End Program
“Relax, Mr. Cawdor,” the softly spoken male voice instructed from the hidden speakers in the coffin walls. “You’re quite safe here.”
Ryan clenched his fists tighter. He would get one chance at this, one chance to surprise whoever the hell was waiting outside this sealed box. Ryan was a survivor—he would take that chance.
Above him, the illuminated panel seemed to be receding, but Ryan realized that it wasn’t the panel that was moving but him. Beneath him, the traylike floor of the coffin bed was drawing backward in the direction that Ryan’s head pointed. He tilted his neck back, craned his head and peered up at the panel there as it swished back on some kind of hidden runners.
After that, the bed of the coffin, as he had come to think of it, slid out from its position, and a room came into view, painted white and lit with subtle sidelights that were still dazzling after so long in the box. A man stood to the side of the retreating bed, dressed in white and facing the wall, his head tilted down to look at some kind of panel or screen that jutted there. The man was bald and wore a tinted visorlike item hooked over his ears that shielded his eyes. The man’s hands were poised on the panel as if he was playing a piano.
As the bed slid out from the wall, the man in white turned to Ryan and smiled. “How are you feeling, Mr. Cawdor?” he asked.
Ryan moved then, rolling off the bed before it could fully retract from the wall, and powering his left fist at the man’s jaw. He moved fast, his feet slapping against the cool floor tiles of the room. Ryan’s fist met the man’s jaw with an audible crack, and the bald stranger went crashing backward in a confusion of suddenly awkward limbs.
Everything was different now. Ryan had two eyes where he had become used to just one. Everything seemed suddenly more vivid, the whiteness of the walls brilliant, like lightning in the mist.
Naked, Ryan stepped forward and brought his right fist around in a brutal cross, striking the stranger’s face high on the left cheek before the man had even finished falling. Ryan felt light-headed, unsteady on his feet, but he knew he had to survive, which meant getting out of this trap—or whatever it was—as soon as possible.
“Mr. Cawdor, please—” the man cried, blood showing now between his teeth.
Ryan leaned down, his head still reeling, and punched the man again, striking him dead center of that weird visor he wore and snapping the plastic in two. The right half went spinning across the white-tiled floor while the left shattered, still clinging to the bridge of the man’s nose. A thin line of blood began to ooze from the man’s nose, following a slow path down the side of his tilted face.
“Where am I?” Ryan spit, crouched over the bald man, his face close to the stranger’s.
The man’s eyes rolled around in their sockets, struggling to keep focus. Ryan took that moment to look around him. He was in a small room, twelve-by-ten with plain white walls and a series of drawers running up the wall from which his bed or coffin had emerged. A single, plain door that looked like a flat panel was set in a recess in the wall opposite where the man had been standing. It had no handle and no control mechanism that Ryan could see. He waved one of his hands close to the door to see if he might activate a sensor, but nothing happened.
“Locked,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.
There were no windows in the room, but where the man had been standing was a pane of glass at roughly waist height, recessed and tilted at an angle so that a standing person could look down into it. With his left hand pressing firmly against the bald man’s breastbone, Ryan raised himself and peered at the glass: it was smoked but otherwise appeared blank.
Beneath him, Ryan felt the man stirring, and heard him mutter something. “Not...going...to hurt you,” the man said, blood washing across his teeth. “Please.”
“Where are my blasters?” Ryan growled. “Where are my friends?”
The bald man’s pink head swayed on his neck like a flower in the breeze, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. Then, as Ryan watched, his victim’s eyes rolled back so that all he could see were the whites behind the flickering lids.
“Fireblast!” Ryan growled, clambering up from the sprawled figure in the white overalls. The man was a weakling, glass jaw, no stamina. He wouldn’t last five minutes outside his lab.
Ryan peered around the room, searching for his weapons. Without warning, the vision in his left eye—the new one—flickered and changed. Ryan started as he saw something appear to scramble across the surface of the eye, flicked his hand before his face without thinking to brush it aside. It was a kind of cross-shaped overlay, like looking through the crosshairs of his Steyr longblaster.
