J.B. couldn’t guess. If the snow outside was any indication, time was running in fits and starts, moving forward like a stuttering wag engine with dirt in the fuel line.
Why it hadn’t affected himself, Mildred and Nyarla was anyone’s guess. Maybe things from outside the bubble of broken time weren’t affected in the same way. Or maybe they were and they just couldn’t see it because their perception was so altered by the rogue chronal energies that surrounded the area.
One thing J.B. did know was that he had to get out of there before they were all killed.
He drove the Uzi into the next corpse as it reached for him, drilling the weapon’s muzzle into the dead man’s gut and pulling the trigger. Dried chunks of intestines burst loose from the dead soldier’s back, spraying across its colleagues with a sound like rocks striking glass. Now gutless, the soldier’s corpse sagged in on itself, its torso lurching to the left and down as it keeled to the floor.
J.B. turned away from it, batting away the grasping hand of another corpse, sending a short burst of fire at another attacker. As he did so he spotted Mildred and Nyarla still crouched in the lobby. “Move,” J.B. shouted. “Get her out of here.”
Mildred glanced back at the door. J.B. was right—they had promised to protect the young woman. But Mildred was reluctant to leave J.B. behind.
“No way. We’re doing this together, cowboy,” Mildred shouted as she darted into the room, her Czech-made ZKR 551 pistol spitting bullets at the deathly soldiers.
J.B. had no time to react. He was already disappearing beneath a mob of long-dead people.
* * *
S
YMON
TURNED
to Piotr
and the others in the hovel they shared. “I heard a blaster,” he said.
Outside, the chronovores had dissipated, leaving a great chasm where they had eaten displaced chronal energy from the very atmosphere.
“I heard it, too,” Marla said. She was playing solitaire with a deck of cards, teaching the simple game to Symon’s daughter.
Piotr grabbed his climbing gear, cinching the rope around his middle and looping it over his shoulder while Graz checked their blasters. “We’ll check it out,” he said. “You stay here, where it’s safe.”
“No.” Symon shook his head. “My other daughter could be out there. She would follow us if she could.”
Piotr nodded. “Then pray she is not the one being shot at.”
* * *
R
YAN
, K
RYSTY
AND
Doc continued downslope toward the icy river and the distant lightning storm. The snow was falling in spots, swimming through the air like a shoal of fish.
As they descended the gentle slope, Krysty’s foot snagged on something and she dropped to her knees.
“Krysty?” Ryan asked, turning back.
“I’m okay,” Krysty began. “I must have—”
But when she looked back, Krysty saw something reaching through the ground, grasping for her foot where she kneeled. Snow fell from the creature’s limbs as it emerged from the icy soil—its twin arms a hideous blue like a long-dead corpse.
“Get back,” Ryan shouted, whipping his SIG-Sauer blaster from its holster in an instant. Beside him, Doc was reaching for his own weapon.
Krysty scrambled across the snow on hands and knees, urging herself out of the path of the grasping thing. Ryan stepped forward, bringing his weapon to bear as the thing emerged from the ground, its head and chest following the hands in a tumble of caked snow. It looked human—or at least semihuman—naked with bloated blue skin. Utterly hairless, the creature had wide-set, bloodshot eyes in a flat face. From a pace away, Ryan stroked the SIG-Sauer’s trigger, sending a single Parabellum bullet through the thing’s forehead, right between those blood-red eyes.
Caught in the tunnel it had channeled through the snow, the creature just swayed in place, its head lolling on its shoulders, a single black hole marking the kill shot.
Ryan didn’t know what it was; it reminded him mostly of corpses left too long above the ground.
“Looks rather like it was already dead,” Doc said helpfully.
Ryan nodded. “Dead but alive,” he said. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s—”
“Beyond reasoning?” Doc suggested as Krysty wiped the snow from her clothes.
Ryan nodded his agreement. “Let’s keep moving. And keep our eyes open. There could be more of these things under the surface.”
