Shaking Earth

Chapter Three

Hardness against his cheek. Pulsing warm—or was he only feeling the heat being drawn out of his face into a floor cold as a baron’s heart?

Ryan lay on his belly. He was unaware of having fallen. The world, slowly, ceased to spin around him.

The groans of his companions made their way through the fog that wrapped his brain. It had been a bad jump, the kind that reached down your gullet and yanked your guts out your mouth.

Krysty!

His eye felt as if it were glued shut. He forced it open. The upper lid came away from the lower with a sick gummy sensation. His empty socket throbbed with scarlet pulses of ache.

Krysty at least had begun the jump on her back, carefully laid down by Mildred and Ryan. She remained pretty much as they had left her, left arm strapped across her sternum to immobilize it. The right, which had been crossed over her stomach, now lay by her side. A thin trickle of blood ran to the floor of the gateway where she had clenched her fist so hard during the jump that her nails had pierced her palm. Her face was unnaturally pale, almost blue, contrasting harshly with her hair, which lay limp around her head like a tangle of red seaweed.

Ryan crawled to her, more lizard than man, feeling as if a mutie the size of a mountain were squatting on his back jeering at his misery. He grabbed her right arm, felt for pulse inside her wrist. It was there and strong.

Now that he knew his woman lived, Ryan allowed himself cautiously to become aware of more of his surroundings. The chamber had walls of orange-red armaglass that passed the dim illumination of the room beyond, which had automatically come on when the gateway powered up to materialize them, like the glow of a fire. There were bad smells, not the bland sterile smell of a long-unused chamber. There were sounds, too: dull distant thumps like giant stone fists being slammed together; pops and cracks like the fire of heavy blasters, the kind needed to be toted with a big war wag; and under everything a deep-note noise that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite a roar, with a bit of crackle and sort of a seethe. A sound you could hear through your bones if both eardrums were shot.

Ryan braced himself on one elbow and looked around. J.B. had hauled himself to a sitting position and was helping Mildred do likewise. Jak already sat with his knees drawn up and his crimson eyes sunk in his face like blood spots in a sheet. A dribble of puke, semidried, still trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Shit,” the albino said. “Look like Doc croaked.”

Doc lay on his back, arms outstretched, mouth agape, rheumy eyes staring unblinking at the top of the mat-trans chamber. Seeing him like that made Mildred shift to rise up and tend to him. Then she settled back down on her haunches, gazing sorrowfully at him and shaking her head. There was obviously no point.

“I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”

Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.

He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.

The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”

Ryan recoiled as if the old man had transformed into a coiled diamondback. “Fireblast!”

Doc sat up with an almost audible creak of joints. “Indeed. One might think you had never seen a man in repose.”

“Doc, you was the deadest-looking article I ever hope to see,” the Armorer said with a chuckle. The old man stood, shot his cuffs and dusted off his frock coat.

“Lover.”

Ryan’s head snapped around. Krysty was sitting up. The color had returned to her cheeks. Before he or Mildred, who had at last gained her own feet, could move to assist her, she stood.

BARE FROM THE WAIST UP, Krysty Wroth had sat in the infirmary of the Rocky Mountain redoubt, teeth locked on Ryan’s scuffed old leather belt. Mildred Wyeth had a pair of channel-lock pliers from J.B.’s armorer’s kit clamped on the head of the crossbow quarrel. The coldheart missile had a barbed iron head that reached halfway down the shaft to make it hard for the recipient to tear it out of the wound. However, a crossbow quarrel had enormous penetrating power. The bolt had actually gone all the way through Krysty’s left shoulder to tent out the fabric of her jumpsuit with two inches of gory tip.

“Hold on, Krysty,” Mildred said. She pulled hard. Krysty closed her eyes, her fingers dug deep as talons into Ryan’s hand. She made no sound.

The quarrel came free with a sucking sound. Blood gushed out, flowing down into towels they’d discovered inside an old laundry storage bin and heaped around the redhead’s middle. Mildred had told the others they’d need to let the wound bleed freely for a short time to flush the channel. The benefit would offset the minor additional blood loss.