“What the hell?” Ryan muttered, looking through the crosshairs. Almost as soon as he noticed it, it disappeared, as if willed out of existence. Something wasn’t right here, and the sooner he got the heck out of this lab the better, he thought.
Ryan went back to scanning the room, searching for his blasters and panga, wary this time of the strange effect that had popped up across his vision. There was no sign of the weapons, only the plain walls, the coffin drawers and a single, low table propped against one wall next to the door. Ryan pulled one of the drawers at random, but it appeared to be locked. His friends could be in there. Dammit, Ryan raged silently, where was he anyway?
He paced back across the room, standing before the unconscious figure. This place was clearly well appointed, which meant the odds were that this man was not working alone. Even now, Ryan realized, there could be an alarm going off, sec men being moved into position against him. He leaned over the man and checked his pockets, searching for a weapon or something to use as one. There was a tubelike metal thing with a pointed end of the approximate size of a ball-point pen or a small screwdriver. Ryan took it, figuring he could use it like a knife if he had to. The rest of the man’s pockets contained only papers and something that looked like a small circuit board, open with resistors and capacitors soldered to its surface. Ryan tossed it aside, checked the man’s pulse. He was still alive, but his pulse was slow—he would be out of it for a few minutes yet.
Ryan straightened, and as he did so the white door slid open on hidden tracks. As the door slid aside, he saw the edge of a figure who was standing there, a white padded shoulder of a jacket of some kind. Ryan leaped, shoving the door open with one hand while his other—holding the implement like a knife—slammed into the newcomer’s face. The man, dressed in a white topcoat and pants with a cloudburst of black curly hair around his head, staggered back under Ryan’s assault, slamming into the corridor wall behind him. “What th—?” the man stuttered as he went sailing into the wall.
“My friends. My weapons. Where are they?” Ryan growled, driving his left fist into the man’s gut to punctuate his statement.
The white-clad figure doubled over with the impact, hands reaching around to clutch his aching belly. “I—”
The Deathlands warrior pressed his hand against the man’s throat, drew back the metal tube. “Where?”
“Ryan, back off.” The voice was familiar, but it took a moment for him to register it. “Back off,” the voice said again, calling from the end of the corridor.
He turned in that direction and saw J.B. hurrying toward him, shouting for him to stop fighting. His old friend looked different—his clothes were cleaner, the arms on his glasses no longer slightly bent from wear. “Stand down, he wasn’t going to hurt you,” the Armorer stated.
“J.B.?” Ryan asked, bewildered.
Behind J.B., more familiar figures appeared in the white-walled corridor, along with several strangers, all of whom were wearing white clothing like the bald man. Mildred and Ricky hurried to join J.B., while Jak was somewhere behind the others but moving quickly to meet with Ryan. Mildred had a white, sleeveless jerkin over her olive-drab T-shirt, and Ricky was in his usual clothes but they had been cleaned. Jak, too, looked the same but different, his usually unruly long hair washed and smoothed. Besides those familiar faces, a man and two women—all of them looking to be under thirty—were striding up the corridor, looking surprised.
The corridor walls and ceiling were painted a clean white, while the floor had been finished in matching white tiles. Fluorescent lights ran the full length of the corridor without a break, set neatly in a recess that ran in the corners where walls met ceiling.
“What’s going on here?” Ryan asked. “Where are we?”
“We’re safe, we’re among friends. It’s okay,” J.B. said reassuringly, pressing a hand against his friend’s bare shoulder to calm him.
Ryan watched J.B., looking for that telltale flinch that would tell him that the Armorer was being pressured somehow, or that it was a trick. There was nothing, just J.B., clean-shaven, glasses polished, old brown fedora looking a little smarter where the dents had been knocked out of it for once.
“We’re safe, Ryan,” J.B.repeated. “We’re safe.”
