"Axler, James - Deathlands 021 - Twilight Children - Laurence James 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

Michael was coming around, his eyes blinking fast, his head shaking from side to side. "Hey," he said, "I

don't feel too bad. We did jump, didn't we?" He looked at the sludge-colored walls. "Oh, yeah. They were red last time, weren't they?"

Only Mildred and Doc were still unconscious.

"Can't feel much." Krysty closed her eyes and took a dozen slow, deep breaths. "No. Air tastes like it generally does. Flat and... There's a kind of bitter, chemical smell to it, though. Least it's not corpses Like the last place."

Mildred sneezed, making them all start. "Bless me." She shook her head, the tiny beads in her plaited hair clicking softly against one another.

"All right?" the Armorer asked, never a man to use three words when two would do the job.

"Think so." She looked inward for a moment. "Yes. Not too bad. Must be one of the better jumps. I suppose we really have... Walls were that screaming red last time, weren't they? Not sure this gray's much improvement."

Now everyone was up but Doc, who slept on, oblivious to the six friends gathered around him. Mildred put her index finger against his throat, checking his pulse. "Slow but not that slow," she announced.

J.B. was examining the walls of the gateway chamber. "You notice this, Ryan?"

"What?"

"Sort of careless built."

Ryan looked more closely and saw what J.B. meant. The sheets of armaglass didn't quite match up, and some kind of sealant had been pushed into the gaps.

One of the walls was cracked, and two of the ceiling disks were actually hanging loose.

"Yeah. That's the first time I've ever noticed anything like that."

"Last year's loving, bitter, still remains," said a familiar deep, resonant voice.

Ryan turned. "Doc's on his way back out of the darkness," he said.

"There is no memory of her here." Doc's eyes bunked open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, gradually returning to focus on the walls and the six faces looking down at him. "Upon my soul, my dear friends, I wondered when we seven would meet again. And here we are, but not upon a blasted heath. A bastard wreath. Last teeth." He struggled to sit up, helped by Mildred and J.B. "Have we successfully completed our jump? I see we have, from the change in hue. But I confess that I fed less sickly than is usual at such moments. Perhaps I am finally building a tolerance to such events."

"We all feel better than we normally do after a jump." Ryan looked around. "If we're all okay to go, we can take a look at where we've finished up."

He didn't need to tell them all to draw their blasters.

Coming out of the gateway was one of the potentially triple-red scenarios in Deathlands. But this time was oddly different.

Chapter Two

Normally there was a small anteroom immediately off the actual mat-trans chamber. The size varied a little from redoubt to redoubt, but they were usually somewhere around ten feet square, plainly decorated, mostly unfurnished.

This time it was simply a cave, roughly hewn from bare stones, a dull gray rock lined with narrow seams of shimmering green quartz. The ceiling was less than eight feet high, and the walls were only about six feet apart. Other than a patina of very fine dusty sand, it was empty.

Michael Brother ran his finger down the stone. "Still got the marks of the chisel," he said. "Looks like it was done only yesterday."

"Must've been one of the last redoubts to be built before skydark," J.B. suggested.