But even before she nodded to Ryan and J.B. to start pressing gauze compresses over the holes, entrance and exit, Mildred’s broad dark face was wrinkled in a gesture of disgust. Ryan frowned.

“The smell,” Mildred said, holding the grisly trophy away from her. “Not much question what it is.”

“Not gangrene, surely?” Doc Tanner asked.

“Way too soon. No, it’s feces, probably human. Those coldheart mothers didn’t miss a beat.”

“Want to guarantee nobody gets away from them,” J.B. said, sharing a grim look with Ryan. They were well familiar with that particular trick from their time with Trader, years before. Smearing a penetrating weapon, like a missile or a punji stick, with human feces all but guaranteed infection, deep-seated and virulent, in anyone unlucky enough to be punctured by it.

“There’s still alcohol and gauze left in the redoubt stores, and even some packets of antibiotic powder,” Mildred said. “I can make a lick and a promise at cleaning out the filth. I can make a pass at debriding the wound, cutting out the dead and tainted flesh with a scalpel, to minimize the infection. But one thing we don’t have is anesthetics.”

Krysty sat, pallid and swaying, with Ryan’s arm around her. “Do what you need to do, Mildred. I can take it.”

“Do you need to?” Ryan asked. “What about Krysty’s natural ability to heal?”

“It has its limits,” Mildred said, “like everything else. As a doctor and a friend, I can’t in conscience let it go without getting some of that crap out of there. I think we can pass on debriding, since that would add to the existing trauma, and nothing in my power is going to prevent infection totally. On the other hand, cleaning the wound channel will help keep the infection down while doing minimal extra damage. But…it’ll be rough.”

It was. Mildred had borrowed both a segmented screw-together aluminum cleaning rod from J.B.’s kit and the concept of another gun-cleaning implement, the pull-through bore scrubber. She used the rod to poke a string through the wound, back to front, and then used it to pull through some thicker cord braided first with alcohol-soaked gauze patches, then dry ones, and finally patches liberally coated in broad-spectrum antibiotic powder. Krysty had endured all in the same stoic silence with which she had taken Mildred’s pulling out the bolt. But by the end her eyes were tightly shut and Ryan had to hang on to her to prevent her toppling from the steel table as she passed out.

SHE’D STRUCK IT lucky one way, anyway: she’d been out for the jump. Now she was standing unassisted.

“Careful, there,” Ryan began, eyeing Krysty carefully in case she started to sway.

Krysty shook her head, smiling. Her hair continued to stir around her shoulders after the motion was done.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Well, not fine. I’m okay for the moment. The power of Gaia is strong right here and now. Can’t you feel it?”

“I can sure hear it,” Ryan said. The colossal groans and creaks and thuds reverberating in the very marrow of his bones could only originate within the Earth itself, he knew.

“The infection’s working in me,” Krysty said. “Gaia’s power will help me fight it, but I’ll need time.”

“Time, fair lady, is one commodity we might not be vouchsafed,” Doc said. “Judging from the prevalence of mephitic vapors, if we have not actually attained the infernal regions, we may have found ourselves in surroundings scarcely more salubrious.”

“From the smell of sulfur and the sound effects,” J.B. said, looking up and around the mat-trans chamber as if judging how likely it was to hold up, “I reckon we might just have jumped in the belly of a live smoky.” He shrugged. “Out of the frying pan—”

“But these redoubts were built to withstand nuclear explosions,” Mildred protested. “What can a volcanic eruption do to them?”

Doc shook his head, his face set in a look of bloodhound mournfulness. “Much, it is to be feared, dear lady. When I was the involuntary guest of the Totality Concept and Operation Chronos in your own charming time, I read studies to the effect that a single large eruption discharged the force of many, many multimegaton warheads. The illusion of safety afforded by our surroundings may be precisely that.”

“A live volcano? What imbecile would’ve decided to build a redoubt inside a volcano?” Mildred asked.

“It might not’ve been live back before skydark,” Ryan said. “Mebbe they reckoned on it staying dormant.”

