The memory comforted Dean. More often than not, he viewed his father as more than human. Oh, not in the way one might view a mutie or doomie, but instead in how a man might step back and look at a force of nature. Ryan shared one trait with the unpredictable weather patterns that circled the globeonce you unleashed the whirlwind, there was no stopping him until the course was completed.

The mist of the chamber began to creep into everyone's being, tendrils of pale smoke sparking with miniature bursts of lightning, working its magic as the group prepared to be taken to an unknown site at an undisclosed location. No one could know for sure where they might end up. The band of travelers had traversed most of what remained of the United States and even visited other continents during their time of hopping around via the gateways.

How the mat-trans units really worked was anybody's guess. Mildred's theorybased on the quick study of the precious little doc.u.mentation she'd been able to scan, the discussions she'd had with the rare few in the Deathlands who appeared to know something about the devices and late-night talks with Doc in the man's more lucid stageswas that both organic and inorganic matter were reduced to digital information and instantaneously transmitted on a form of carrier wave to another gateway, where it was then reconstructed, molecule by molecule.

None of the group had ever taken the time to try to dismantle any of the gateways; after all, once you'd taken one apart, there was no guarantee of being able to put it back together again. Ryan didn't want to find himself in a situation where they'd broken down their only avenue of escape because they'd gotten creative.

Nor had they been able to completely figure out exactly how a destination was chosen for them. The process was unpredictablesome jumps seemed to take only seconds, others hours or days. The time spent in transit always varied, surprisingly enough, even from person to person, depending on how their own perceptions colored the excursion.

"I'm really not looking forward to this," Krysty said softly.

Ryan moved closer to her in silent reply, acknowledging the journey to come.

Chapter Three.

Exposing body and psyche to the forces of the mat-trans gateway was never a pleasant experience. At best, one might hope to walk away with a nosebleed and a feeling of nausea. Vomiting was a frequent companion to those who dared partake of the unforgettable mat-trans experience. At worst, a traveler arrived on the other end in a near coma, vital signs at a low ebb. There was also the haunting possibility of coming out of a jump in a state of dementia, thrashing around and causing injury to oneself and comrades.

Days before, when the group had first arrived at the gateway chamber inside the biological and genetics laboratory, Ryan and Krysty both were unconscious and dreaming, their sleeping minds locked in a simultaneous dream vision of erotic horror.

Later, all had determined that this shared dreampieces of which Doc had also been privy to, minus the erotic elementhad been brought to the forefront by the pharaoh and his formidable mutant gifts. But it was ultimately connected by their own psi abilities. Ryan was latent sensitive, which in many ways accounted for his own finely honed survival instincts. With the damage Doc had suffered by being time trawled, it was hard to determine how strong his own "psychic" abilities might beor had once been.

Of the three, only Krysty possessed any outward manifestations of true extrasensory abilities. Her gifts were strong, skirting doomie status when in full bloom and serving as an advance-warning system for the group in times of uncertainty and danger.

Still, any example of a shared dream was most unusual. As a rule, everyone enveloped within the gateway process dreamed, and usually the experience wasn't pleasant. More often than not, what Ryan and the others were forced to endure while in the midst of molecular meltdown and rea.s.sembly was forgotten once they were awake and safe, the only vestiges being fleeting images of evil and feelings of unease.

Some of the dreams triggered by the mat-trans jumps they underwent were amazingly ba.n.a.l when exposed to the cold light of unforgiving reason and logic vicious gunfights in the Old West along muddy streets and wooden sidewalks; card games with elegantly dressed gentlemen scalie gamblers on river-boats made of thick plastic and spun gla.s.s; a fistfight with a walking, talking plant that spouted plat.i.tudes from Plato; wild, unbridled s.e.x with a mult.i.tude of partners.

Anything and everything burbled up from the subconscious and intruded when it came to the insanity of a mat-trans dream.

Ryan had asked Mildred what she thought caused the dreams to be so vividly violent, and she'd told him that the mind was only able to absorb and comprehend so much. When they took their places in a mat-trans chamber to go spiraling off into the infinite, perhaps the dreams were a defense mechanism to deal with sights and sounds that could otherwise drive them to insanity.

Not a bad theory, but Ryan had later placed his own spin on why the dreaming was induced. Depending on the level of just how psi sensitive you might be, tapping into the place where time and s.p.a.ce met might also allow one a subtle, cloaked and symbolic glimpse into the future, such as the recent precognitive visit in the Egyptian-styled halls of h.e.l.l Eyes.

