End Program

“Quite,” Doc acknowledged, nodding.

Mildred tore a chunk from a bread roll and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I’ve had worse,” she admitted. “Rat meat, leafy stew, boot—” She stopped abruptly, remembering the horrific moments when she had almost become a cannibal. Ryan had secretly promised to chill her then, if that’s what was needed, and so she had trusted him with her life until she could be cured. “I’ve had worse,” she finished lamely.

Laughing, Ricky reached for another roll. “It won’t ever taste as good as my mama’s cooking,” he said, “but I’ll take it if it’s free.” Then he took a second roll and a third, and began juggling them with casual dexterity. “Anyone else want a roll?” he asked.

Jak and J.B. told Ricky that they did, and both found themselves the recipients of juggled rolls that landed perfectly on their respective plates.

“With an arm like that, he should have played baseball,” Mildred said, shaking her head.

“Mayhap one day,” Doc told her, “when all of this horror is past.”

J.B. chewed a corner of his roll thoughtfully and glanced back to the window. Ryan and Krysty could be seen there making their way gradually back up the paved street. “You think Ryan’s going to be okay?” he asked Mildred.

“He’s got a new eye,” Mildred reasoned. “That’s going to take some getting used to. But it can only be beneficial for him, and for us too.”

“I don’t know,” the Armorer said. “Ryan’s done pretty okay by us with just one eye. There hasn’t been an occasion I can think of where I’ve regretted the loss of his eye. Can you?”

Doc and Jak shook their heads, while Mildred verbally agreed.

“I have not known Ryan very long,” Ricky admitted, “but the man is a crack shot with his blasters. I never gave much thought to what it must be like for him, living with one eye.”

“It messes with your depth perception,” Mildred told Ricky and the others, “but Ryan compensates well. He’s had a lot of time to get used to living like that. I just hope this new eye doesn’t throw off his rhythms.”

“Ryan Cawdor is a survivor,” Doc reminded them all. “He will always win through. I suggest we accept the outcome of this visit—his new eye—as propitious and do not look the proverbial given horse in its mouth.”

* * *

OUTSIDE, RYAN HAD expressed feeling tired and so Krysty walked with him slowly back to the medical facility.

“Any idea how many people live here?” Ryan asked, admiring the towers.

“A hundred, maybe more,” Krysty told him.

As they walked, Ryan assessed their surroundings. Everything looked newly built, even the street looked freshly paved, its stones shining a brilliant white. But here and there, Ryan spotted evidence of another world, the world before the nukecaust—a road sign, triangular metal on a pole that had been bent to one side; hints of the blacktop of an ancient road that had run along the same pattern as the streets.

“I wonder what this place used to be?” Ryan said.

Krysty pointed to a low building that ran crosswise to the others, poised at the end of the broad thoroughfare. It looked dirtier than the rest and older, despite some obvious attempts at repair work. “See that? Old military redoubt. That’s where we popped in via the mat-trans. It must have been built back before the nukecaust.”

“Unusual seeing so much aboveground,” Ryan observed. In his experience, most of the ancient army facilities were built underground, with just an entrance visible aboveground.

“Doc figures that when the plates started shifting around the whole redoubt popped out from under,” Krysty said, “or that everything around it sunk.”

“That sounds more likely,” Ryan said. “Redoubts were built to last.” He eyed the ancient building a few seconds longer, marveling at their luck in landing in a safe community. Usually it went the other way—if there were people living near a mat-trans, the first thing they would do would be to try to chill Ryan and his companions. And the second thing they would do, as the old Deathlands joke had it, was die. Heaven Falls came to mind.... Nothing was given away free.

* * *

RYAN AND KRYSTY joined the others just as they finished their meal.

“’Tis heartening to see you back on your feet,” Doc said, standing to shake Ryan’s hand.

“Thanks, Doc,” Ryan said, grasping the old man’s hand. “You too.”

“You’ve had a look around?” Mildred asked. “Is everything okay? Do you feel all right?” Mildred was a doctor and her question was strictly professional; if Ryan expressed any concerns she would have him checked over immediately.

“I’m okay, Mildred,” Ryan answered, keeping his voice low, “and I think it’s time we were going.”

J.B. looked at Ryan quizzically. “Something bothering you?”