Warily, Ryan drew the hand that held the metal tube away from the man he had attacked, pulled his other hand back from the man’s throat. The figure sagged against the wall, breathing with an agonized, choking gasp, blood on his face, a hole in his cheek.
“Where are we?” Ryan asked J.B..
Chapter Six
“They call this place Progress,” J.B. explained.
Ryan sat with the Armorer in a vast lounge area with panoramic windows that looked out over a ville of towering dwellings and predark factories. Jak, Mildred and Ricky were with them, and they all sat around a low table furnished with drinking glasses. The factories pumped smoke into the air, clouding the skies with trails of gray. Ryan had been given clothes to wear, a dressing gown with a simple tie that he had knotted at his waist. He had been assured that his own clothes would be returned shortly. They were being held in storage after being cleaned.
One of the locals, a young woman with flawless skin and blond hair tied back in a braid, had asked Ryan if he needed anything, and when he told her he was thirsty she hurried away and returned a half minute later with bottle of clear water. The bottle didn’t smell of pollutants or of poison, so Ryan sipped at its contents warily as he took in everything J.B. was telling him. The blonde stood on the far side of the room, ostensibly admiring the view through the windows but actually keeping an eye on Ryan in case he went on another rampage. Other people from the ville had been sent to deal with the wounded that Ryan had left in his wake.
“Progress,” Ryan repeated, skepticism clear in his tone.
“Stupe name, I guess,” J.B. admitted, “but you get used to it. The ville was built around an old military base—redoubt, mat-trans, the whole enchilada. When we jumped out of that redoubt greenhouse from hell...you remember that?”
Ryan nodded, taking another sip of water.
“When we jumped, we wound up here,” J.B. continued. “We were all pretty beat-up when we arrived—”
“I remember the armaglass wall imploding,” Ryan confirmed.
“Yeah, you got a face-full of that,” J.B. told him regretfully, “and we all got cut up pretty bad. Some of the glass came with us too, and really did a number on us.”
“Where’s Krysty?” Ryan asked. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Mildred told him, leaning closer. “Doc too.”
“Well, mebbe a bit more ornery,” J.B. added, “if you want my opinion.”
Mildred shot a look at J.B. “Everyone made it, Ryan,” she said. “We’re all okay. The people here in Progress went above and beyond to patch us up.”
Ryan nodded, reaching up with one hand to feel at the alien eye that had been placed in the empty socket. “So I see,” he said, the irony of the phrase lost on him. “What is this thing, Mildred? What did they do to me?”
“We’ve been here two weeks, Ryan,” J.B. replied before Mildred could speak. “Some of us were badly wounded by the armaglass. We’d all lost a lot of blood.”
“The locals treated us,” Mildred stated. “They saw the damage to your face, and they plucked out all the debris you’d got showered with. When they saw your missing eye, well, they improvised.”
“So, I can see again?” Ryan asked. He knew that he could, but he wanted to know how.
“The locals will explain it to you more fully,” Mildred told him, “but basically they’ve fused a computerized camera to your optic nerve, allowing you to use both eyes once more.”
“It has crosshairs,” Ryan said, glancing across the room to where the blonde stood. Jak was watching her too, he noticed; as usual, the albino was alert, suspicious of anyone he didn’t know.
“Your new eye has a lot of things,” Mildred replied. “From what they told me, that’s a pretty serious piece of hardware they’ve put inside your skull.”
“And they did this for nothing?” Ryan asked, knowing that everything had a price. He gazed out the window behind Mildred, focusing his vision, changing the depth. The artificial eye responded seamlessly, and when he drew a close bead on something in the distance those faint crosshairs reappeared over his left field of vision.
“As far as we can tell,” Mildred replied. “They have a philosophy here in Progress about changing the world and making things better again. They want to fix the mess that the nukecaust left us. They want to repair the Deathlands so people can live here and prosper.”
Ryan looked at Mildred, then turned to J.B. before addressing them both. “Where is this place?” he asked.
“California,” J.B. answered. “Some part of it that survived the San Andreas problem.”