"There is truth in dreams, my dear Ryan," Doc had intoned more than once after recovering from a jump. "Ignore them at your peril."

"Dreams, h.e.l.lnightmares is more like it," was how Ryan defined them, both at that time for Doc and even now, at the present, when he was caught up in such a jump state.

Nightmares.

RYAN LOOKED DOWN at his hands. His scarred fists were stubs of raw, red meat from where he'd continued the pounding on the thick armored gla.s.s of the room's lone doorway. His bones ached, and his back was one long knot of pain. The shoulder he'd injured and Mildred had reset was a glistening ma.s.s of aches. His mouth was desert dry, and his breath was a long rasp as the oxygen-rich air went in and came out through lips that were cracked and bleeding.

He needed a drink. He needed a long cool drink of water, or even better, a bottle of vintage predark Scotch whiskey, a large heaping tankard filled with nothing but the finest whiskey and pure spring water and cracked ice.

h.e.l.l, at that very moment in life, Ryan felt as if he could drink a five-gallon bucket of the liquor, especially if it was the good stuff. Scotch like he was dreaming of could only be found in the secured wine cellars of the most powerful land baronsfat, swaggering, evil men who reeked of corruption and decay. Most barons were a silly, idiotic lot, content to feast on the downtrodden and keep all in their so-called kingdoms for their own private use and gainbut they always had the best booze.

A lot of baronies were nothing but cesspools of slave labor and s.e.xual cruelty, sadism for sadism's sake a child pulling the wings from a fly, or the torturing of an injured animal caught in a bear trap; the crushing of a man's self-respect and honor; the joy of watching the light of life slowly die in the eyes of anyone who dared get in their way. That's all many barons stood forand Ryan had no use for them. However, barons could also be dangerous when provoked, and the one-eyed man and his ragtag band of friends seemed to have a knack for p.i.s.sing off all the right people at all the wrong times.

Ryan wasn't the most patient of men, nor was he the most compa.s.sionate. He worked hard at holding back the red curtain of anger that would start to descend at the slightest provocation, knowing that to give in would leave him vulnerable, at risk.

But at that very moment, Ryan was prepared to endure the most debilitating bout of red-eyed rage if he could gain a bottle of Scotch whiskey in the bargain. Even the kiss of a baron was preferable to sitting in the near darkness, alone and in pain, for Ryan knew there would be no drink coming, neither of Scotch nor of water.

Not here. In this room there was nothing but madness and the dead.

Ryan studied the walls of the chamber, which seemed to flicker with hidden fires. The air was filled with shadows, physical and mental, but all were black.

The shadows were his protection against seeing his oldest friend with his arms wrapped in a death's grip around the body of the black woman in his embrace. Ryan felt his eye involuntarily tear up as he tried not to see the lifeless, pale, scarred man-child or the lean, weathered face of the elderly dead man tangled together on the floor. He tried not to notice how the flames flickered and created after-patterns in his retina when his gaze pa.s.sed over the long, flowing, sunburst flame of hair of the woman he loved.

The woman he had loved. Ryan's tenses kept scrambling uppast, present and future. He made a valiant attempt to cut his lone eye away from the broken sight of his only son, the heir to the Cawdor name and bloodline. Madness.

Ryan remembered now the reason why all of the walls in the chamber were spider webbed with cracks. Krysty had called on the terrible power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, closing her emerald eyes to slits as she sat in the lotus position on the floor and began to whisper in a half voice a mantra of a.s.sistance, "Help me, Mother, help me and give me the strength."

She had been trained since childhood to hone this empathy by being in tune with the electromagnetic energies of the very Earth itself. By tapping into these deep pools of energy, Krysty was forced to sacrifice her humanity in order to become a creature with untold strength.

The transformation lasted only a limited time, and took a terrific toll on her physical and mental being. Still, she'd tried her best to free them from the armagla.s.s trap, but her efforts had ultimately proved useless. Her human frame could only trap and house the near molten force for so long before her bodily functions began to shut down, and she had pushed way beyond her limits this time.

She was dead twenty minutes after the attempt. Mildred noted the last of the woman's vital signs as they faded away.

A second bitter tear welled inside the duct of Ryan's blue eye.

"I know you, Ryan," a voice said. "I remember your face."

The rangy, muscular man whirled at the words, peering into the gloom of the room, trying not to look down at the limp, unmoving bodies.

"I remember what a cold-eyed, b.i.t.c.hing b.a.s.t.a.r.d you were. Even as a young kid."

The voice came from none of the people at his feet. Ryan tried to focus and came up with the face from his own brain to go with the easy, mocking tone.