He shook his head. “Nothing particular,” he said. “I just don’t like staying in one place for too long. Remember Heaven Falls.”

“I hear you,” J.B. agreed.

“Jak? Did you look around?”

Leaning back in his chair, Jak nodded solemnly, picking at his teeth.

“We both did,” Ricky explained. “Got about a mile out. No one was bothered much about it.”

“What did you find?” Ryan asked the dark-haired teen.

“Nothing worth finding,” Ricky told him. “We’re a little way up in some mountains—”

“Here,” J.B. said, showing Ryan their approximate position on a map he had produced from one of his capacious pockets.

Ryan looked over the map as Ricky continued.

“The immediate area is dead, nothing much out there other than birds and insects,” Ricky said.

“Nothing worth eatin’,” Jak elaborated tersely.

“Looked like mebbe some villes out to the east,” Ricky picked up. “Small dwellings bunched together. Could be farm types, but we didn’t get close enough to find out.”

Ryan nodded. “That’s okay. Gives us something to go on, anyhow.

“Now, unless anyone objects, I’m going to speak to our hosts and thank them for their hospitality, and for my hospitalization,” Ryan continued, “and then we are going to do what we always do—walk. So, any objections?”

There was none. The companions had traveled the hell roads for a long time; they trusted Ryan’s instincts, and when he said it was time to move on, then it was time to move on.

* * *

WHEN RYAN EXPRESSED his desire to leave, Roma escorted him to another building that lay close to the Klamath River. “I’d like to thank our hosts for everything they’ve done,” he told her.

They traveled on the back of an automated vehicle, its driver a box of lights located at the front of its open frame. Ryan sat, his hands resting on the tops of his thighs, close to the holster on his right hip. He didn’t like traveling around alone like this, but the others had gear to pack up, so there it was.

After two minutes of smooth, near-silent movement, the automated vehicle drew to a halt outside a towering circular structure overlooking the river. The tower rose three hundred feet into the air, housing over fifteen levels within.

Roma walked with Ryan, leading him inside. “The ville is ruled from in here,” she explained, as they strode through an empty lobby.

The lobby was circular like the structure, empty with a vast column in its center that thrust up into the main body of the building itself. The lobby’s walls were made from tinted glass, possibly even armaglass, like the walls of the mat-trans. The glass was smoky and behind it Ryan could see electrical circuitry, tiny diodes flashing frequently amid the complex structure.

“Lot of tech here,” Ryan observed, indicating the walls.

Roma merely smiled as she ran her hand over the hidden sensor plate that opened the doors to one of a bank of elevators located in the central hub of the lobby. They stepped inside and the elevator door swished closed before the car sent its passengers up into the body of the building. The elevator was silent, Ryan could only detect the movement by the way his stomach dropped—it was fast, then.

Five seconds passed, and then the door pulled back and Ryan saw a shadow-filled room beyond. The room was huge, with high ceilings, grand walls and no seating. The lights were recessed and obscured, casting only a little illumination into the room. It smelled of recycled air, grease and oil, mechanical things, fans dissipating heat.

As Ryan entered, he flicked his artificial eye to night vision, scanning the poorly lit room. Though the room was not fully circular, the walls were curved, and there appeared to be no exits other than the elevator bank located behind him. The room was large enough to comfortably house a dozen wags without anything getting scratched. There was glass along the walls, cabinet-type doors behind which more circuitry hummed, diodes twinkling with light like stars in the night sky; colored stars, reds and greens and yellows.

Up ahead, dominating the room, was something that looked like a high wall, and it was plated with circuitry, the copper lines of the circuit boards catching what little illumination was cast from the lighting to create a ghostly crisscross of shining metallic streaks. At the top of that wall, Ryan saw people waiting, standing twelve feet above him, pacing along the high balcony as they came to see who had arrived. There were seven of them in all, their faces hidden in shadow, even to Ryan’s enhanced night vision. They wore long robes that trailed down to the floor, shapeless things that obscured their bodies entirely.

Roma waited by the elevator as Ryan entered the room, her hands held neatly behind her back.

“Mr. Cawdor has expressed his intention to leave,” she announced, “along with his companions.”

Ryan took up a position in the center of the room, scanning the shadowy figures above him. “I wanted to thank you for everything,” he said. “My friends tell me you patched them up pretty good—me too—and you asked for nothing in return. Charity like that’s rare in my experience, so I owe you my gratitude.”