There were. As the companions jogged down the slope, the ground beneath them burst open and another blue-gray figure emerged, followed by another. A whole community of the molelike things appeared drawn by the movement above their home.
Ryan watched as another creature burst from the ground a dozen yards ahead of them like some demented jack-in-the-box, snow falling from its naked body. Without slowing, Ryan aimed and fired, shooting the thing on the run. Beside him, Krysty and Doc were picking off the creatures even as they emerged, the crack of their gunshots echoing across the snowy ground.
* * *
I
N
THE
MESS
HALL
, Mildred scrambled across a table and dived toward the scrum that had descended on J.B. Her blaster fired shot after shot, each bullet taking chunks out of the skulls of the nearest corpses. One corpse turned as Mildred’s latest bullet ripped a wound across the left-hand half of its skull, peering at her with its remaining sunken white eyeball, its lips peeled back in a sneer.
Mildred squeezed the trigger again, sending another bullet into the dead thing’s face, leaving little more than a stump of neck and a jawbone in its wake. The man-thing toppled back, doing a spastic death dance as it crashed into a table. Plates and cutlery careened from the table, spilling their dried-up contents to the floor in a clatter.
The animated corpses were beginning to react to Mildred’s presence now, a whole gaggle of them turning to face her, striding down the aisles between the tables, knocking chairs over in their wake.
“Okay,” Mildred told herself as she pumped the trigger of the ZKR, “bad move.”
A moment later, like J.B. before her, Mildred felt herself fall beneath the weight of the animated corpses.
Nyarla watched helplessly as Mildred and J.B. disappeared beneath the mob of living death. She had a blaster on her and a knife but she knew it wouldn’t be enough, knew there was no sense in getting herself chilled, too.
She turned, shoved the freezing door open and stepped back out into the falling snow. Wasn’t that what Mildred had told her to do?
* * *
T
HE
SNOW
-
COVERED
slope was coming apart as more of the blue-skinned figures emerged from their hiding places beneath the ground. Ryan, Krysty and Doc kept running, their legs pumping as they hurried down the slope at breakneck speed. Up ahead, Ryan saw another blue-fleshed hand reaching up through a parting in the snow and he leapt over it, shouting out an alert to the others.
Behind Ryan, Krysty swerved to avoid the reaching hand while Doc ran straight for it, driving the end of his swordstick down into the wriggling fingers. Something cried beneath the snow and the hand went limp.
Doc ran on, hurrying after his two companions. They were already obscured by the falling snow and mists that clouded the area. Doc stepped up his pace.
Up ahead, Ryan came to an abrupt halt as his ankles caught against something, sending him head over heels before crashing down hard in the snow. A few paces behind him, Krysty slowed, looking for what it was that had tripped her lover. As she did so, she heard the whiz of displaced air and something cinched around her neck—a bolo, two weights at opposite ends of a cord. She, too, went down in a tumble of limbs, the .38 Smith & Wesson spiraling out of her grasp.
“Doc?” Ryan called, pushing himself up from where he was sprawled on the ground. A thin white wire had been stretched taut between two tree stumps, he saw now, wide-spaced and perfectly camouflaged in the snow. It was this that had tripped him and sent him flying, a trap that could have been left weeks before by the hibernating blue things.
He turned, calling again for Doc. As he did so he saw the figures emerging from the curtain of falling snow, five in total, each with the blue flesh of a frozen corpse. Some wore loincloths and had carved tattoos across their flesh, bloodshot eyes peering from their ugly, hairless faces. They were some version of human, Ryan saw, but had become so far removed from humanity that they were barely recognizable. Muties.
Ryan raised his blaster, but as he did so a sixth figure appeared, blue-fleshed like the others...and this one held Doc in a death grip, a curved blade held against the old man’s throat.
“I am sorry, Ryan,” Doc gasped. “They came at me from all sides at once.”