“And how much do you trust whitecoat judgment?” J.B. asked. “They did such a swell job with the good Doc here.”

“Talk fills no empty bellies or water bottles,” Ryan said. “We better take a look-see, find out what’s actually going on.”

He glanced around the chamber with its flame-colored walls, now sinister and suggestive. Had the builders intended it as some kind of ironic commentary on their own arrogance in building their shelter in the gut of a volcano? Or was it a sign of their obliviousness?

He didn’t bother to shrug. Only bigger waste of time than reckoning men’s motives, he thought, was trying to reckon dead men’s motives.

“Let’s move,” he said. “Krysty keeps to the rear, with Mildred to guard her.” Ryan stepped forward and opened the door to the chamber.

Mildred nodded, her ZKR already in hand. Krysty, he noted with approval, hadn’t drawn her own weapon. Last thing anybody headed into potential danger—and the unknown was always dangerous—was somebody at his back with a blaster who wasn’t in complete control of himself. Or herself. Normally, Krysty pulled her weight and more without being asked. Now she did her part by keeping out of the way, because Gaia or not, she wasn’t fit to fight, and had sense to know and accept it.

He nodded to J.B., who with scattergun ready moved swiftly out the open door of the mat-trans chamber. He stepped left to clear the doorway. Ryan followed, holding his 9 mm SIG-Sauer in both hands, through the antechamber and right, to hunker down behind a control console. Each scanned half of the large room beyond, all senses stretched to greatest sensitivity, not just vision.

This room was pretty standard, if darker than usual. Black walls and ceiling seemed to soak up the dim white light that had come on automatically when the transfer completed. The room was circular, perhaps ten yards across. The only visible doors were closed.

Except for the groans and bangs of the Earth itself, shivering up through the floor and Ryan’s boots and the bones of his legs, the place gave off a pervasive feel of emptiness, of deadness.

“Clear,” J.B. said.

“Clear,” Ryan echoed.

Jak came out next as if shot from a coldheart crossbow, hitting the far wall with his big Python a dull metallic gleam in both hands, covering the room either side of the mat-trans. Doc came next, LeMat held out at full extent of one arm as if probing like an insect’s feeler.

Jak’s nose was twitching like a wild animal’s and his lip was curled. “Stinks,” he said. “But dead. Nobody here.”

“Reckon you’re right,” Ryan said. “But we make sure. Mildred, you and Krysty stay here and stay sharp. The rest of us will secure the place.”

THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY, all right. Its automatic life-support systems seemed to function properly. As the four men moved with swift caution through the corridors and up and down stairs the stench of brimstone, which had infiltrated the vast subterranean structure over a century or more, was replaced by cooler, cleaner-smelling air scrubbed by the filters. “Cleaner-smelling” was a relative term; the redoubt was full of a musty smell no HVAC system could exorcise, of dust and mildew and disuse—and, faintly but unmistakably, of death. They found several corpses, shrunk and mummified in the dry sterilized air, bundled in ancient U.S. army uniforms. Unusual.

When the group came back to the gateway control room Ryan was alarmed to find Krysty lying apparently unconscious on a pallet composed of their coats and jackets. “She’s just resting,” Mildred said, moving away and lowering her voice so as not to disturb her patient. “Letting Gaia get a head start on healing her. They and me got a job of work ahead of us.” She studied the four. “Especially if we need to move right away.”

“You called the shot,” J.B. said. “Place is cleaned out pretty good. No food, no weps, no meds. There’s all the water we could want. We can get cleaned up and drink until our skins are swollen out like three-day-old deaders. But that’s all she wrote for resupply.”

Mildred sucked in her lower lip. The mountain retreat had been good to them. The abundance of game and natural food to gather had left them with a few days’ MREs and self-heats in all their packs. But all that really granted them was a little time to forage for more food in whatever terrain lay beyond the redoubt—and the erupting volcano.

“And to think,” Mildred said sourly, “right about now those bastard coldhearts are stuffing their faces with that nice juicy deer I gutted. Well, we can’t stay here, even if the roof doesn’t open up and pour lava on our heads.”