Hellbenders. James Axler

body seemed dwarfed by the camou trousers, heavy boots and patched jacket that appeared to swallow up his small frame.

      Yet this was deceptive; Jak Lauren was a child of the bayous, whose hunting instincts and ability to chill in a multiplicity of manners had been honed by his early life in the swamplands. He had proved his strength, speed and cunning many times after joining Ryan’s band, and his loyalty was beyond question.

      Mildred hurried over to Jak, bending to check his pulse. It was strong but erratic. She stepped back as another stream of bile shot from his mouth, and his body convulsed in a spasm of retching.

      “Dammit, you nearly got me, Jak,” she whispered as she avoided the vomit.

      “Sorry,” he replied weakly, his eyes coming into focus, “try harder next time.”

      “You’re feeling better, then,” she said simply, helping him to sit upright, careful to avoid the hidden jagged metal and pieces of glass sewn into his jacket.

      As he adjusted himself into a sitting position, Jak took in his surroundings. “Made it,” he said softly.

      “Looks like it,” Mildred replied, adding, “at least, I think so.” She glanced over to where Doc Tanner lay. Beside him lay his weapons: the silver-tipped lion’s-head cane with a hidden blade, rapier thin, made of the finest tempered Toledo steel. Next to it sat the ancient LeMat percussion pistol, with its double barrels, one of which was primed for a charge of shot, the other for a ball that was of an incredible diameter and density for such a pistol. They were old weapons, but ones that, in the hands of the skilled Doc Tanner, were deadly.

      Theophilus Tanner was, like Mildred, one of the few people in the with any firsthand knowledge of the world before skydark. Except that his story was more incredible than anything that any of the companions could have dreamed, and hadn’t even come out of the mouth of Tanner himself. Some of the things they had learned about the man had come through chance discoveries in files and records left behind in some of the places they had visited.

      Lying on the floor of the chamber with his frock coat wrapped around him and his white mane of hair obscuring his features, Doc could be mistaken—on glimpsing his weathered and lined features—for a man in his sixties. And yet he was only in his late thirties. Doc had been the subject of an experiment by Operation Chronos, a part of the Totality Concept, a U.S. Government project that had been partly responsible for the war that led to the devastation of skydark, and that had bequeathed the redoubts and the mat-trans units to those who came after.

      Doc had been born in the late 1860s in a rural part of Vermont, and was a doctor both of science and of philosophy. A happily married man, he had been snatched away from his beloved wife, Emily, and his children, Rachel and Jolyon, by a random time trawl operated by the whitecoat scientists of Operation Chronos. He had fought and struggled, both mentally and physically, with his captors. Doc had become a problem, and the solution was to send him forward in time. Doc had been shot a hundred years into the future, ironically saving him from the fate that soon caught up with his tormentors, but leaving him adrift in a world completely unlike anything he could ever have imagined.

      Doc’s physical frame showed signs of the stresses of such time travel, but it was his mind that was much more of a concern to those he traveled with. In flashes, Doc was erudite and sharp, but at other times he was in a different world than those around him, and his grasp on reality could be dangerously thin, the silken thread of his psyche perilously close to snapping.

      As Mildred attended to him, he mumbled incoherently, his pulse fading in and out with his consciousness, as though he were actually close to just fading away in front of them. Without saying anything, Mildred knew that the others mirrored her thoughts: how many more of these jumps could Doc’s mind and body take?

      And then, just when she thought that he was about to fade again, his eyes snapped open, the clear blue orbs immediately focused on her.

      “By the Three Kennedys,” he whispered hoarsely, “I do believe we’ve arrived safely once more. Perhaps we should stick around, see what’s happening.”

      Ryan looked at Krysty. The ends of her hair were wispy tendrils that began to flutter, as though from the slightest breeze.

      There was no movement in the air.

      Her green eyes caught his and fixed them with an intent stare. “I don’t know,” she said hesitantly, with an almost unconscious shake of her head. “I just can’t tell right now. I think there’s something. It’s not danger exactly, more a kind of…distant threat.”

      The one-eyed man nodded crisply. He trusted Krysty’s almost doomielike feelings, and particularly the early-warning system of her hair, which he had come to know over their time together to be an arbiter of threats that she herself may have little idea of.

      “Triple red, friends,” he cautioned, inclining his head to J.B. The Armorer nodded in return, moving toward the back of the group. They would follow their usual formation: Ryan would lead from the front, followed by Krysty and Jak. Doc, as the most immediately vulnerable, would be kept in the middle, followed by Dean and Mildred. J.B. brought up the rear, and was skilled in the art of keeping their asses covered. Nothing had gotten past the man.

      And it seemed as though there would be little to trouble that reputation in this redoubt. Ryan opened the door and stood back. Exiting a chamber into an unknown environment could always be a risk. He lowered his breathing so that the very sound of his central nervous system seemed to deaden within, allowing him to better detect any noises that might come from outside the chamber. His eye flickered across the narrow scope of fire afforded by the door. He could hear or see nothing. Turning his head, he could see Krysty. Her sentient hair hadn’t moved, and her steady gaze told him of no danger. He raised an eyebrow as he looked at Jak. The albino hunter had also stilled his breathing, his every sense concentrated on detecting signs of life.

      Jak suddenly opened his blood-red orbs, the fire in them burning strong now that he had recovered from the effects of the jump. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

      Ryan, satisfied that there was little danger, but still prepared for any action, tensed his steel-coiled muscles and eased through the door. He had the Steyr up and searching, but the area appeared to be clean. At Ryan’s command, his companions left the chamber and filed through the anteroom and into the comp control room.

      “No signs of life in here,” Ryan began, “but what about outside, lover?”

      Krysty pursed her lips. “Something, but not right around here. We need to keep it triple red, though.”

      J.B. and Jak both looked up at the ceiling together.

      “Sec cameras?” the Armorer asked.

      “Uh-huh,” Jak grunted in reply. “Never know.”

      As they both looked around, they could see the old vid cameras, but noticed that the winking red lights that usually indicated a working camera were extinguished on all.

      “That’s good,” J.B. commented. “No one’s gonna be expecting us.”

      “I wouldn’t bet on that,” Dean said softly.

      “Why?” J.B. asked, looking over to where Dean had wandered. The youth was near the exit door to the unit, hunkered down and examining something on the floor.

      “Take a look at this,” Dean said, picking an object off the floor and carrying it over to the rest of the group.

      “A self-heat,” Mildred said as she got a better glimpse of the object.

      It was, indeed, a self-heat. Most redoubts had large supplies of these vacuum-packed foods, sealed in such a way that unwrapping them triggered a reaction in the packaging that heated the food within. They usually tasted terrible, but were always good to plunder from the redoubts as they were manufactured with the preDark sec forces in mind, and so had an emphasis on nutritional and energy value over actual taste. They were invaluable. During their time together, the companions had become all too familiar with the self-heats.

      “More