Ritual Chill. James Axler

to do with the ravages of time in the period since. It meant that each redoubt that existed, no matter how long it had been silent, still had its own specific character.

      This one hadn’t been empty that long. No sooner had Ryan and the companions carried out basic maneuvers and secured the area than the familiarity of this particular redoubt impressed itself upon them.

      “Can’t be,” J.B. said. “Hasn’t happened all that often.”

      “If you consider that there are only a finite number of these infernal places and that the laws of probability dictate—”

      “Doc, shut up.” Mildred cut across him. “Are you saying that we’ve been here before? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t get any bells ringing.”

      “You haven’t been here before,” Ryan answered with emphasis. “Neither has Jak. But the rest of us know this place only too well.”

      “Only too well indeed,” Doc echoed with a touch of melancholy in his voice. He began to wander down the corridor outside the mat-trans control room. He appeared to know where he was going.

      “Safe doing that?” Jak questioned.

      “There isn’t anyone here to harm us,” Ryan told him.

      “No one, but mebbe a few memories that aren’t so great,” Krysty murmured.

      They followed behind Doc, Mildred and Jak exchanging puzzled glances. No one else spoke. They merely followed the old man as he trailed along the maze of corridors, his demeanor showing a definite intent. He passed numerous closed doors and moved up a level, until coming to a closed door.

      The companions held back, letting Doc enter the room on his own. They could hear the sounds of lockers being opened, the rustling of clothes and then silence.

      Krysty moved forward silently, looking into the room. Doc was on his knees in front of a line of open lockers, among a pile of clothes. There were jackets, short skirts and buckskin boots. He took a yellow silk blouse and held it up to his nose, inhaling deeply before looking at Krysty with an almost infinite sadness.

      “They don’t even smell of her. They don’t smell of anything at all. It’s as though she never existed.”

      IT HAD BEEN A WHILE. Perhaps not that long, but it was hard to say. So much had happened to them since then that the passage of time seemed impossible to quantify. Finnegan and Hennings were gone. So were Okie and Hunnaker. Doc had been even more of an enigma. Mildred had still been frozen, and Jak still in the bayou. The corpses of Keeper Quint and his sister-wife Rachel were here somewhere, wherever they had dumped them after the firefight that had chilled them—Hunnaker, too. And Lori was lost to them. Quint’s daughter—mebbe Rachel’s, mebbe another chilled wife’s, they’d never been able to work that one out—who had chosen them over the insanity of her inbred family existence and had become Doc’s companion. The clean slate of her untutored mind provided a sounding board for the time-traveler’s tortured psyche until she had been cruelly snatched from him.

      The redoubt had continued to function without anyone to trouble its automated systems. Left to the efficiency of the old tech, it had continued to light and heat the underground warren and to maintain a level of operable capability. It hadn’t changed since they had left it.

      Which should have given them cause for celebration. The showers and baths still worked, the water was still hot. There were still plentiful supplies and the armory was as it had been left after they had plundered it last time. Even having taken all that they could carry, there was still far more that had been left behind. The size of the armory—indeed, the size of the redoubt as a whole—had been dictated by its proximity to the old Soviet Union, and even though that threat had long since been erased, the detritus of an ancient conflict still marked its passing.

      The glittering mosaic floor of the stores still beckoned with operating old tech, clothes, vids and tapes of old shows and music the likes of which Mildred hadn’t seen since her predark life.

      It should have been a chance for them to rest up, knowing that they were alone and that there was little to disturb them beyond the sec doors to the outside world. They could relax and recuperate.

      But it wasn’t going to work that way.

      The armory, for a start. If the remains of the twisted skeleton they had encountered on their last visit weren’t enough, the distorted skeleton was now dust, disturbed from its years of rest, the warning scrawled in blood on the door now faded after being exposed to the touch of human flesh and sweat, they were soon reminded that the majority of the weaponry and ammo left in the armory was of little use to them. The blasters were too big or clumsy, or not makes and models in which any of them were proficient or comfortable. The ammo for the weapons they used was either cleaned out or not there in the first place, the only ordnance left suitable for the blasters they had dismissed.

      Beyond the armory, there was enough old tech and cultural artifacts to keep them occupied for years. Except that Jak wasn’t interested, Mildred found them reminders of her past that she would prefer to keep buried, and for the others they were reminders only of the previous visit and the disasters that had ensued.

      Mildred, tired of being reminded of the world before the nukecaust, asked what had happened.

      She listened while they told her and Jak of their previous visit to this redoubt and their encounter with the Keeper. How he had been desperate for new blood to provide for another Keeper to succeed him, and how he and his sister-wife Rachel had clung to the companions to give them that new blood, wanting to keep them here. About how, when they had then left the redoubt they had encountered the Russian bandits who had made their way across the wastelands separating the old United States from the old USSR in the snow-filled lands that had once been Alaska.

      Jak nodded recognition when they spoke of the Russian Major, Zimyanin, who had led the Russian sec in pursuit of the bandits. The name was familiar to him from the time when the mat-trans had sent them to the old capital of the USSR, Moscow, and they had once more encountered the granite-faced sec man.

      But even though he may have expected to have heard all about their previous encounter, he was astonished when the facts unfolded. The fact that they had broken a dam with an old missile and flooded part of the land in escaping from Zimyanin’s arbitrary justice was something that had been unknown to him. Ryan’s description of the expression on the Russian’s face when the dam broke made Jak laugh, a short, loud bark that broke the silence. A noise he doubled when he heard how the man had been duped by another missile, this one a dummy.

      It should have broken the tension, but it didn’t. They were all still uneasy. There was little in the way of useful food supplies left from their previous stopover, so they would have to move soon anyway: jump to another location or walk out into a hostile and frozen environment that had been changed by the dam burst. If they jumped, it was possible that the new redoubt and its environs would be just as hostile.

      As Ryan had once read in a predark book, better the devil you knew… They’d attempt to find more supplies in the frozen wasteland before attempting a jump.

      “RECKON WE SHOULD MOVE as soon as possible,” Ryan said to Krysty as they settled into the whirlpool bath that was still working perfectly. “Could make the food last a few days, but…”

      Krysty shook her head, the long red tresses flowing freely over her shoulders. Despite the air of unease about the redoubt, there was no danger, and so her sentient hair remained at ease, despite the swirl of worry that surrounded her heart.

      “It’s going to be hard out there. Real hard. I remember what it was like from before. But it’s got to be better than in here. It’s like there are ghosts watching us, coming down and pressing us into the ground.”

      Ryan said nothing for a moment. Finally he broke the silence. “Shouldn’t be that way. We’ve chilled our share—had to, before they chilled us. Quint and Rachel were just another two. No reason they should come back, not something stupe like ghosts, but the memory…”

      Krysty reached out and stroked his face,