Crater Lake

Chapter Twenty

Jak Lauren had slept well.

He often dreamed of the old days of childhood, back in the humid swamps of Louisiana. His night phantoms were mutie alligators or swampies with blind eyes that floated over the sucking mud, webbed fingers grasping for him as he danced from them with an elusive ease. The albino always relished such dreams, never dreading the demons that rose in them.

This night it had been different.

A couple of times Jak's father had taken him, as a child, into the outskirts of the ruined urban spread that had once been the proud city of New Orleans. It had become a featureless waste, with an occasional spire of twisted metal where a water tower or aerial had stood. There had been great fires, Jak's father had heard from his father's grandfather. Fires that had ravaged anything that had remained after the nuking. Fires that had gone on burning for years, drawing on gases and liquids far beneath the crust of the earth.

The dream had been a little like that.

He had been walking briskly along what was left of an old blacktop highway, its surface cracked and seamed with ridges like waves where the shocks of the missiles had turned stone into a corrugated ribbon. Plants burst in profusion through the ravaged road, but they weren't from Louisiana, though the dream somehow seemed set there.

There was alpine fireweed, stonecrop, bog orchids and purple asters, goldenrod and brown-eyed Susan, all flourishing and bright in a landscape that was predominantly gray and leprous white.

Near Lafayette Jak had known of an age-old cemetery, with angels and graceful ministers of moss-stained stone weeping mournful tears in the damp air.

There they were, all about him, his feet sinking silently into long, cropped turf. Graves, each with its own memorial tablet, bore witness to the name and dates and virtues of the persons who lay buried there. Jak paused to stoop and peer at the nearest stone.

"Jak Lauren," it read. "He died in agony and sleeps forever waking."

The next grave said the same.

And the next.

Next.

A pallid sun cast watery shadows among the tombs, but Jak himself threw no shadow at all. There was a mist weaving about some stunted yew trees, their boles and knobbed branches draped in long fronds of Spanish moss. It was impossible to see more than twenty or thirty yards in any direction, and Jak began to feel he was not alone.

He began to walk faster, picking his way among the graves. Now he was in an older part of the cemetery, where some of the stones had fallen, their jagged edges ready to trip the unwary.

The ground rose and fell, making it difficult to maintain a steady pace. Jak paused several times, staring into the roiling banks of fog seeping all around him. He laid his head to one side, straining to catch any noise. There was a faint rumbling, like a well-laden wag laboring up an incline. And water. The sullen sound of water dropping over cold rock from a great height.

The graves disappeared, and he was on an open hillside, among heather. Tough, wiry roots gripped him by the ankles, and he fell several times. He heard laughter somewhere below him.

Or was it from above?

The air was thin and cold, searing his lungs as he fought for breath. Once, as he fell, he laid his hand upon a nest of tiny, wriggling maggots that squirmed away from him at enormous speed, vanishing into the earth.

A lake became visible through the shifting cushion of fog. A shingled beach, with round, smooth pebbles that rolled under his bare feet, clattering and echoing. The echo carried on even when he stopped running, sounding closer, as though whoever pursued him was gaining.

Or whatever pursued him.

Then, half turning, Jak saw it. Saw them. Tall, lumbering creatures in glittering black armor, with masks made from dull mirrors. As the boy stared at them, he recognized myriad reflections of himself, white hair drifting about his crimson eyes, menacing him from every helmet.

He ran again, now at the edge of the lake, stumbling into it, the water burning him with its fiery chill. It splashed about his naked body, leaving a livid blotch for every drop that touched him. Jak's left eye hurt him, and he lifted a hesitant hand, feeling a black patch that sealed off his sight, as though it were grafted to his own living skin.

They were gaining on him. He didn't dare to turn now, so close were they, their clawing fingers straining to peel the flesh from his back. He knew that the masks were gone and that they grinned at him with charnel faces, the skin dripping off in wedges from the scabrous bone.

Someone was calling to him out near the middle of the vast lake, calling him by name. Jak struck out, seeing a piece of rotting wood in his way. He pushed at it, but it bobbed up and down, blocking his way past. There was carving on it, the letters etched deep in the soft surface, some of them almost obliterated by a gray-green fungus. But he could make out the last part.

...died in agony and sleeps forever waking.

Something immeasurably huge moved, swirling far below him in the water. The voice still called him, but it was moving away, becoming more faint. Treading water, Jak tried to make out something that appeared for a second through the fog. It was in a small boat, and it had a great nodding, spongelike head that was, mercifully, turned away from him.

At that moment he woke up, still in the clean, antiseptic cell of the security section of the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement.

It was hard to reckon how long the dream had lasted, but he felt refreshed, as though the rest of the night had passed peacefully. Still, the images continued to haunt him as he sat on the narrow bunk and waited for the mutie sec guard to bring breakfast. By squinting through the barred slot in the door, the boy was able to see the corner of a clock.

It was around the middle of Ein the red. The first plate of pallid, tepid stodge normally arrived just as the pointer shaded from red into amber.

The sec man moved across his line of sight. Jak was tempted to call out to him, but he knew from previous attempts that it would be futile. The speaker on the wall would respond to him, but only to ask what his request was. His keen hearing caught the sound of someone walking in the corridor beyond the outer door. The sec man also heard the noise and stood up to block the entrance, blaster at the ready.

Jak guessed it was Ryan Cawdor even before he heard his voice.

"Hi. Can I come through to see my friend?"

