End Program

“Oh, lover,” Krysty groaned. As she did so, she shook her head slightly: No.

Ryan kissed her again as the elevator stopped its silent descent and the door drew back. They were in a vast lobby now, its proportions dwarfing anything Ryan could think of—it was like a predark aircraft hangar or a shipyard, ceilings so high they were almost four stories above him. There were a few people in the vast room—too few for its size, in Ryan’s opinion, but he had witnessed chronic overcrowding in the Deathlands and the sickness it had brought. The people were dressed in white and pale colors, loose-fitting clothes that better suited the climate of the West Coast. Some moved on wheeled devices, standing atop them, maintaining their balance with arms gently out to their sides as they sped swiftly across the room.

A quick scan, automatic now after all these years, revealed that no one appeared to be armed.

The room’s illumination came from an impressive wall of windows that looked out on to the ville. Ryan and Krysty strode across the room, fifty steps from the elevator to the nearest doorway, a twenty-foot-wide gap in the glass that opened straight out onto a veranda beyond. There was an awning up above to keep rain off, should there be any, and the veranda and its surrounds were designed in such a way that no wind could penetrate into the lobby itself.

Ryan stepped out into the sunlight, taking in a deep breath of air. Morning sunshine and clear skies gave a fresh feel to the day. The wide streets were paved and clean, birds occasionally fluttering past, landing for a moment to scout the area for food. Buildings towered all around, eight huge structures clad in bold white like the great marble temples of ancient Greece. The lowest of them was two stories, the tallest much higher than that. The buildings were linked, Ryan saw, with bridges running across the streets from their upper stories. The bridges were open to the elements. Few people were about, given all the space, but Ryan noticed that several of them were traveling via the same wheeled disklike platforms, flitting between the buildings like a ballerina figurine pirouetting out of a music box.

“This place is incredible,” Ryan said as he tried to take it all in.

“They’ve been very hospitable,” Krysty told him. “We’ve wanted for nothing.”

Ryan checked the weapon at his hip, noticed Krysty was still wearing her Smith & Wesson on hers. “Not that hospitable, though,” he said, indicating her blaster.

Krysty smiled. “Force of habit,” she admitted. “I haven’t had to draw my blaster in two weeks. The only time it’s been out of its holster has been to oil it.”

Ryan nodded. Oiling their weapons was a ritual the companions strictly followed. A well-maintained blaster could mean the difference between life and death in the Deathlands; it would never do to become complacent, no matter how tranquil the surroundings.

And they were very tranquil. There was noise here—the hiss and drone from the factories, the sound of the nearby river rushing past—but it was muffled by the buildings and the wide-open spaces.

Ryan and Krysty walked slowly down a wide thoroughfare. Outside, the building looked newly built and was a pale yellow that was almost white, better to reflect the fierce California sun. It ran over three hundred feet before Ryan and Krysty reached its edge, the same in the other direction. Ryan was impressed by its size.

“Is this place all dedicated to fixing people up?” he asked Krysty.

“They’re very advanced here,” Krysty replied. “Mildred said they’re doing a lot of experimental work into cybernetics—like the unit they put in your eye.”

“Robot stuff?” Ryan asked, glancing back at the building.

“From what I’ve seen, they use the building as a repair shop and medical center,” Krysty said. “I’m not sure they see much difference between those things.”

As Ryan focused on the building, the crosshairs reappeared across his left field of vision, a ghost overlay on the image. “Yeah, I guess.”

They continued walking, taking it slowly as Ryan realized how exhausted he felt. He had been fed a steady drip of proteins while held in the drawerlike unit, and while he was fully nourished he had little energy—that had been used up by his body for repairs.

People flitted past on the wheeled disks, while another group traveled toward Ryan and Krysty in a group, riding aboard a wheeled transport roughly the size of a wag but entirely open to the elements. Ryan looked at the vehicle as it passed them and moved down the road. Its passage was almost silent and it had no driver, just a cylindrical box of lights up front a little like the thing that had assisted Betty during her examination.

Krysty watched Ryan, the smile never leaving her face. She was pleased to have him back—it had been a fraught two weeks waiting for the man she loved to wake up after all that he had been through. As they walked, Krysty brought him up to speed on what the companions had been doing in his absence—J.B. and Mildred had checked out every nook and cranny of the medical center, while Jak and Ricky had spent time scouting the ville and its immediate surrounds, coming and going as they pleased. Doc, she explained, had been disappointed in the food here and had taken it on himself to show the local “Progressians” how to cook, despite the lack of a variety of ingredients. Krysty didn’t tell Ryan about her own recovery, nor how much time she had spent in a medically induced coma; she did not want to worry him.

“You weren’t tempted to move on?” Ryan teased. “To leave me behind?”

“No one gets left behind,” Krysty reminded him. “Especially you, lover.”

It was true. No one would ever be left behind. Ryan had been with J.B., Krysty and Doc longer than anyone, and the others were just as much family to him now. But there had been an occasion—once—when someone had been left behind: Ryan’s own son, Dean Cawdor, stolen by his mother, Sharona, and lost to him for the cruel eternity that only a grieving parent could know. Dean was alive, but changed, and his recent reacquaintance with his father had been brief and had not ended well. It was something Ryan couldn’t fix, though he hoped that one day Dean would come back to him. It was something that Ryan didn’t vocalize, but he thought of Dean just about every day.

Fifteen minutes’ slow walk brought the couple to the edge of the ville, where a mighty river flowed. “J.B. calls the river the Klamath,” Krysty said.

