Death Hunt. James Axler

      Chapter One

      “‘It’s a mighty long way down the dusty trail…’”

      “Don’t—”

      “‘Where the sun bursts hot on the…’ By the Three Kennedys, the next line has completely escaped me!” Doc exclaimed.

      “That’s a blessing, if nothing else,” Mildred murmured. She’d been pleading with Doc to stop quoting half-remembered lines, which she found more irritating than if he had been able to quote whole stanzas, for what seemed to be hours. It couldn’t really have been that long, but time was beginning to drag.

      The companions were seated in the kitchen area of a redoubt, the last of the dried and still-edible frozen goods in pots on top of the stove. The self-heats had been securely stowed for their journey ahead; they’d leave when their chrons told them it was daylight up above.

      A pall of gloom hung over the six friends, caused by the fact that there were only, now, the six. Ryan had veered between raging anger and deep sorrow in the time following the discovery that Sharona had jumped and taken Dean with her.

      Although all of the companions had been shocked at the sudden departure of the boy, and hadn’t known what to make of the circumstances, it seemed that Cawdor had been hit on a deeper level—from which a scar had formed that was more pronounced than any physical reminder of his hard, raging life. Questions consumed Ryan’s mind. Had she tricked the boy? Or had he left of his own accord, without a word to his father and friends? Where were they now? What was to become of them? He had withdrawn into himself, not even wishing to share his anger, pain and confusion with Krysty. For several days he had been little more than a spectral presence, haunting the corridors of the redoubt where they were now resting.

      He finally emerged into their midst, and spoken, his tone grim, resigned. But it was the dulled quality of his one good eye that was the biggest sign of his pain, its hard glitter and diamond-hardness temporarily gone.

      “Wherever that bitch has jumped, and wherever they both are, there’s no way we can follow. And she knows that…” He didn’t add that it was Dean who would have told her or that this was the hardest thing of all to bear. “But even if we can’t follow, we can still hope…I can still hope,” he added after a pause. “All we can do is carry on. I want us to get out of here as soon as we can.”

      There were no arguments from the others. To jump from this redoubt would remove Ryan from the source. To move on in physical space would make the moving on within him that little bit easier to initiate.

      The companions scoured the redoubt, stripping the place of anything useful. No one spoke much, and the task was achieved in triple-quick time. They were soon entering the mat-trans chamber, settling into positions that would reduce the stress and agony that came with every jump.

      It was the one-eyed man himself who closed the chamber door, folding his length into a sitting position, knees drawn up protectively as the chamber air began to crackle as a white mist whirled wisplike from the metallic disks on the floor and ceiling.

      The obliquity of the jump was something Ryan welcomed.

      The deviation, however, didn’t last long.

      He was haunted by dreams, not the surreal nightmares of a mat-trans jump, the effect of every atom being broken, twisted and turned into an electron stream shot from one unit to another before being painfully reassembled. Those kinds of nightmares, at least, had shape to them. They were sickening, and exposed every fear and loathing contained within the human brain. But they were just nightmares, just the subconscious dredging up the detritus and spewing it out in protest of the battering it was taking from the jump.

      These hauntings were worse. They weren’t nightmares. They weren’t even dreams: neither in the sense of having coherence nor in having narrative; not even the distorted logic of most dreams. Instead, they were fragments: wisps as much as the white mist that had swirled around him before he’d finally passed out, with as much substance and with as much seemingly benign malevolence.

      A succession of images and memories passed through his brain like a cavalcade; Dean as a small boy—absurd, this, as Ryan hadn’t known of Dean until the boy was nine—Sharona as she was before the rad sickness; the Brody school in which he had enrolled the lad when he had found him again. The circumstances of his rejoining their party the last time, after being used as a gladiator in a sport of barons. What had happened since: snatching him from Jenna, the twisted wife of Baron Alien, who had mixed old-occult practices and the old tech nuke to make her own new way of promulgating a master race…Fireblast, but Ryan had thought Dean had been lost forever.

      The last image ripped from his head and held up in front of him was of Dean as he had last seen him: at rest in the redoubt, with plans for the next day. Plans to explore the underground base, to join his father and friends in stripping it before moving on to their next location, the next step in their search for…

      Well, for what? What was there now, beyond survival? Twice before Ryan had found his son and then lost him. Was there to be a third chance?

      Ryan opened his eye with the feeling that, should he part his lips, his intestines would vomit themselves out through his mouth and the pressure would blow his brains down through his nose.

      Except, this time, he wouldn’t fight it and he wouldn’t care.

      But he did. The nausea and sense of being turned inside out, the pounding in his skull, as some kind of consciousness returned…served to kick in his sense of survival. Operating on instinct rather than intellect, he pulled himself together, battling to regain the full use of all his senses as rapidly as possibly, lest the mat-trans chamber be vulnerable in any way, leaving them open to attack. He was first on his feet and the first to organize the six companions into a party capable of securing the immediate area.

      As always, it was Jak and Doc who took longest to recover from the jump. Doc’s body and mind had been through too much to withstand the jumps, but still the seemingly old man’s stubbornness pulled him through. As for Jak, he was tough, but there was something in him that didn’t respond to the jumps. The albino was always the last to come around, puking painfully as his body readjusted.

      J.B. and Mildred exchanged concerned glances as they secured the area. Ryan, perfunctory about the operation, made himself go through the motions, seemingly not as sharp as usual. Fortunately, Krysty could feel the darkness coming off him, which had nothing to do with her doomie sense and everything to do with her feelings for the one-eyed man, and was able to cover and compensate.

      A thorough recce determined that the redoubt was secure, so they settled in for some rest before heading into the outside world. In itself, the redoubt had been no problem. Deserted, it had remained untouched since the advent of skydark. The only signs of passing time were the layer of dust that had gathered where the gently wheezing air-conditioners had slowly begun to wind down without continuous maintenance. The air was slightly stale and some of the comps had cut out where transistors and fuses had died of age.

      As with most of the redoubts they had visited, there was no sign of life. Unlike many of those other redoubts, there was little sign that the land around the installation had suffered much upheaval. The levels they explored showed little other than minor cracks in the reinforced walls and ceilings.

      And unlike other bases, this one hadn’t been completely stripped. The armory would replenish their ammo supply and the clothes stores would provide much-needed new underwear, T-shirts