Deathlands - Dectra Chain Part 3

"You can ride my shoulders, Eyes of Wolf," the shaman offered.

"Shouldn't be necessary," the old man said, clapping his gnarled hands together.

"But it won't get us out, Doc," Ryan said, suddenly aware that the rise of the sea had definitely slowed.

"It'll give us time to think of a way."

The water stopped rising just above Ryan's waist. As an experiment he dipped his head below the surface, straining his hearing to try to catch the sound of the sea gus.h.i.+ng through the gap, twenty feet or so below them. But there was silence, which was broken only by the surging noise of his own blood pumping through his head.

Doc kept mumbling to himself, trying to work out some hideously complex sum in his head, linking the pressure of the air around them with how deep the sea might be outside.

"Hundred and forty-six miles," he concluded. "d.a.m.nation and perdition! That can't be right. No. Can't be too much deeper outside than in. If this is high tide, then we do have some small hope of escape when it falls again. Particularly if we are anywhere near the northeast coast. The tides there are exceedingly large. The Bay of Fundy...born on Monday, christened on Tuesday and... What was I saying?"

The old man's voice faded away.

The coldness was chilling, cutting through to the bone. Ryan made everyone keep moving, stamping their feet and slapping hands, fighting off the insidious enemy.

Once he felt something move close by his legs, swirling past him, grazing his pants. Something that felt a whole lot too large for his peace of mind. At his warning, everyone who carried a knife drew it, and they moved even closer together on the cramped, narrow landing. It was a sign that the doors of the redoubt must have opened wider than he'd thought.

The creature didn't come back.

"IT'S GOING DOWN," Donfil said.

Ryan hadn't noticed any sign of the water level dropping, but he didn't propose to argue with the seven-foot-tall Apache.

"Yes," Krysty agreed after a couple of minutes. "He's right."

Three hours pa.s.sed before the water dropped enough for them to be able to see the gap in the jammed doors. From above, it looked to be about fifteen inches wide-just enough for them all to be able to squeeze through. But they still had no idea what was on the other side. The sea was out there; that was all they knew.

The redoubt could be on some uninhabited island, miles from land. The doors might open at the foot of unscalable cliffs. Ryan knew that their chances of getting out of this mess alive weren't much better than even.

"Light's fading out there," Jak Lauren observed some time later, his red eyes being more sensitive than anyone else's to such changes. "Must be night starting."

The water at the foot of the stairs was barely a foot deep. Ryan was conscious of the risk that they might miss the turning of the tide and leave it too late to make their move. But he still hesitated at leading his six companions out into the unknown and threatening darkness.

"Gaia!" Krysty s.h.i.+vered. "My bones are turning into pack ice, lover. Doc and Lori won't make it through another tide. Maybe I won't. We'll die if we stay here."

He nodded, feeling the stiffness and deadly numbness sapping his energy. "Sure. Let's move out."

Ryan led the way, wading to the doors. The gap was festooned with long tendrils of leprous-pale weed, and he was aware of sand beneath the soles of his combat boots. It was impossible, with the dazzling lights of the redoubt at his shoulder, to see anything at all outside, beyond the gleam of water on rock a couple of paces beyond the entrance.

J.B. went to the control wheel and threw his weight against it. He shook his head grimly. "Locked for ever an' a day."

"I'll go first," Jak said. "Follow tight."

The young albino had excellent night vision, and Ryan was happy for him to take the lead, moving easily between the rubber-sealed doors. J.B. went second, with the rest of the group close behind. Ryan brought up the rear, glancing back down the bright corridor, wondering whether they might have done better by going back and trying the gateway. But the water seemed to be rising once more, and if they got trapped again, the cold and wet would surely take its toll among them.

"n.o.body ever gets anywhere going backward," he said quietly to himself. He pushed past the fronds of seaweed and walked out into the cool night breeze.

They stood on the crumbling remnants of an old jetty, with huge, rusting iron mooring rings set in the weathered concrete. The turning tide was already a foot or more over the surface, and Ryan guessed that the vicious nuking of the last of wars must have caused a local earth s.h.i.+ft. When it was first built, the quay would have been a good many feet proud of the high-tide level.

The night was piercingly black, with only scudding white clouds staining the oppressive darkness of the sky. Ryan found it difficult to see through the blown spume off the ocean, but he had the impression of a vast distance out beyond the edge of the jetty, and of monstrously high cliffs sc.r.a.ping upward behind them.

"Stairs. Iron. Up there." Jak pointed up by the side of the pair of doors. "Not safe. All rotted down."

