Ritual Chill. James Axler
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of slaughter. The moments spent fumbling in new places, remembering where they had relocated their weapons, would be minimal—yet could make the difference between chill or be chilled. He secured his scarf with its weighted ends around his neck.
Doc, who stood to the rear of the line, was in black. It suited his mood. He had taken a full-length fur that swamped his angular frame, bulking him out so that he was almost unrecognizable. He resembled nothing so much as the kind of trapper he would have been interested to encounter in the time of his birth. But it’s doubtful if any trapper, no matter how long he had been alone in the backwoods, no matter how much cabin fever he had endured, would have had the unblinking intensity of stare with which Doc greeted the lifting of the main sec door and the harsh glare of the outside world.
As the door finally ground to a halt, the winds from outside swirled around and welcomed them in a cold embrace. The taint of sulfur in the air caught at their throats and made them choke and cough before they became used to breathing it in. Although it wasn’t snowing, the air was still full of small flakes and particles of ice that had been chipped from the surrounding terrain by the strength of the winds. These stung on their exposed skin.
“Let’s move it, people,” Ryan said simply, leading the way out of the redoubt and into the frozen lands beyond.
Although they were alert for any threat that may be lurking around the mouth of the redoubt, all were still wrapped in their own thoughts, having barely communicated that morning.
Doc was last to leave. He tapped the sec code back in to close the door, lingering as it ground slowly shut, taking a last look at the interior before it was finally cut off from view.
“Farewell, thou bitter friend,” he muttered as the bland expanse of corridor lessened. It was a quote half remembered: where from, he couldn’t recall. He could recall little with any clarity, these past few hours, and it was only when he had moments of such stark recognition that he realized what he had become. Old before his time and not even allowed to be within the constraints of that time. He was an exile. Something else came back to him. He said the words softly. “Home? I have no home. Driven out from those that I love, I—” He stopped, his brow furrowing as he sought the words that seemed to chase away in his mind. What was that, and where had he heard it?
Like everything, it was shrouded in a mist of confusion. Even his very being seemed to be nebulous, hidden even from himself. How did he know that everything he had seen and experienced had been true? He remembered his Descartes and the Frenchman’s espousal of an idea that it was possible that all he saw was not true, just something placed in front of his eyes by an evil genius who sought to deceive him.
On first reading this, he had thought it a clever conceit and had argued with friends and colleagues on the inherent absurdity of the idea. But now he wasn’t so sure. As the door finally closed, who was not to say that it wasn’t merely another shutter in a long procession of such; a curtain brought down on a stage while the scenery was changed, ready for the next act.
“Doc, are you listening?”
The old man turned to find Mildred looking back at him, her face almost obscured by the hood of her padded coat, the snorkel design taking it over her features and hiding her expression.
“Sorry, I—” Doc tried to make himself function, but all he could think was, What if she is not real? The ambiguity paralyzed him. He knew that if all this were genuine, then he had to move, keep up just to survive. But if not, then…
“What the hell is wrong with you? It’s just as well I thought to look back, otherwise we would have lost you already. We haven’t even got more than a hundred yards from the redoubt and you’ve already nearly vanished on us.” Her tone was sharp, betraying her own unease and shortness of temper.
“My dear Doctor, I cannot apologize. I have not been myself.” Then who are you? asked a voice in his head. “I shall try to, as you would say, snap out of it.”
Mildred’s expression, still partially obscured by her hood, softened. “We all felt weird in there, Doc. Even me, and I wasn’t here before. It’s okay, we can just walk away.”
She beckoned to him and waited until Doc had walked a few steps toward her before turning and continuing after the others.
Doc Tanner followed, words and thoughts still racing in his mind, tumbling over one another. There may be situations you can walk away from, times and places. But if it is yourself from which you seek to escape? How can you ever walk away from yourself?
THE FROZEN WASTELAND was much as they remembered it, those who had been here before. The sky was tinged yellow with sulfur, the same that got down into their throats and lungs, making breathing difficult as it scraped at the membrane, making each of them want to choke. Breathing was best if taken in shallow gasps. Deep lungfuls of air made them cough, sucking in more air so that the urge to cough became greater, the circle harder to break. The chem clouds above them tinged the skies with yellow, the heavy banks of gray and yellow scudding across the expanse of sky with a rapidity that spoke of the intensity of the wind currents, the sudden changes in direction for the tumbling clouds making them all the more ominous, as though they were about to lose their abrasive contents upon the earth below.
The terrain was much as they remembered. Banks of snow, meters deep, were driven and formed against sheer rock by the force of the winds, the loose snow on top treacherous, the ice banked beneath waiting to trap them. Against this were the exposed walls and inclines of rock, slippery with long strings and trails of moss and lichen that had been allowed to grow and prosper as the snows were scoured from them. All around, the earth had been broken by the shifting of the rock beds, new inclines, small mountainous ranges and recently formed volcanoes spewing the sulfur into the air, peppering the landscape to the horizon.
It was a harsh terrain to cross and an even harsher environment in which to live. There was little sign of any life that made its home in this unwelcoming terrain, and yet Ryan clearly recalled being attacked by dwarf muties and encountering wild bears on his first excursion into the wastes. There had also been some small communities and isolated trappers who had fallen prey to the Russian bandits. It was doubtful whether their deserted settlements would have been reclaimed by others. Even so, Ryan was still intent on keeping his people focused for any dangers that may be lying in wait.
The floods caused by the breaking of the dam had done little to change this section of the Alaskan tundra. It would be another half-day’s march through the oppressive weather conditions before they reached that spot. In the meantime, each could be lost in their own thoughts. Although they remained alert and aware, the atmosphere of the redoubt still weighed heavily on all of them.
MILDRED LOOKED BACK to check that Doc was still following. The black figure, stark against the landscape, trudged through the snow, head held erect against the winds, eyes seemingly—although surely this was a trick of the obscured light—unblinking and wide, regardless of the wind and ice.
Mildred was concerned about the old man. More than the others, she had some kind of grasp of what he had to be feeling. She, too, was out of time and in a world for which she had been ill-prepared. The others had been born to this, it was all that they had ever known. She, on the other hand, had been living in relative affluence and comfort in the late twentieth century before being put out for a routine operation. If all had been well, a few days and she would have been recuperating at home, catching up on soaps and developing couch potato habits, before resuming work. Instead she had awakened to a nightmare that was all the more terrifying for being real.
Since that first moment it had been fear, adrenaline, constant movement and action. Living on the brink of death. Perhaps life was always like that, but it wasn’t something that the late 1990s had prepared her for; the stark choices of this new world were often not choices at all, but imperatives. Act first, ask questions later.
What had her life become? These people with whom she traveled were closer to her than anyone she had ever known. They had bonded with her in a way that no one else ever had. J.B., particularly. In many ways she knew them as well as she knew herself. Yet they were as alien to her as…as she was to them.
She