Pilgrimage to Hell

Chapter Seventeen

Ryan opened his eye.

There was a mild pain across his temples, like after a night of drinking home brew. His pulse was up and so was his breathing. He lay still, aware of a tingling sensation at the tips of toes and fingers. He lifted his hands and touched his face, feeling a faint numbness. And his black, curly hair bristled with static electricity. He closed his eye and opened it again, blinking up at a ceiling of patterned metal disks that glowed. A glow that was fading even as he looked up at it.

He tried to work out just how he felt. His stomach swirled as if he'd been riding War Wag One over the bumpiest road in all Deathlands. And his brain relayed the curious sensation of having been sucked into itself and then dragged through a vacuum before being rammed back into his skull.

But he lived.

Whatever that bastard machine was supposed to have done, it had failed. The trap had not been properly sprung. Maybe over the decades the gas or poison or whatever had lost its power. He thought again that he ought to kill Doc. Now, without any further hesitation.

"Ryan? You all... Mother, my head aches."

Ryan sat up, looking around, seeing all his comrades either slumped unconscious or showing the first signs of recovering. Krysty blinked and sighed.

"How d'you feel?" he said.

She licked her lips, brushing a hand through the tumbling hair. "I've felt better. What was it? Death trap went wrong?"

"Don't know. Doc knew about it, the old..."

"Where are we, Mr. Cawdor?"

Ryan drew the LAPA, finger on the trigger. "We're still in the Redoubt and we're all alive. Trick didn't work, Doc."

"Trick? Upon my soul, but it is no trick. And it didwork."

"What? Knocked us on our asses, that's all."

Doc was up, tottering, steadying himself with a hand on the streaked glass of the wall. Everyone was now back to some degree of awareness.

"What color were the walls of the gateway in the Redoubt, Mr. Cawdor?"

"Brown and..." Ryan's jaw sagged a little. "Fireheat! These are green. They've changed."

"No. We've changed. The gateway worked. We are no longer within the Redoubt in the Darks."

That was enough to bring them all to their feet. J.B. doubled over and retched as though he was about to throw up, but nothing came.

"Not in the Darks no more?" he gasped, wiping a gloved hand over his mouth. "Where, then?"

"Ah..." The triumphant smile had vanished. "That is one of the many problems with the gateways. Not always reliable. Depends on destination setting."

Whatever had happened while they were all out cold, Doc's madness had deserted him and he spoke clearly and intelligently.

"They started here about a hundred years back, trying to transmit matter. They began with a pair of small metal balls. Light gray metal balls. They got them to travel a few centimeters. And they went on from there."

While he listened, Ryan moved around the room. The walls were certainly a changed color and the air tasted different. Not flat and dead as in the Redoubt. Was all this possible? Had the fog been a luci-gas? Was this all some chem dream?

"They wanted to use it for military purposes. But the big war stopped that good. By then they'd set up a network of these Redoubts, each with gates. Send and receive, and some big mistakes. Horrible things did happen."

He stopped as though his mind was lodging on unbearable memories. Ryan reached to open the door, but Doc waved a hand to stop him.

"Not yet. Nearly done. Gates can be set as this one was. But all codes are now lost, lost forever. So it's a gamble whereand whenyou get out."

"But... some of these gates must have been destroyed in the fighting," said Ryan. "What would have happened if the controls had been set for one of those? Then what?"

"Most in the wilderness areas were destroyed. As to your question, I suppose that possibility represents the final frontier!"

And he laughed.

"You crazy bastard," spat Hun, moving toward him with her fist clenched.

"Leave him be," ordered Ryan, stopping her.

"Let's go see where we are."

"I am obliged, Mr. Cawdor," Doc said, relapsing once more into the archaic way of speaking. "Most of all I would dislike having to strike a lady. Next I would dislike being struck by one."

The door opened easily.

