End Program

Chapter Five

Ryan listened intently as he lay beneath the illuminated panel. He was trapped, at the mercy of the person behind the voice, and he didn’t know who the voice belonged to or why he was being held.

There was silence for a minute, maybe less, it was hard to tell. Then Ryan heard the soft susurrus of machinery coming to life, and he felt something subtly moving beneath his back.

“Relax, Mr. Cawdor,” the softly spoken male voice instructed from the hidden speakers in the coffin walls. “You’re quite safe here.”

Ryan clenched his fists tighter. He would get one chance at this, one chance to surprise whoever the hell was waiting outside this sealed box. Ryan was a survivor—he would take that chance.

Above him, the illuminated panel seemed to be receding, but Ryan realized that it wasn’t the panel that was moving but him. Beneath him, the traylike floor of the coffin bed was drawing backward in the direction that Ryan’s head pointed. He tilted his neck back, craned his head and peered up at the panel there as it swished back on some kind of hidden runners.

After that, the bed of the coffin, as he had come to think of it, slid out from its position, and a room came into view, painted white and lit with subtle sidelights that were still dazzling after so long in the box. A man stood to the side of the retreating bed, dressed in white and facing the wall, his head tilted down to look at some kind of panel or screen that jutted there. The man was bald and wore a tinted visorlike item hooked over his ears that shielded his eyes. The man’s hands were poised on the panel as if he was playing a piano.

As the bed slid out from the wall, the man in white turned to Ryan and smiled. “How are you feeling, Mr. Cawdor?” he asked.

Ryan moved then, rolling off the bed before it could fully retract from the wall, and powering his left fist at the man’s jaw. He moved fast, his feet slapping against the cool floor tiles of the room. Ryan’s fist met the man’s jaw with an audible crack, and the bald stranger went crashing backward in a confusion of suddenly awkward limbs.

Everything was different now. Ryan had two eyes where he had become used to just one. Everything seemed suddenly more vivid, the whiteness of the walls brilliant, like lightning in the mist.

Naked, Ryan stepped forward and brought his right fist around in a brutal cross, striking the stranger’s face high on the left cheek before the man had even finished falling. Ryan felt light-headed, unsteady on his feet, but he knew he had to survive, which meant getting out of this trap—or whatever it was—as soon as possible.

“Mr. Cawdor, please—” the man cried, blood showing now between his teeth.

Ryan leaned down, his head still reeling, and punched the man again, striking him dead center of that weird visor he wore and snapping the plastic in two. The right half went spinning across the white-tiled floor while the left shattered, still clinging to the bridge of the man’s nose. A thin line of blood began to ooze from the man’s nose, following a slow path down the side of his tilted face.

“Where am I?” Ryan spit, crouched over the bald man, his face close to the stranger’s.

The man’s eyes rolled around in their sockets, struggling to keep focus. Ryan took that moment to look around him. He was in a small room, twelve-by-ten with plain white walls and a series of drawers running up the wall from which his bed or coffin had emerged. A single, plain door that looked like a flat panel was set in a recess in the wall opposite where the man had been standing. It had no handle and no control mechanism that Ryan could see. He waved one of his hands close to the door to see if he might activate a sensor, but nothing happened.

“Locked,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head.

There were no windows in the room, but where the man had been standing was a pane of glass at roughly waist height, recessed and tilted at an angle so that a standing person could look down into it. With his left hand pressing firmly against the bald man’s breastbone, Ryan raised himself and peered at the glass: it was smoked but otherwise appeared blank.

Beneath him, Ryan felt the man stirring, and heard him mutter something. “Not...going...to hurt you,” the man said, blood washing across his teeth. “Please.”

“Where are my blasters?” Ryan growled. “Where are my friends?”

The bald man’s pink head swayed on his neck like a flower in the breeze, his eyes drifting in and out of focus. Then, as Ryan watched, his victim’s eyes rolled back so that all he could see were the whites behind the flickering lids.

“Fireblast!” Ryan growled, clambering up from the sprawled figure in the white overalls. The man was a weakling, glass jaw, no stamina. He wouldn’t last five minutes outside his lab.

Ryan peered around the room, searching for his weapons. Without warning, the vision in his left eye—the new one—flickered and changed. Ryan started as he saw something appear to scramble across the surface of the eye, flicked his hand before his face without thinking to brush it aside. It was a kind of cross-shaped overlay, like looking through the crosshairs of his Steyr longblaster.

“What the hell?” Ryan muttered, looking through the crosshairs. Almost as soon as he noticed it, it disappeared, as if willed out of existence. Something wasn’t right here, and the sooner he got the heck out of this lab the better, he thought.

Ryan went back to scanning the room, searching for his blasters and panga, wary this time of the strange effect that had popped up across his vision. There was no sign of the weapons, only the plain walls, the coffin drawers and a single, low table propped against one wall next to the door. Ryan pulled one of the drawers at random, but it appeared to be locked. His friends could be in there. Dammit, Ryan raged silently, where was he anyway?