J.B. was the guardian of the maps for the group, and he employed a mini-sextant to get their bearings when they traveled. Without him, the group would be lost in Hell; as it was, they traveled the post-nukecaust roads with the knowledge of where they were, but they were still the roads of Hell.

“A lot of California was devastated when the quakes hit,” Ryan observed, peering out at the raging waters. Whiteheads leaped and dissipated there, like horses in the sea.

Ryan was correct in what he said. California had been struck hard by the nukecaust and all that followed. Great chunks of the west coast of America had been sheared off when the San Andreas Fault broke open, and some of the state had been relegated to an archipelago of tiny islands dotted in the Pacific. J.B. couldn’t know it, but the Klamath River had been widened in the past century as a result of the tectonic plate movement, and now ran at a faster speed than it had a hundred years earlier.

Ryan looked across the rushing river to where a great dam had been constructed. The dam was made from huge hunks of stone that had been carved and shaped with craftsmanlike precision, barricading the river. A grand walkway ran across the top, as wide as a two-lane blacktop, arching forty feet above the tumultuous surface of the fast-flowing water. The dam ended in a high protective wall on the far bank, while the near side was attached to a monitoring tower that rose another twenty above the high wall. It was an impressive feat of engineering, something seldom seen in the devastated Deathlands.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked, his eye focusing on the details of the pale, curved wall of stone. “A dam. But I don’t see a whole lot of farming going on.” In fact there was none; the area surrounding the ville appeared to be devoid of life.

“J.B. says they use it to power the equipment here,” Krysty told Ryan. “Some kind of hydropower arrangement, like a watermill only bigger.”

“Much bigger,” Ryan acknowledged as he eyed the watchtower. “Stands to reason. Lotta tech here—needs a lot of power.”

“That tech saved your life,” Krysty reminded him. Then she reached inside the back pocket of her pants and pulled something free. Coiled on itself, the thing looked like a handful of thick black cord. “I saved this,” she told Ryan, handing it to him.

Ryan took the item, unraveled it and looked it over. It was his old eye patch, the one removed back in that redoubt where they had been attacked by the mutie plant. He held it up for a moment, tracing the stitching that held the leather to the cord, seeing the spots where it had frayed. “I don’t need it anymore,” he said, and he drew his hand back and threw the patch toward the rushing water below.

Krysty’s hand darted out, grabbing the patch as it dropped. “I’ll keep it,” she told Ryan when she saw his confused expression. “A keepsake of what you were,” she added, slipping the eye patch back inside her pants pocket.

“I make my own keepsakes now,” Ryan said, stepping back from Krysty. “Stay there.” He looked at her and held himself still, waiting for the camera eye to snap a picture of her. After five seconds it did, capturing Krysty’s image for posterity. In his eye, she would always be beautiful, her hair catching in the wind, the river racing behind her. Now he could call upon that image whenever he wanted to—in his eye.

Chapter Nine

“The food here is so terribly bland, do you not agree?” Doc asked as he blew on a spoonful of soup to cool it.

Doc was sitting at a beech wood table in a large room whose panoramic windows overlooked the river and the hydroelectric dam stretching across it like a stone cutlass. Across from him, Mildred, J.B. and Ricky sat eating from their own bowls of soup while Jak sat a space down from Doc, mopping his bowl with a bread roll from the pile that dominated the center of the table. Tasty or not, Jak ate the meal with gusto.

Around the room, several other groups were eating. They were locals, dressed in plain overalls and coverings in muted colors, whites and pastels. They ate quietly in ones and twos, and mostly in silence.

“I haven’t paid it much mind,” J.B. admitted distractedly. He had heard the argument before; they all had. The old man was nothing if not consistent.

J.B. was gazing down at the dam and the two people who stood close to its edge on the raised river banks. Krysty was easily recognizable even from this distance with her vivid red hair, while Ryan’s huge frame made him easy enough to spot if you knew what you were looking for.

“I have spoken to the chefs de cuisine about adding salt, spices and so on, but they seem ignorant of the whole concept of seasoning,” Doc espoused. “Alas it seems that humankind’s culinary knowledge has been forgotten along with so much else in these terrible times.”

“Food is food, and free food tastes that much better,” J.B. said, his eyes flicking up to the white-haired old man over the rims of his glasses. “At least we didn’t have to hunt and chill anything to get this, and that’s a definite appetizer in my book.”

“Quite,” Doc acknowledged, nodding.

Mildred tore a chunk from a bread roll and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I’ve had worse,” she admitted. “Rat meat, leafy stew, boot—” She stopped abruptly, remembering the horrific moments when she had almost become a cannibal. Ryan had secretly promised to chill her then, if that’s what was needed, and so she had trusted him with her life until she could be cured. “I’ve had worse,” she finished lamely.

Laughing, Ricky reached for another roll. “It won’t ever taste as good as my mama’s cooking,” he said, “but I’ll take it if it’s free.” Then he took a second roll and a third, and began juggling them with casual dexterity. “Anyone else want a roll?” he asked.

Jak and J.B. told Ricky that they did, and both found themselves the recipients of juggled rolls that landed perfectly on their respective plates.

“With an arm like that, he should have played baseball,” Mildred said, shaking her head.

“Mayhap one day,” Doc told her, “when all of this horror is past.”

J.B. chewed a corner of his roll thoughtfully and glanced back to the window. Ryan and Krysty could be seen there making their way gradually back up the paved street. “You think Ryan’s going to be okay?” he asked Mildred.