He stopped, and for a moment the only response was silence. He eyed the figures poised above him, watching for any signs of life.

“I don’t like being in a man’s debt,” Ryan finally added, breaking the silence. As he spoke, he switched his vision to infrared, scanning the figures above. They were alive—he had seen them move when he had arrived with Roma. In infrared, their bodies gave off heat. “So, if there’s anything my people can do—”

“There is no debt to pay, Ryan Cawdor,” a male voice said, deep and resonant.

It took Ryan a moment to pinpoint who had spoken, and he turned to face the man, holding up one hand up as if to shield his eyes and better see in the darkness. “I’m grateful for that. Can I ask why?”

There was silence again, a long pause while Ryan waited. Finally, the resonant voice spoke again.

“Humankind destroyed itself in a nuclear exchange one hundred years ago,” the voice said. “What little remains is barely enough to sustain the survivors. We in Progress plan to change that. We are working hard on a solution, or on multiple solutions, that will grant a reprieve for all that has been wrought on this once-great nation.”

Memories of Judge Santee washed across Ryan’s mind, but he let it pass.

“And the hardware in my eye?” Ryan asked. “Is that part of your solution?”

Ryan waited once more while the room fell silent. Then a narrow spotlight came on, focusing solely on another figure, who had been waiting in the darkness. The man wore a gray robe with a headpiece that covered the forehead and back of his skull like a hood. Ryan automatically commanded his left eye to magnify, focusing on the man’s face. The headpiece looked to be made of plastic or metal, Ryan thought, while the man looked to be in middle age, with dark skin.

“My name is Emil,” the man told Ryan. “I designed the hardware in your eye, along with my companions here—Una and Turing. What you are experiencing is an infinitesimal step toward the betterment of this world. Tiny steps are all we can expect at this moment, but that will change.”

“You have an impressive setup here, Emil,” Ryan said. “I saw the dam out there. Krysty said you get your power from it.”

“It takes a lot to power the future,” Emil told him. “We intend to make things perfect.”

Ryan smiled. “Perfect’s a tall order.”

“Rest assured, Mr. Cawdor—all we need is time,” Emil answered.

Then the spotlight dimmed and the room was cast in darkness once more, the seven figures returned to shadows watching Ryan from above.

“Thank you for your time,” Ryan said, dipping his head once, respectfully, before stepping back and returning to the elevator, where Roma stood waiting. A moment later, they were back in the lobby, making their way toward the exit, where the automated transport waited.

Chapter Ten

They were back in Hell. Their pilgrimage through the hellscape began again, picking up where it had left off.

Ryan and his companions trekked across the ruined landscape, following a dirt road that was scored in the soil like a scab. The road nudged through overgrown fields of rapeseed and corn, an orchard full of skeletal trees—the apples withered and dead on their branches, poisoned by the toxins in the soil. Behind them, Progress soon became just a smear on the horizon, the smudge of white towers barely visible beside the winding silver snake of water. Ryan turned back occasionally, framing the ville in his sights and pulling up the magnification mode in his artificial eye. He would see the ville towers if he magnified the image, could make out the three-hundred-foot point where he had enjoyed an audience with the ruling cabal of the ville. How they had built such magnificent structures when all around them was devastated he could not imagine. It was a jewel amid the trash, a single diamond in the dirt.

Up ahead there was little evidence of human life. No settlements, no buildings. Occasionally they would pass the foundations of something that looked like a building, but it had been razed to the ground so long ago that what remained looked like a floor plan carved into the dirt, more like a game of pick-up-sticks than a place a human could ever have lived.

Ryan led the way, the SIG Sauer holstered back at his hip, the Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster held across his shoulders like an old days’ milkmaid’s rig. Beside him, Krysty walked along with a spring in her step, still dressed in the white clothes that she had acquired while in Progress, her old clothes folded neatly into a knapsack she had hooked over one shoulder along with her bearskin coat. She wouldn’t need a fur coat out here, not with the sun beating down on what was left of California.

Doc and J.B. huddled along behind the couple, bickering about some point of geography until Mildred saw fit to pull them apart. Mildred was walking beside Ricky, swapping stories about his childhood on Monster Island, hers in twentieth-century Alabama, where her skin color was still an issue to some.

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