Ryan looked out at the blue sky, wondering what they had walked into this time; wondering if they could survive in a place where survival didn’t seem to be a struggle.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER THAT, two of the locals joined Ryan’s group in the lounge, carrying his clothes—repaired and freshly laundered—as well as his combat boots and his familiar weapons.
The locals were a man and a woman, the man was quite young while the woman looked to be approaching middle age, slivers of iron gray in her hair, wrinkles clawed around her eyes. They seemed pleasant enough, albeit subservient in their attitude. They reminded Ryan of his childhood, growing up as a baron’s son in Front Royal, where his every need was attended to by servants.
Ryan began to disrobe there in the lounge, but the woman held her hand up before her and suggested he follow her to a separate room, where he might dress in privacy. He followed her out of the lounge, into a white-walled hallway to a door. It slid aside at the woman’s touch, and Ryan looked at her confused.
“How’d you do that?” he asked.
The woman held up her left hand, and Ryan noticed the unobtrusive band of silver she wore on her middle finger like a wedding ring. “The doors are programmed to respond to this,” she said.
Ryan nodded, not really sure what to say. He had seen technology before; of course he had—the redoubts he and his companions used to travel the secret roads of the Deathlands were graced with working technology that dated back over a hundred years, and seemed far in advance of anything humankind was capable of these day. He had also fought with mechanical devices before now, robotic things that walked like norms but chilled with the coldheartedness of machines. Even so, this was new—this ville with its hidden locks and uncluttered, almost sterile environment.
The room’s walls were painted white like the other parts of the complex that he had seen, with illumination gradually manifesting from a low dimness. The room had a small window at one end, and it featured a single bed, walk-in wardrobe and a small basin for washing.
“Let me know if you need anything,” the woman told him as she placed his weapons on the bed. “I’ll be just outside. My name’s Roma, by the way.”
“Good to meet you, Roma-by-the-way,” Ryan said with a self-deprecating smile.
Roma left and the door to the room sealed behind her. Alone, Ryan paced, deep in thought. There was a mirror located on the wall beside the basin, set at a height to shave by, and when Ryan paused before it a hidden light tucked into a fold in the mirror’s frame glowed brighter, lighting his face for the reflection. He looked at himself, assessing his appearance as if for the first time. Black curly hair, a little disheveled where he had been sleeping in the coffin-drawer. Chin, clean shaved for the first time in weeks.
Eyes—two.
The right one was an intense shade of blue, the left a little duller perhaps, but a close enough match. He looked at it in the mirror, the way it rested in his socket as if it had been there forever. As he looked, staring more and more intensely at the workmanship that had gone into that artificial orb, the crosshairs reappeared over his vision, like a faint blurring in the air, forming a central point that had been left open to view.
As Ryan continued looking, the vision in his left eye magnified—x2, x5, x10—running through the magnifications in rapid succession, so quick it made him feel nauseous. Ryan’s right eye, his real eye, remained at normal focus, unable to magnify, leaving him with the disorienting double image of distant and close-up at the same time.
He closed his eyes, brought his hands up to his face, breathing fast.
“What did they do to me?” Ryan muttered, trying to keep from being sick.
Behind him, there came a light tapping at the door followed by Roma’s voice. “Mr. Cawdor, are you decent?”
“Decent?” Ryan asked the air.
“Are you dressed? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”
Raising his head tentatively, Ryan opened his eyes and reached for the SIG Sauer blaster that rested on the bedcover beside his piled clothes. “Yeah, I’m decent,” he said, flipping off the safety.
The door slid back on near-silent runners and Krysty stepped into the room, while Roma waited obediently outside. Krysty looked beautiful—more beautiful than Ryan had remembered, he would swear. Her vivid red hair swirled around her pale face like a flame, her eyes the green of sunlight through emerald. She was dressed in a version of her usual clothes—blouse, jeans—but they were white. Only her familiar blue cowboy boots remained as Ryan remembered, and even they had been reheeled and polished to remove the scuffs from walking thousands miles of the Deathlands. The boots looked almost new. Ryan held his breath as he saw her, his heart pounding.