There was the usual delay, but this time Ryan didn't have to repeat what he'd said. The speaker came on almost instantly. "Greetings, stranger. The experimental sample can be seen. But work will be done on him during this three-color period. After that all access will be withdrawn."

Jak didn't much like the sound of that. Maybe it was getting time to move on out. He'd talk to Ryan first, though.

The rusty bolts slid open, and Ryan walked in. His long white silk scarf was wrapped around his throat and tucked into the neck of his coveralls. Jak grinned crookedly at the older man, who smiled back, brushing his mouth with the index finger of his right hand — the signal they all knew for caution.

"You all right?"

"Sure."

"Doc got piss-ant drunk last night."

"In this place?"

Ryan laughed, moving in closer to the boy. "Yeah. Even in here. Got to talking with one of the scientists. Found out how interesting the work is."

Jak was puzzled. He didn't see where the conversation was leading.

Ryan sat down on the bed. "Fact is, we could all go like Baron Tourment. You remember him?"

Jak could hardly forget the evil genius who'd run the ville where he'd first lived, nor could he forget how the baron had ended up. "I get the meaning, Ryan."

"Best we got things moving real fast, kid. Real fucking fast."

Ryan jerked his thumb toward the half-open door in an unmistakable gesture, running his hand across the front of his own throat as if he were slicing it with a sharp blade. Jak shrugged his shoulders, showing open palms. How were they going to make the break from the security section without weapons?

"Glad it's all good." Ryan stood up.

"It's good."

"Guess I'll have to go. The scientists are going to start their experiments on you today. So we might not meet up again."

"I heard that," Jak replied, also standing.

"Well. Best go, kid. Take care now, you hear. Everyone sends their best to you."

They shook hands, Ryan managing a wink with his right eye as he pulled the door open and called to the sentry outside. "All right if I leave?"

The blank-visored face turned incuriously toward him. The mutie stood quite still, waiting for instructions from his scientist masters.

"I asked if I could go," Ryan repeated.

"Egress permission affirmative," the corner loudspeaker squawked.

The guard turned away from the two men in the cell and gazed down the corridor.

Ryan clenched his fists together and swung a dreadful clubbing blow at the creature's back, striking it with crushing force a little to the right of the small of the back over the kidneys. The sec man gave a choked cry of pain and shock, forced out past the voice activator, hardly louder than a whisper. Jak darted in like a hunting animal and snatched the laser blaster as it dropped from nerveless fingers.

As the guard dropped to his knees, almost paralyzed by the awesome power of the double punch, Ryan flicked off his heavy helmet. The face turned up toward him, eyes rolling in agony, the mouth drooped open, showing yellowed gums. The hair was cropped to the scalp, one ear completely lacking.

Despite all, it was unmistakably the face of a woman, pleading silently for mercy.

Ryan didn't hesitate, chopping with the edge of his hand across the front of the throat and crushing the delicate electronic implant. His hand also pulped the thyroid cartilage and crushed the laryngeal branch of the vital vagus nerve.

The sec guard was dying, sliding forward on the floor of the corridor on her face, arms and legs moving spasmodically, gloved fingers scraping feebly.

Ryan glanced around to make sure the killing had been done out of sight of the watchful vid cameras. Jak turned the power control dial of the gun all the way around to the upper limit of twenty.

"Finn swears those blasters don't work ninety-nine times out of a hundred," Ryan said. "So watch yourself."

"Why we moving?" the boy asked.

Ryan quickly explained everything Doc Tanner had found out the previous evening, adding that they now knew the scientists were intending to start their physiological experiments on the white-haired boy that very day.

"And we don't think the bastards intended you to be up and walking after they've done. Termination mode for you, kid."

"So we blow 'em?"

Ryan grinned wolfishly. "Clean out the nest, Jak. What we're good at."

It was close to Bin amber when Ryan and Jak finally arrived safely back at the dormitory. One good thing about the vast research sections of the complex being sealed off from them was that the scientists seemed to rarely move anywhere else, having most of their living and eating quarters near their precious work.

Twice they'd seen sec patrols, but they'd been absurdly easy to dodge. More and more Ryan had come to realize that the Wizard Island complex was like a security sieve. When it had first been established, it had probably been the last word in tightness, but over the years it had fallen apart. The research had taken priority, and there had never been any threats to the scientists from outside.

Everyone in the dormitory was ready and primed. Doc had recovered from the alcoholic excesses of the night before and looked chipper. The first priority was to get hold of some weapons, and the blaster Jak and Ryan had won was a start. J.B. had made the suggestion at their battle meeting that they should try to get their clothes and weapons back. That way they would fight better and be ready to make a swift run for it. At no time during their brief discussions had anyone suggested the possibility they might fail.

If you succeeded, it wouldn't arise.

And if you didn't, then it wasn't going to matter much.

"When shall we start?" Krysty asked now, sitting cross-legged on her bed, doing slow-breathing exercises to ready herself for the coming combat.

"Now's good as any time. Who wants to take this laser blaster?"

Finn grinned at Ryan's question. "Have to be me. I'm the man with blasters. Don't have many skills, but I fucking know 'bout blasters. Gimme, Ryan."

He caught the short, vicious gun, then dropped into a fighter's crouch, pretending to spray the room with the lethal blue beam. In the laughter, none of them heard the warning sound of the main door hissing open.

"M-m-m-m-my suspicions were in affirmative m-m-m-m-mode," Dr. Avian said. He stood there, a malevolent smile of triumph on his face.

He was flanked by four armed sec men.