"Harry?" Ryan asked, startling himself with how flat and dry his own normal baritone came out. "Harry, is that you?"

"If you say I am, I guess I am," Harry Stanton replied. The King of the Underworld of Newyork was sitting across from Ryan in a far corner of the hexagonal-shaped room. His eyes twinkled and he smiled broadly. He was dressed in the same outfit as Ryan had last seen him wearing many months ago amid the ruins of old Manhattan Island. Harry favored red and crimson apparel, and with his long beard and ample girth, he looked like a Deathlands version of jolly old Saint Nick.

Only Santa Claus had never looked so maniacal when smiling.

Ryan actually knew a bit about Christmas. He'd read an ill.u.s.trated children's booka poem really over and over as a kid during his privileged childhood as the son of Baron t.i.tus Cawdor in the ville of Front Royal. There was time for reading then. All the time in the world for anything he might have wished, until his mad brother and equally insane stepmother had taken all of that away from him.

"'Merry Christmas to all,'" Ryan said weakly.

" 'And to all a good night,' " Harry finished. "Never took you for a poet, Ryan."

"I'm just full of surprises," he said after considering the concept.

"Oh, now, that I can certainly attest to, yes. Ryan Cawdor? A one-eyed chill-crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d, filled to the apex of his pointy head with jolly surprises."

"What brings you out here?" Ryan asked, bored already with the rambling chatter that Harry adored.

"Out here, you say? Oh, we're outside?" Harry asked with a smirk, staring at the oppressive armagla.s.s walls surrounding them.

"I mean, in here, I guess," Ryan added lamely. Fireblast, but he feltbroken. Drugged. Weary. All fought out.

"You'll do, Ryan! You'll do fineyou always have, d.a.m.n your luck," Harry boomed. "Last time I saw you, you left me and my men a.s.shole deep in a blizzard back among the skysc.r.a.pers of my beloved Newyork, Newyork."

"It wasn't personal, Harry. Otherwise I never would have left you stuck there alive. You saved my a.s.s. J.B.'s, too."

"Glad to know you remember. h.e.l.l, I had to, Ryan. We had a history. I was there, you know, only a few weeks after you first joined up with the Trader. d.a.m.n, you were a sight back then," Harry mused, his ruddy face glowing with the memory. "You were too busy keeping the cheeks of your a.s.s pressed together and walking tough to notice me, except as a potential enemy."

"My instincts weren't that far off."

"Yeah, me and the Trader, we go way back," Harry continued. "And since you were there in training pants running along behind, you and I, we go back, as well."

"Trader used to say a man with a long history was a walking corpse," Ryan said.

"Trader used to say a lot of things, most of it useless, but d.a.m.n, it was entertaining. Life with the Trader was many things, but it was never boring."

Harry crooked a finger, and Ryan slid over closer. "I have something to tell you. Six degrees of separation is all that exists between any of us."

"Huh?" Ryan asked dully.

Harry sighed. "In between launching your salvos of bullets, you should think about reading a book every now and then."

"I have. I must've read The Night before Christmas fifty times," Ryan protested in a voice that sounded remarkably childlike. The timbre of his words frightened him enough to make him fear taking a look down upon himself, fearing he might see the fleshy body of an eight-year-old kid with proper depth perception.

"Let me put it this wayit's a small world after all, but we're all connected in some form or fashion," Harry said. "Not like spokes on a wheel, either. More like a patchwork quilt."

"Okay." Ryan coughed, suddenly impatient. He wasn't sure where Harry was going with this latest crock of s.h.i.t about wheels and quilts, and he didn't care. Time to change the topic of discussion before he was forced to get to his feet, stagger over and strangle the talky b.a.s.t.a.r.d with his bare hands.

"How's the vid collection coming along, Harry?" Ryan asked, recalling the stacks and stacks of old videotapes Harry had shown him during his time in the man's lair beneath the streets of Newyork. Some of the vids were in protective plastic cases or tight cardboard boxes, but most were openpiles and piles of black plastic sh.e.l.ls filled with spools of endless miles of recording tape.

"Coming along quad-triple fine!" the overweight man replied, excited to talk of his hobby. "I guess every man, woman and child must've owned a vid machine in the old days. More tapes floating around than a man would ever have time to watch. I can't figure out the logic behind some of the s.h.i.t people recorded and saved, but any tape is usually a gem. You want to know what I find the most?"

"Not really, Harry. I was just trying to make conversation," Ryan retorted. "And you picked a lousy time for a visit."

"All depends on the interpretation."

"Yeah, right. Why did you pop up here anyway?"