"Just what I needed," Ryan said, baring his teeth in a mirthless grin. "Always loved climbing up a crumbling ladder in pitch-dark over rocks and sea. Nothing f.u.c.king nicer in the world."

THE RUNGS AND side supports of the ladder had been worn down until many of them were thinner than a child's finger. Despite the bitter chill and the rising wind, Ryan found himself sodden with sweat, which was running down the small of his back and was making his hands even more slippery.

He lost track of how long and how high they'd been climbing. For the first few minutes he'd been able to peer down between his boots and see white water breaking over the quay's rough edges. The next time he looked down, all that had vanished. There was nothing to be seen above him and nothing below.

Every now and again Ryan felt Krysty, climbing second, touch his foot, but for most of the spidering ascent he felt utterly alone, suspended in the yawning chasm between Earth and Heaven. Once a rung broke under his foot, and he swung for a heart-stopping second by his hands, conscious only of the frailty of the metal and the appalling distance he would fall.

The wind was rising, tugging at his clothes, trying to jerk the G-12 off his shoulders. His hair blew about his face.

A large gull burst shrieking from a cleft in the rock, nearly dislodging his grip and sending him spinning into the void. But he held on and kept climbing remorselessly upward.

The ladder could only possibly have been built there for emergency purposes. There was no human way of making the climb, except in the direst of needs.

The wind had become almost a full-blown gale, howling like a cemetery banshee, deafening him to every other sound. It blanked out all of his senses except the ones that gripped the rusting iron and hauled him painfully upward, a trembling step at a time.

Ryan paused and blinked the spray from his eye, staring up. He was able to see only a few feet, but seeing... thinking he was seeing... the sharp edge of concrete only a half dozen rungs above his head. It had to be the top of the climb.

The sides of the ladder rose up and over in a semicircle of freezing, pitted metal. Ryan, drained by the struggle of leading the others into unknown blackness, clambered clumsily over the rim and collapsed on hands and knees on smoother stone. Krysty joined him a moment later, her breathing surging harshly.

"I've done easier things, lover," she panted. "Hope the others can make it."

"Only one way. Can't go down," he said, feeling strength already seeping back into his body.

It seemed an eternity before the next head loomed into sight, mirrored gla.s.ses making it appear like a bizarrely mutated stick insect.

"Doc's... close behind. Near falling. Lori tied herself to him with belt. Told him if he let go he'd... take her with... with him. Been pulling from above. I would not do that again for immortal life."

With a great effort the three of them managed to heave the old man and the girl over the brink onto the flat platform. Doc collapsed, totally exhausted, and Lori fell behind him, retching on hands and knees, threads of vomit dangling from her sagging mouth.

"Five up and two to go," Ryan said.

Jak was next, hair plastered to his angular skull like a snow-plas mask. He was sobbing for breath, and he joined Lori, doubled up.

Last was J.B., his trusty fedora jammed down the front of his jacket. His gla.s.ses were totally misted with sea spray, but he climbed the last few steps as sprightly as if he'd been out for an afternoon scramble with a pair of maiden aunts.

Ryan had found a small iron door, covered in lichen, at the rear of the platform, and he left the others and pushed at it, finding that it swung open easily. His eye winced at the brightness of light inside, startling after the long blackness.

But he could see enough to make out a slackly grinning mouth and shadowed eyes that seemed to mutter brain death. And below that the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.

Chapter Five.

"HI. WHOOOOO YOU?".

The fluting, owllike voice was like that of a young child. But the face above the scattergun was at least sixty years old, lined and furrowed, with a pale, unhealthy sheen to it, overlaid with a gray patina of dust and grease. The crazed eyes stared at Ryan out of pits of scoured bone, deadly flat and so dark a brown that they blurred into black. There were no teeth in the yellowed gums that leered at Ryan Cawdor. His hair was the color of rotting corn, pasted thinly over the crumpled scalp. Both ears pointed backward instead of forward. The man wore a shapeless suit of crudely woven wool, dyed a sickly green-yellow. Ryan wrinkled his nose at the foul smell of damp and decay that billowed around him.

"Whooooo you?" the voice repeated.

"Name's Ryan Cawdor. What do they call you?"

"Don't knooooow. Nooooo name for meeee. How you come?"

"Up the ladder. Had a boat wrecked below on the rocks. Climbed up. Long way, ain't it?"

The head nodded, but the gun never s.h.i.+fted. The stranger's finger never moved off the twin triggers of the battered Remington.

"Long waaaaay. Sure is. Upanupanup."