Opened onto a room of the same scale as the one back at the Redoubt. Any of Ryan's doubts were dispelled when he saw a table knocked over on its side and two of the shelves slipping lopsidedly. A long crack ran down the wall, deep enough to insert a hand.

In the next room, the consoles whirred and lights danced, but there was an undertone of grinding and Ryan could smell a frail scent of smoldering. Of a fire that slumbered somewhere within the machinery that surrounded them. He could see all eight of his group reflected in the smeared metal of the door that he knew would open on a blank passage. To the right of it there was a green lever in the down position, with the word Closed printed beneath it.

Ryan grasped the lever and pushed it up to the Open position. It moved easily, as though it swam in a greased slot. For a moment nothing happened, then the grinding of gears, and then the door began to slide back.

Everyone yelled at once.

The moment that the thin sheet of filthy water came gushing through the widening crack at the edge of the door, the shouting began. Water immediately flowed about their feet, carrying innumerable wriggling creatures with scaly skins and ferocious rows of tiny teeth.

"Shut it!" shouted J.B., but Ryan had already thrown the lever down again.

It seemed to take forever, but the door finally hissed shut, and the water stopped.

"It's fuckin' hot, Ryan," said Henn, kicking with his boots at one of the reptiles that had fastened onto the sole of his boot.

"It came all the way from top to bottom." Krysty's shocked voice said it all. The Redoubt where they had finished up was under water. Maybe under shallow water, maybe under whole fathoms.

"There is a thirty-minute automatic reset on the gates," said Doc. "If we make haste we should... should be back in the Redoubt in the Darks."

They splashed through the filth of mud and water, crushing the seething life as they moved. There was a step into the actual trans-mat chamber and the slime had not penetrated it. They all stepped in, and J.B. reached to close the door.

"Hold on. If we're goin' to pass out," said Ryan, "I guess it's better if we sit down first."

They sat in a ring, Krysty opposite Ryan. Their eyes met and he winked at her. He enjoyed the hint of a smile on her full lips. And she was a mutie!

The door closed and once again darkness clawed its way over Ryan's mind, blanking it out.

The moment of wakening was less painful, the headache gone, but the feeling of disorientation was still as strong. It was as if every atom in his body had been juggled around and clumsily reassembled.

Ryan opened his eye.

The walls were brown glass. By the texture it looked armored. It was not possible to guess its thickness.

"Come on, people," Ryan said. "Doc? You know how to reset this machine?"

"Yes, indeed, Mr. Cawdor. But I must repeat that it is a random element. All instructions and codes are gone these many, many years. I can alter the setting and then it will be in the laps of what gods we worship."

"I worship this," said Okie, holding up her M-16.

As he checked that everyone had recovered, Ryan wondered yet again about Doc's range of knowledge. Lots of it could have come from some hoard of old books or vids. There was no other sensible explanation. But he knew so much. Spoke as if he'd been here before. Been here a hundred years ago!

They were back in the clean, antiseptic anteroom. Ryan tugged the door open, hearing the faint whisper of sound that told him that it was air locked.

He pulled harder and it swung open.

The master control room now held a dozen or more of the squat, muscular Indians.

Okie reacted fastest, and Ryan winced at the stream of bullets that burst past him, knocking down five or six of the attackers in a welter of blood.

"Don't' fire!" screamed Doc's voice. "Damage anything and we'll never jump again!"

Ryan reached for his heavy panga, drawing it from its stitched leather sheath, thrusting at the face of the nearest of the Indians. It cleaved through the open mouth, splintering teeth as it did so, and lodged itself in the cervical vertebrae at the back of the man's neck. Blood gushed, hot and salt, into Ryan's face, nearly blinding him. But the man was down and done, screams bubbling through the choking flood of scarlet.

Around him the most desperate battle raged. Okie used her gun like a club, smashing one man across the side of the head, kicking him hard in the groin as his hands went to grab her.

Henn and Finnegan had both drawn their knives, automatically fighting back to back, the steel of their blades making a deadly web that snared any of the Sioux who tried to get within it.