Harry rapped a gloved fist on the top of his own head. "Why, I'm a cheesy fragment from your subconscious mind, Ryan, here to tell you to keep your possessions closeand your loved ones closer."

Ryan exhaled noisily. "f.u.c.k, Harry. I already do that."

"Or so you think."

"No thinking necessary. I don't think. I do."

Harry fell silent, looking around the fiery walls of the hexagonal chamber. "Looks like you're in a b.a.s.t.a.r.d fix, Ryan my boy. Yeah, One-eye Cawdor's not going to fight or trick his way out of this one. h.e.l.l, I don't know why you're acting so surprised. We both know you were expecting this to happen sooner or later."

"What are you talking about, Santa?" Ryan had decided to give up on trying to maintain a semblance of a true conversationhe was saying whatever came into his mind now, flowing with the fever-dream logic being presented to him.

Harry beamed at Ryan, running his fingers through the snowy white beard the fat man was now sporting. "Come, now. In the darkest part of your heart you antic.i.p.ated this happening. Now, there's no more dread, ho-ho-ho."

Ryan digested this latest piece of information. Harry had seemed to tap into a private dread, and from the looks of things, the evidence was clear. Was Santa Harry right? Did Ryan's fear of ending up trapped in a gateway cause this? Ryan pondered the concept, his own hidden fears peeled away and put on display in such a destructive fashion before his own remaining eye.

Then he rejected such a.n.a.lysis. No way. Every rea.s.sembled atom of his being rejected such a notion.

"No way, Harry Claus. I'm not dead yet."

"No, you're not. Not yet. Soon, mebbe. Sooner than you think. But jolly jumping Jesus, boy, take off the patch and look around you, because everybody else is stone-cold dead in the marketplace, one hundred and ten percent chilled!"

With that, Harry Santa Stanton Claus, the once and future King of the Underworld of Newyork, laid a finger up the side of his nose, and with a nod and a wink, up the brick-and-mortar chimney he rose.

Ryan gaped. He managed to crawl over to the mantel, his knees uncertain as he crossed J.B.'s lifeless leg, for a better look at the flickering fireplace, the source of the strange light and shadows that had been bothering him since he arrived here, in this place, in this state of mind. His gaze delivered more details about the fireplace.

There were photographs on the mantel, framed pictures of himself as an older man, with a hint of silver in his hair; of himself and Krysty together, smiling, at ease, with a tiny red-haired child held proudly between them; and of Dean, only Dean at the age of thirty, with the lines of maturity and age set in his cheeks and forehead.

Photographs. Memories. Visions of things to come?

Ryan took all of this in and was moved to speak a final time.

"I didn't know there was a fireplace in here," he whispered, half-hypnotized by the flickering of the flames, and then he woke up.

Chapter Four.

Even through his closed eyelid, Ryan could still see the light.

A second ago, he had opened his right eye and immediately snapped it shut. In the instant Ryan had looked up into the blinding light, he'd been struck down hard by the coruscating illumination surrounding him. His lone orb ached, like someone with a ma.s.sive fist had smashed a hairy knuckle into his lone good eye socket.

That wasn't a light caused by smoldering embers glowing inside a jump-dream-inspired fireplace. The light seemed to come from all sides, washing down from above and splashing up from below, bathing him from all angles in white brilliance.

Flat on his back, Ryan willed himself to reach down blindly for the weapon holstered at his hip and was rewarded with the comforting feel of the b.u.t.t of the SIG-Sauer in his palm. He pulled the weapon free of its holster and scooted backward until the base of his spine hit the solid surface of what he figured to be the mat-trans armagla.s.s wall.

The nova-hot light had begun to slowly fade to a more reasonable wattage. Through the spots dancing in front of his vision, Ryan was able to make out the forms of his companions, all of them scattered like discarded sh.e.l.l casings across the floor around him, their positioning identical to how he'd seen them in his mat-trans induced nightmare.

Krysty was to his right, facedown and unmoving. Her flowing red hair was shining bright in the brilliant illumination. Near her was Dean's tense body. Ryan gathered that the boy had also come to consciousness and been exposed to the sheer ferocity of the lighthe was on his side, his eyes clenched shut like a fist. A dark streamer of blood covered his lips and chin, the standard nosebleed the mat-trans jumps so frequently induced. Ryan had come to consciousness many a time to find a smear of red across his face.

"Dean, you all right?" Ryan barked.

"Yeah, Dad. Got a triple-bad hammer going at my head," the boy replied. "Eyes feel awful. Like somebody rubbed ashes in them."