Chapter Four

      “Ah,” the General said in satisfaction, leaning back in a red plush chair and sipping from a goblet of brandy. “It’s definitely a rare treat to encounter a man of your culture out here in the wasteland, Doctor Tanner.”

      Doc started to reply around a mouthful of apple and cinnamon omelet and toast that he would have found ambrosial had it been served to him back in his very own long-lost house in nineteenth-century Vermont by the beloved and equally lost hand of his wife Emily. Instead it had been dished out by the hand of a solemn stone-faced servant from a brass chafing dish heated by a little cup of clear, odorless, smokeless burning fuel.

      Realizing that standard Deathlands etiquette would hardly answer these circumstances, Doc hurriedly finished chewing and swallowed, not without regret for the unseemly haste. Covering his mouth, just for security’s sake, by pretending to dab it clean with a spotless white-linen napkin, he nodded and replied. “I might say the same, General. I might well indeed.”

      They sat in oak-paneled and comfort-conditioned splendor, two men of knowledge at ease with one each other and their world, taking their breakfast and engaging in the art of conversation. Even for a man of Theophilus Tanner’s unique experience, it was one of the most—what was that eminently useful modern word?—surreal moments of them all.

      The General—that was how he had been introduced and the only way Doc had heard him spoken of—was a short burly man with buzzed grizzled hair and features that might have been carved from granite by a skilled but hasty sculptor. Even taking his ease with an apparent act of will, the enormous vigor that animated him was evident. He was a man made for action. Right now he wore a maroon robe over white pajamas with blue pinstripes. On the right breast of the robe was sewn a patch showing a fierce eagle clutching lightning bolts and weapons, with a stars-and-stripes shield over its own breast. Above it arced the legend Mobile Anti-Guerrilla Operations Group. Below it was embossed the acronym MAGOG.

      “I trust you find your accommodations to your liking, Professor,” the General said, allowing his steward, a tall, olive-skinned man in black trousers, white shirt with stand-up collar and bow tie, to replenish his coffee.

      “Quite, General.”

      He had, in fact. He’d been kept separate from his companions ever since leaving the massacre site by the Grand Canyon. Nor had he seen for sure where they were taken, although he surmised they were bound for a barbed-wire stockade with some tents pitched inside that had been erected near the work site. He hoped they were well, and not terribly mistreated. He wasn’t overly concerned. Obviously their captors wanted them alive rather than dead, and to judge by past performance, it would be but a matter of time before one of them, most likely the ever-so-resourceful John Barrymore Dix, figured out a way to spring them all.

      His captor had introduced himself as Marc Anthony Helton, Captain, Provisional U.S. Army. He was a very polite and well-spoken young man, despite his regrettable propensity for casual mass murder. He was fascinated by Doc, and grilled him about who he was, where he’d come from, and what experiences he had had. Tanner had cloaked his responses in sufficient vagueness to avoid giving away any significant information without convincing the young officer that he was too far gone mentally speaking to be of real interest to the General.

      At least, he hoped he had.

      On arrival, young Captain Helton had taken cordial leave of him. Soldiers had hustled Doc onto the train straightaway. There, he was brusquely ordered to strip and sent into a bank of showerheads to cleanse himself under a guard’s watchful eye. He would never believe a mere shower could equal the sybaritic luxury of a tub of steaming water, and candidly, he was the most inclined of their brave little band to be careless in matters hygienic, but the hot gushing water and the sense of cleanliness it produced were alike bliss-producing.

      Once dried, he had been given a rough and rather itchy set of garments of the depressing greenish shade favored by the U.S. Army of the twentieth century. After he put them on he had been marched to another car and locked into a small passenger compartment. Ironically, he had been allowed to keep his cane, although naturally, his bulky LeMat cap-and-ball revolver had been appropriated.

      Indeed, the General just upon the instant picked up the pistol and began to examine it with keen interest, turning it over and over in his hard, scarred hands.

      In his compartment, which he had to himself, Doc had been served a better-than-adequate meal. Surprisingly, it had been a stew of game—rabbit and deer at the very least, with a possible hint of quail—along with carrots and potatoes and seasoned with sage. All seemed quite fresh, and the bread rolls that came with it were palpably hot from the oven. The butter tasted real. Doc hoped his friends were well fed and housed.

      The bench unfolded into a bed, which was the most comfortable he’d known in many a moon. He slept soundly, and blessedly without dreaming, until a peremptory knock had awakened him, and his clothes—cleaned and pressed, by the gods—had been thrust upon him.

      Now he sat in a kind of sitting room in the General’s personal car, eating another splendid meal and drinking coffee—freeze-dried, regrettably—while the General peered down the LeMat’s barrel, the long .44-caliber main barrel, and the auxiliary 12-gauge barrel in front of the cylinder. In tribute to Doc’s vast storehouse of knowledge, the General addressed him as “Professor.”

      “A remarkable weapon, Professor,” the General remarked, setting the big pistol down on a table beside his red-plush chair. “But isn’t it kind of an eccentric choice?”

      Doc gave a debonair wave of his coffee cup, pinky extended. “One who knows the proper formula, and, more important, the proper technique, it’s all in the caking—for manufacturing black gunpowder, as I do, can produce it far more simply, from much more readily available materials, than any more modern smokeless propellants.”

      “Ah, but it still requires percussion caps to ignite the powder, doesn’t it? My whitecoats tell me they need to be filled with high explosives that are unstable and fairly dangerous to handle—not to mention the chemistry’s a bit more involved than mixing saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal.”

      Doc shrugged. “I see that I am caught out. Your Excellency is not the first to observe that I am, indeed, an eccentric.”

      The General held up a hand. “No need to call me anything that fancy. I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy. ‘General’ or ‘sir” will do just fine.”

      Doc nodded and sipped. My, what fine manners he had for a murderer, he thought.

      Since joining Ryan and the rest, Doc had become a far different man from the one who had capered and spouted half-remembered snatches of poetry for the delectation of the unspeakable Jordan Teague and Strasser, his brute of a sec chief. His spine, for example, had recovered a remarkable degree of rigidity, although his grip on sanity was still not of the firmest, sadly. But he still knew how to show a pleasing face to power, and didn’t scruple to do so at need. Besides, for all