Shaking Earth. James Axler

eyes staring unblinking at the top of the mat-trans chamber. Seeing him like that made Mildred shift to rise up and tend to him. Then she settled back down on her haunches, gazing sorrowfully at him and shaking her head. There was obviously no point.

      “I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”

      Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.

      He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.

      The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”

      Ryan recoiled as if the old man had transformed into a coiled diamondback. “Fireblast!”

      Doc sat up with an almost audible creak of joints. “Indeed. One might think you had never seen a man in repose.”

      “Doc, you was the deadest-looking article I ever hope to see,” the Armorer said with a chuckle. The old man stood, shot his cuffs and dusted off his frock coat.

      “Lover.”

      Ryan’s head snapped around. Krysty was sitting up. The color had returned to her cheeks. Before he or Mildred, who had at last gained her own feet, could move to assist her, she stood.

      BARE FROM THE WAIST UP, Krysty Wroth had sat in the infirmary of the Rocky Mountain redoubt, teeth locked on Ryan’s scuffed old leather belt. Mildred Wyeth had a pair of channel-lock pliers from J.B.’s armorer’s kit clamped on the head of the crossbow quarrel. The coldheart missile had a barbed iron head that reached halfway down the shaft to make it hard for the recipient to tear it out of the wound. However, a crossbow quarrel had enormous penetrating power. The bolt had actually gone all the way through Krysty’s left shoulder to tent out the fabric of her jumpsuit with two inches of gory tip.

      “Hold on, Krysty,” Mildred said. She pulled hard. Krysty closed her eyes, her fingers dug deep as talons into Ryan’s hand. She made no sound.

      The quarrel came free with a sucking sound. Blood gushed out, flowing down into towels they’d discovered inside an old laundry storage bin and heaped around the redhead’s middle. Mildred had told the others they’d need to let the wound bleed freely for a short time to flush the channel. The benefit would offset the minor additional blood loss.

      But even before she nodded to Ryan and J.B. to start pressing gauze compresses over the holes, entrance and exit, Mildred’s broad dark face was wrinkled in a gesture of disgust. Ryan frowned.

      “The smell,” Mildred said, holding the grisly trophy away from her. “Not much question what it is.”

      “Not gangrene, surely?” Doc Tanner asked.

      “Way too soon. No, it’s feces, probably human. Those coldheart mothers didn’t miss a beat.”

      “Want to guarantee nobody gets away from them,” J.B. said, sharing a grim look with Ryan. They were well familiar with that particular trick from their time with Trader, years before. Smearing a penetrating weapon, like a missile or a punji stick, with human feces all but guaranteed infection, deep-seated and virulent, in anyone unlucky enough to be punctured by it.

      “There’s still alcohol and gauze left in the redoubt stores, and even some packets of antibiotic powder,” Mildred said. “I can make a lick and a promise at cleaning out the filth. I can make a pass at debriding the wound, cutting out the dead and tainted flesh with a scalpel, to minimize the infection. But one thing we don’t have is anesthetics.”

      Krysty sat, pallid and swaying, with Ryan’s arm around her. “Do what you need to do, Mildred. I can take it.”

      “Do you need to?” Ryan asked. “What about Krysty’s natural ability to heal?”

      “It has its limits,” Mildred said, “like everything else. As a doctor and a friend, I can’t in conscience let it go without getting some of that crap out of there. I think we can pass on debriding, since that would add to the existing trauma, and nothing in my power is going to prevent infection totally. On the other hand, cleaning the wound channel will help keep the infection down while doing minimal extra damage. But…it’ll be rough.”

      It was. Mildred had borrowed both a segmented screw-together aluminum cleaning rod from J.B.’s kit and the concept of another gun-cleaning implement, the pull-through bore scrubber. She used the rod to poke a string through the wound, back to front, and then used it to pull through some thicker cord braided first with alcohol-soaked gauze patches, then dry ones, and finally patches liberally coated in broad-spectrum antibiotic powder. Krysty had endured all in the same stoic silence with which she had taken Mildred’s pulling out the bolt. But by the end her eyes were tightly shut and Ryan had to hang on to her to prevent her toppling from the steel table as she passed out.

      SHE’D STRUCK IT lucky one way, anyway: she’d been out for the jump. Now she was standing unassisted.

      “Careful, there,” Ryan began, eyeing Krysty carefully in case she started to sway.

      Krysty shook her head, smiling. Her hair continued to stir around her shoulders after the motion was done.

      “I’m fine,” she said. “Well, not fine. I’m okay for the moment. The power of Gaia is strong right here and now. Can’t you feel it?”

      “I can sure hear it,” Ryan said. The colossal groans and creaks and thuds reverberating in the very marrow of his bones could only originate within the Earth itself, he knew.

      “The infection’s working in me,” Krysty said. “Gaia’s power will help me fight it, but I’ll need time.”

      “Time, fair lady, is one commodity we might not be vouchsafed,” Doc said. “Judging from the prevalence of mephitic vapors, if we have not actually attained the infernal regions, we may have found ourselves in surroundings scarcely more salubrious.”

      “From the smell of sulfur and the sound effects,” J.B. said, looking up and around the mat-trans chamber as if judging how likely it was to hold up, “I reckon we might just have jumped in the belly of a live smoky.” He shrugged. “Out of the frying pan—”

      “But these redoubts were built to withstand nuclear explosions,” Mildred protested. “What can a volcanic eruption do to them?”

      Doc shook his head, his face set in a look of bloodhound mournfulness. “Much, it is to be feared, dear lady. When I was the involuntary guest of the Totality Concept and Operation Chronos in your own charming time, I read studies to the effect that a single large eruption discharged the force of many, many multimegaton warheads. The illusion of safety afforded by our surroundings may be precisely that.”

      “A live volcano? What imbecile would’ve decided to build a redoubt inside a volcano?” Mildred asked.

      “It might not’ve been live back before skydark,” Ryan said. “Mebbe they reckoned on it staying dormant.”

      “And how much do you trust whitecoat judgment?” J.B. asked. “They did such a swell job with the good Doc here.”

      “Talk fills no empty bellies or water bottles,” Ryan said. “We better take a look-see, find out what’s actually going on.”

      He glanced around the chamber with its flame-colored walls, now sinister and suggestive. Had the builders intended it as some kind of ironic commentary on their own arrogance in building their shelter in the gut of a volcano? Or was it a sign of their obliviousness?

      He didn’t bother to shrug. Only bigger waste of time than reckoning men’s motives, he thought, was trying to reckon dead men’s motives.

      “Let’s