“Ryan, I’m so happy to finally see you!” Krysty ran the last few steps and flew into Ryan’s arms, hugging him fiercely. She pressed her face into his neck, as if she could not get close enough. “You’re okay,” she sobbed, “you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Ryan assured her, stroking her red hair with his free hand. She smelled of soap and cleanser, fresh like mountain air.
With his other hand, Ryan slipped the safety back on the SIG Sauer and dropped the blaster back onto the bed before bringing his arm back around to hold Krysty to him. “I’m all right,” he told her again. “What about you? Are you okay?”
Krysty nodded her reply; Ryan felt the movement against his neck.
“What did I miss?” Ryan asked, his eyes locked on the door to the room to check it had closed, and that they were alone.
“Two weeks,” Krysty said, the words coming out like a sigh. “You were two weeks in that bath, Ryan—”
“Bath?” Ryan asked, confused.
“Nutrient bath,” Krysty said, pulling herself reluctantly from Ryan’s strong arms. “When we got here, you’d been hit by the imploding wall of the mat-trans—did they tell you that?”
“J.B. and Mildred said something about it,” Ryan confirmed, reaching for his pants. They had been freshly laundered and smelled—well, they smelled clean, which was nothing short of remarkable, considering how long he’d been wearing these particular duds.
“You were badly injured,” Krysty explained. “We all were. A great chunk of that glass had jumped with us when the mat-trans activated, and we brought it with us in the jump. When we materialized, the glass was still moving. You got the worst of it, but Doc and Jak got a couple of nasty cuts too.”
“And you?” Ryan prompted.
Krysty shook her head. “A few cuts and grazes,” she said, pushing her right sleeve up and showing him the skin there. It was unmarked. “Had a few scabs here a week ago, but they’ve healed.”
“Sore?”
“No.”
Ryan nodded, slipping out of the dressing gown and reaching for his shirt. As he did, Krysty pressed her hand against his chest, running her fingers through his chest hair.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.
Ryan was a pragmatist. He desired Krysty in that moment, but he wanted to stay alive too. He knew that staying alive sometimes meant foregoing the things he wanted. Right now, he needed to know all the facts, before someone put a bullet in the back of his head or dumped him back in that coffin where he had woken up.
“You said about a nutrient bath,” Ryan said thoughtfully, pushing Krysty gently away.
“After you were hit by the glass, you fell unconscious,” Krysty said, picking up her story. “You’d lost a lot of blood—were still losing it. We were all in a mess.”
“What happened?”
“Someone outside the chamber somehow opened the mat-trans door. Doc figured they did it with a comp,” Krysty said. “It was the people here, a team of them, and they came to help us. They took us away, nursed everyone’s injuries. Mildred said they did a commendable job.”
“What about me?” Ryan pressed.
“You’d suffered the worst of us,” Krysty told him, and he saw worry in her face as she thought back. “There was a whole pool of your blood on the mat-trans floor. They took you away on a gurney, rushed you over to their medical center—”
“And you let them?” Ryan bit off the rest of his comment. It wasn’t an accusation or criticism; he was merely surprised to hear his companions would have been so trusting.
“Like I said, we were pretty messed up after the jump,” Krysty explained. “J.B. questioned them, tried to stop them, I think, but none of us was in a state to put up much of a fight. We didn’t need to, thank goodness.
“They took care of you, lover. They took you straight to surgery and removed the glass, then they started patching you up. They have advanced techniques here—that’s according to Mildred. She understands more about it than I do. She says they used nanobots to repair your body, dunked you in a nutrient bath full of them to give you time to recover.”
“How long?” Ryan asked.
“Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.
“Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him. “They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile state.”
Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the eye?” he said.
“I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him. “None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident, I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”
Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.
“It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process it?
“The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”
“There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”
Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.
Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall for you all over again right now.”