He paced back across the room, standing before the unconscious figure. This place was clearly well appointed, which meant the odds were that this man was not working alone. Even now, Ryan realized, there could be an alarm going off, sec men being moved into position against him. He leaned over the man and checked his pockets, searching for a weapon or something to use as one. There was a tubelike metal thing with a pointed end of the approximate size of a ball-point pen or a small screwdriver. Ryan took it, figuring he could use it like a knife if he had to. The rest of the man’s pockets contained only papers and something that looked like a small circuit board, open with resistors and capacitors soldered to its surface. Ryan tossed it aside, checked the man’s pulse. He was still alive, but his pulse was slow—he would be out of it for a few minutes yet.

Ryan straightened, and as he did so the white door slid open on hidden tracks. As the door slid aside, he saw the edge of a figure who was standing there, a white padded shoulder of a jacket of some kind. Ryan leaped, shoving the door open with one hand while his other—holding the implement like a knife—slammed into the newcomer’s face. The man, dressed in a white topcoat and pants with a cloudburst of black curly hair around his head, staggered back under Ryan’s assault, slamming into the corridor wall behind him. “What th—?” the man stuttered as he went sailing into the wall.

“My friends. My weapons. Where are they?” Ryan growled, driving his left fist into the man’s gut to punctuate his statement.

The white-clad figure doubled over with the impact, hands reaching around to clutch his aching belly. “I—”

The Deathlands warrior pressed his hand against the man’s throat, drew back the metal tube. “Where?”

“Ryan, back off.” The voice was familiar, but it took a moment for him to register it. “Back off,” the voice said again, calling from the end of the corridor.

He turned in that direction and saw J.B. hurrying toward him, shouting for him to stop fighting. His old friend looked different—his clothes were cleaner, the arms on his glasses no longer slightly bent from wear. “Stand down, he wasn’t going to hurt you,” the Armorer stated.

“J.B.?” Ryan asked, bewildered.

Behind J.B., more familiar figures appeared in the white-walled corridor, along with several strangers, all of whom were wearing white clothing like the bald man. Mildred and Ricky hurried to join J.B., while Jak was somewhere behind the others but moving quickly to meet with Ryan. Mildred had a white, sleeveless jerkin over her olive-drab T-shirt, and Ricky was in his usual clothes but they had been cleaned. Jak, too, looked the same but different, his usually unruly long hair washed and smoothed. Besides those familiar faces, a man and two women—all of them looking to be under thirty—were striding up the corridor, looking surprised.

The corridor walls and ceiling were painted a clean white, while the floor had been finished in matching white tiles. Fluorescent lights ran the full length of the corridor without a break, set neatly in a recess that ran in the corners where walls met ceiling.

“What’s going on here?” Ryan asked. “Where are we?”

“We’re safe, we’re among friends. It’s okay,” J.B. said reassuringly, pressing a hand against his friend’s bare shoulder to calm him.

Ryan watched J.B., looking for that telltale flinch that would tell him that the Armorer was being pressured somehow, or that it was a trick. There was nothing, just J.B., clean-shaven, glasses polished, old brown fedora looking a little smarter where the dents had been knocked out of it for once.

“We’re safe, Ryan,” J.B.repeated. “We’re safe.”

Warily, Ryan drew the hand that held the metal tube away from the man he had attacked, pulled his other hand back from the man’s throat. The figure sagged against the wall, breathing with an agonized, choking gasp, blood on his face, a hole in his cheek.

“Where are we?” Ryan asked J.B..

Chapter Six

“They call this place Progress,” J.B. explained.

Ryan sat with the Armorer in a vast lounge area with panoramic windows that looked out over a ville of towering dwellings and predark factories. Jak, Mildred and Ricky were with them, and they all sat around a low table furnished with drinking glasses. The factories pumped smoke into the air, clouding the skies with trails of gray. Ryan had been given clothes to wear, a dressing gown with a simple tie that he had knotted at his waist. He had been assured that his own clothes would be returned shortly. They were being held in storage after being cleaned.

One of the locals, a young woman with flawless skin and blond hair tied back in a braid, had asked Ryan if he needed anything, and when he told her he was thirsty she hurried away and returned a half minute later with bottle of clear water. The bottle didn’t smell of pollutants or of poison, so Ryan sipped at its contents warily as he took in everything J.B. was telling him. The blonde stood on the far side of the room, ostensibly admiring the view through the windows but actually keeping an eye on Ryan in case he went on another rampage. Other people from the ville had been sent to deal with the wounded that Ryan had left in his wake.

“Progress,” Ryan repeated, skepticism clear in his tone.

“Stupe name, I guess,” J.B. admitted, “but you get used to it. The ville was built around an old military base—redoubt, mat-trans, the whole enchilada. When we jumped out of that redoubt greenhouse from hell...you remember that?”

Ryan nodded, taking another sip of water.

“When we jumped, we wound up here,” J.B. continued. “We were all pretty beat-up when we arrived—”

“I remember the armaglass wall imploding,” Ryan confirmed.

“Yeah, you got a face-full of that,” J.B. told him regretfully, “and we all got cut up pretty bad. Some of the glass came with us too, and really did a number on us.”