J.B. had his delicate knives, one in each hand, the thin blades opening up hideous gashes like lips in the stomach of the man attacking him. As the man reeled away, crying like a scalded kitten, Hun used her own broad-bladed dagger to slit his throat. Blood from the jugular pattered onto the concrete floor, making it slick and treacherous.

Krysty ducked and weaved against a taller Indian, her hair seeming to foam back and forth in the man's face, blinding him. But she did not carry a long-bladed knife, and she was in desperate trouble. Meanwhile Ryan punched a grinning face, knocking it away from him, and raised the panga as he closed on Krysty's attacker.

The impact jarred Ryan's arm. But the steel was honed enough and weighted enough to hack clean through the skin and flesh and bone of the neck. The head, eyes staring, tongue moving, rolled and bounced among the fighters' feet, while the body gradually slumped to the floor as though reluctant to submit to death.

"Thanks," she panted, trying to back away to join Doc near the door through to the gateway.

"Anytime."

Henn was staggering, blood streaming from a cut along the side of his thigh, with Finnegan holding off a pair of the Indians, each armed with a triangular ax.

"Make for the door!" Ryan yelled, going to help Finnegan cover Henn's retreat. Hun got there first, stabbing the nearest of the attackers so hard that the steel snapped and she withdrew only the hilt, grinning at the shocked and puzzled expression on the bronzed face of the man she had just killed.

Doc, Krysty, Henn and Finnegan were through into the anteroom, watching anxiously as their friends still battled on. Nine or ten of the Indians were down, dying or dead. But four more had come in, two armed with bows and arrows.

"Back!" shouted Ryan again, pushing Hunaker in front of him, parrying a lunge from a feather-tipped spear, turning and spilling the man's guts in loops of greasy intestine around his feet.

Okie stood, legs braced, to one side of the doorway, the M-16 steady in her hands, waiting a chance to open fire at the enemy without harming the electrical equipment in its serried banks.

J.B. followed Hun through, then Ryan was in the doorway, tapping Okie on the arm. At the far end of the control room, more of the Sioux came pouring in, screaming and shouting. An arrow hit the wall at Ryan's side, and he snapped off a 3-round burst at the man who had loosed it. The rounds kicked the man onto his back, knocking others over with the violence of his dying.

Another arrow clipped Okie's right shoulder, pinning her to the wall by the material of her jacket. "Bastard!" she hissed, reaching and snapping the shaft of the arrow, and throwing it contemptuously on the concrete. Then she ripped in half the man who had wounded her. His body jerked and danced, held up by the force of the bullets that stitched him apart. As she took her finger off the trigger he fell sideways, crashing into one of the consoles, where sparks flew and a siren began to howl deep in the recesses of the Redoubt.

"That screws it," hissed Ryan, grabbing Okie and pulling her after him. There wasn't time to close the intervening door. The rest of them were already in the glass-walled chamber, beckoning to Ryan.

More arrows sliced by them, one plucking at the hem of his coat. J.B. yelled for them all to get down. The armored door began to close the moment they were all inside.

Ryan was last. A final shaft missed his left elbow by a hairsbreadth, hitting the control panel to the gateway, splintering one of the numbered buttons, breaking the plastic cover, revealing all the mass of tangled multicolored wiring beneath. As the door closed, Ryan's last glimpse of the Redoubt in the Darks was a worm of smoke inching from the damaged control.

An arrow pinged against the glass, but the thick plate held fast. The fog rose about them and the metal disks glowed brightly. Ryan felt himself being sucked into the maelstrom and fought against losing consciousness. But the physical disturbance was too severe, and the darkness swamped his mind.

Ryan opened his eye.