The man was a perfect target for anyone behind Ryan, with that bright light haloing him, and he wouldn't be able to see any of the others in the blackness outside. However, any of the other six would also be able to see the shotgun pointing just below Ryan's breastbone. It was way better than evens that a bullet through the toothless mouth could also mean a hole in Ryan's guts.

"Why the gun?" Ryan asked, taking care not to let his own fingers stray toward the blaster in his belt.

"Why not? There's a riddle, innit? Riddlemereeeeee. You come the ladder?"

"Yeah."

"Up it?"

"Sure."

"Now you gooooo down it."

"How's that?" The muzzle jabbing toward Ryan made it clear what the mutie

meant.

"Down, down." The movement stopped. "You got any c.o.kes?"

"Drinks, you mean?"

The face split wider in a smile of delight. "You know it."

In a few of the redoubts that Ryan Cawdor had helped to uncover, there'd been

rooms full of supplies. The familiar red-and-white cans were sometimes there, still good and drinkable after all the long years.

"Could have," Ryan said cautiously, hedging his bets for the crazie.

"Where?"

"In the boat. Out there." He pointed behind him, where he could sense the others waiting, tensely, for a chance to chill the stranger.

"I been here lotsa days. Found a room with cansa c.o.ke innit. Had-" a look of concentrated effort crossed the man's face "-had meeee same cans as fingers every day. More lotsa times. All days been here all life been here."

Ryan's mind boggled. If this gibbering dotard had really been in this redoubt all his life and had been drinking ten cans of soft drink every day, he must have finished off...hundreds of thousands of them. Somewhere there must be a graveyard of tins bigger than a dozen war wags.

"Not had any for days now. Lotsa days. How many you got?"

"Lots." Ryan held up both hands to show ten fingers, clenching and opening them, drawing the sunken, mad little eyes.

The barrels of the scattergun wavered for a moment, which was all that Ryan needed.

He slashed down with his left hand, parrying the blaster away, simultaneously diving low and to his left, inside the doorway.

"Chill him!" he yelled.

The blast of gunfire filled his ears, and he was conscious of the all too familiar warm rain of blood and bone splinters cascading over him. The mutie didn't even have time for a proper scream as he saw his own pa.s.sing-a m.u.f.fled cry and then the clatter of the Remington hitting the floor, followed by the loose flailing as he went down after the blaster. One of his feet kicked Ryan in the ribs before he could roll away.

"You can get up, Ryan," J.B. said. "He's going nowhere."

He stood up, dusting himself off, seeing that J.B., Jak and Krysty were all holding smoking blasters. The dead mutie lay in a jumbled heap of torn flesh, dark blood puddled all around him.

Jak picked up the fallen shotgun, flicking it open. "Empty," he said laconically. "Not fired for fifty years by dirt."

"Is that a mistake?" Donfil asked, stooping to get through the doorway, out of the screeching wind and spray.

"No," Ryan answered. "Mistake would have been if it had been me down and done for. No. No mistake at all, friend."

DOC WAS IN A PARLOUS STATE. The shock of the climb-after the immersion in freezing seawater-had carried him beyond the level of exhaustion. And, as is often the case, the mind had gone along with his body. Lori and Ryan carried him in, while Krysty finally closed the door on the bitter storm that raged outside in the night. The old man was talking incessantly, in a ragged monotone, half inaudible, the rest complete nonsense.

"Cape Cod, summer of '95. Bitter chill it was. The crabs for all their feathers were... Emily, belly swollen like a milkmaid, smiling in the sun. Rachel tarry-hooting around like a heathen savage. We went so gentle into the far-off beating of a slackskin drum." The eyes snapped open and stared with a fiery intelligence into Ryan's good eye. "You lied who told me time would ease my pain. I miss them in the turning of the tides. I miss them in the weeping of the rain. There's a wind on the heath, Brother Ryan. Life is very sweet. Who would wish to die?"

His eyes closed and he fell deeply asleep, even as they carried him into the depths of the isolated redoubt.

For reasons that n.o.body would ever know, it seemed that the nameless mutie had been living alone in that section of the complex for most of his life. There were rooms filled with empty and rotten self-heats and ring-pulls. It had been the storage section, and there were still enough racks of food and drink to keep a small army supplied for months.

There was also a whole wing of the redoubt equipped as dormitories, with part.i.tions dividing off small rooms, each with half a dozen metal-frame bunk beds.

They laid Doc on one of them, and Lori crashed out on the bed beside. J.B. and Jak joined the shaman in a room just along the pa.s.sage.