As before, his seven comrades were lying all around him. J.B.'s glasses had become dislodged from his thin nose and lay on the floor. Finnegan was snoring, flat on his back, revealing a mouthful of teeth that overlapped and jostled one another like a view into an excavated graveyard. Hunaker was curled into a fetal ball, eyes blinking as she began to recover. Henn held his leg, the blood still trickling steadily from it. Okie was also bleeding, crimson rivulets threading from between her fingers as she clamped her hand over the superficial flesh wound in her shoulder. Her other hand held the M-16 tight. Krysty was sitting up, shaking her head to clear the mist from it. The front of her overalls was soaked with blood from the Indian that Ryan had decapitated.

Doc was groaning, with a small pool of yellow bile near his feet. As he sat up, he looked toward Ryan. "Upon my... I am becoming too old for this sort of foolishness, sir. Indeed I am."

"If they wreck the Redoubt up in the Darks, then what if we tried to get back?"

"Not a wise idea, Mr. Cawdor. I will alter the setting so that the automatic return is negated. That is, if we should decide not to remain here."

"Where is here, Doc?" grunted Hunaker, standing up.

The glass was a pale gray color, and as Ryan stood he noticed that there was a network of very fine cracks lacing the plate. He took a deep breath. The air smelled bad. He could taste the oily flavor of methane on his tongue, and some other, bitter chemical.

"Don't like this. J.B., you come with me. Rest of you stay here. Doc, you'd best alter the control."

"You do appreciate that I can change them so we don't return, but I have no control over where we might eventually finish up?"

"Yeah. Just do it, Doc. Ready, J.B.?"

"As I'll ever be."

As soon as they left the trans-mat chamber, Ryan sensed something was wrong. Gravely wrong. The bitter flavor of the air was stronger and it was very warm. The door to the anteroom was already ajar. There was no furniture there at all, and the walls were marked with deep gouges and scratches, with smears of burned ash across the ceiling. The outer was also partly open, showing nothing but a great darkness.

"Don't like it, Ryan," said J.B.

"I know what you mean."

Ryan moved to the door and peered out. The darkness was not total. The sky glowed an unimaginably deep red, with flashes of lightning scattered across it. But each bolt of lightning stayed in place for several seconds as though frozen there. Distant thunder rumbled. The land seemed flat and sandy, from what they could make out in the strip of light that spilled out through the open doorway.

On a sudden deadly impulse, Ryan flicked on the small geiger counter in his lapel. Immediately it began to crackle and click louder than he'd ever thought possible.

"It's a hot spot! "said J.B.

"There's enough milli-rads here to fry a war wag. Let's go."

As he turned, Ryan glimpsed something moving out in that seared desert. Something blasphemously huge, lumbering toward the remnants of the Redoubt. He hadn't made out the shape of the entity, except that it had seemed in that single glimpse to have no true shape at all.

With the knowledge of that horror at his heels, Ryan pushed J.B. ahead of him, past the banks of machines, many silent and blind. He saw the others, gathered in the door of the chamber, and the look on his face propelled them into instant action. Guns sprang into hands.

"No. Just get out!"

"I've altered..." began Doc, but Ryan elbowed him aside, pulling the door and slamming it shut behind J.B. and himself.

The lights came on and the thick mist rose about their feet.

"Here we go," said Krysty softly. "Where to this time?"

"Somewhere better," Ryan began to say, but he felt the suction of his mind and the atoms and molecules of his body being displaced.

But even as the displacement occurred, and in spite of it, Ryan Cawdor knew with a profound and gratifying certainty that, in fact, they had already achieved, truly achieved, what he and Krysty had set out to do. They had broken from the bonds that were at the heart of the Deathlands, they had entered the forbidden places, deep into the Darks, and they had found... something, something other than their dreary experience in the Deathlands, something that by its very newness spelled hope for a different life, a different future.

That was what they had always yearned for, quested for, put their lives on the line for. Now Ryan and his woman and J.B. and their warrior allies and the strange character called Doc were free at last of the deadening reality of the Deathlands, free to live anew even if the new life was hazardous and unknown.

Through love and through death they had come this far, and they had seen so much, and now they would conquer...

And the darkness fell once more over them all.