happens to me next will be a large part of the journey. If fate—or the workings of my own imagination masquerading as fate—decrees that I end up back in the frozen north, then it shall be nothing more than another sign that I have taken the right path.
These are not times for plans. Plans demand intellect; intellect is confused by the workings of insanity; the gut is the only true arbiter.
But I shall miss them. I dimly recall thinking of them as angels at one point in my madness. Perhaps they are, in a sense. Guardians of ideal qualities created by my mind, perhaps based on those I have known at some point. Or mayhap they are real, and this world is my reality. In that case, then they are angels of the best kind: firm friends in the face of adversity.
I salute them…
‘WHAT THE HELL does he think he’s doing?’ Mildred yelled as she turned and ran toward the closing sec door, Doc now nothing more than a darkness in the shadows as he moved out of sight.
‘Millie, wait,’ J.B. yelled. He cast a glance at Ryan, wondering if his friend would want to follow Doc. The old man was still suffering from some kind of psychosis, and the last thing they needed—friend or not—was to become embroiled in more games.
But J.B. need not have wondered. Already, Ryan was catching up to Mildred and passing her on the way to the sec door.
‘Bastard won’t start to open until it’s fully shut, even if you punch the code in,’ he yelled breathlessly. ‘We’ve got to get through it and get him, let the others wait.’
Mildred didn’t bother to answer, saving her breath to try to keep pace with Ryan’s longer stride. Particularly if she was going to make it under the door. They were now about twenty feet from the entrance and the door showed less than a foot of space. It was going to be incredibly tight.
Ryan was a crucial few feet ahead of her and he flung himself into the gap, flattening himself as much as possible and bracing for the impact as his flying body connected harshly with the floor of the tunnel. He winced in pain as his shoulder jarred, a tingling numbness momentarily shooting down to his fingers. He ignored it, concentrating on rolling so that he could get the hell out of Mildred’s way as she came through.
Cursing loudly with her last desperate exhalation of breath, she took a flying leap at the ever-narrowing gap, feeling the edge of the door bite as it closed the gap uncomfortably. She threw herself with as much force and momentum as possible, the foot-long thickness of the tunnel almost catching and trapping the toes of her boots as she slid past, ironically just enough to kill her speed and insure that she didn’t hit the floor as hard as Ryan.
The one-eyed man was already on his feet and headed down the tunnel as she picked herself up.
‘That damn fool old buzzard. We should just leave the old bastard to do what the hell he wants,’ she muttered darkly as she hauled herself to her feet and set off in pursuit.
They knew exactly where they were headed, and as they were stronger and faster than Doc, they might just have time to catch him before he entered the mat-trans unit. Once the chamber door closed, it would be impossible to open it until the process had been completed.
Neither of them wasted time looking to their rear. They knew that the others would follow as soon as they could get the sec door opened once more. It was more of an imperative to reach Doc.
Their choices were justified. As they thundered down the lower corridor, heavy footfalls echoing around the dank and scarred walls of the lowest levels, they knew Doc could hear them. But it didn’t matter. Speed was more important than stealth. Something that was proved when they entered the comp room to find Doc about to grab the lever to the unit’s door. He was almost crying with frustration as his shaking hands and trembling fingers, fraught with anxiety, seemingly refused to grasp the lever.
He looked up as they approached.
‘Please. I did not want you to follow me. Allow me to do this.’
‘To do what, Doc? To send yourself off into God knows where?’ Mildred asked.
‘It’s something I must do,’ he replied as firmly as he could.
‘The hell it is,’ Ryan snapped.
Doc looked at him, momentarily distracted. ‘How the hell would you know?’ he retorted angrily. ‘You have no idea what I am trying to do, or why.’
‘Then why don’t you tell us?’ Mildred questioned in as reasonable a tone as she could muster.
Doc sighed. ‘It would take too long, and you would not want me to do it. I do not think you could understand—’
‘Too stupid, is that it?’ Mildred countered.
‘No, it is not that. What’s the point, you’ll only stop me anyway,’ he added with a resigned sigh, standing back from the door.
In the distance, they could hear the others approaching.
‘C’mon, Doc, I really don’t want to talk about it in here,’ Ryan said softly. ‘Let’s go topside, and then you can explain. Mebbe we’ll understand, after all.’
‘I somehow doubt that that very much,’ Doc murmured, ‘but I suppose I should give you the chance.’
If nothing else, Mildred could treasure the confused looks on the faces of J.B. and Krysty when she, Doc and Ryan calmly walked out of the mat-trans anteroom. There was even a flicker of confusion crossing Jak’s albino visage.
For the second time, they exited the redoubt and stood in the glorious morning. But there was little attention to be paid to the landscape or the blazing clear sky. The first thing was to try to sort out the problem with which Doc now presented them.
A few hundred yards from the entry to the redoubt was a small clump of trees, twisted and stunted with thick growth on their boles, but enough canopy to provide shelter from the heat and brightness of the sun. They took refuge beneath these and Doc started to explain what had caused him to turn back.
It was a long, rambling tale. Sometimes he had to stop and go back on the story, as though there were parts that he even had to explain for himself. Which was no surprise, as what had made so much sense when mulled over within the confines of his own head now seemed to be disjointed and absurd when spilled out loud. He could see from the faces around him that they were having trouble understanding the questions he had to ask himself and the non sequitur answers that had caused him to take his instinct-led course of action.
He finished up weakly, shrugging and telling them that he didn’t expect them to understand, but that it was something that he had to do.
‘Doc,’ Ryan said softly after a long silence, ‘you weren’t with us when that ville went up. Well, you were, but you were this other person. And then you were unconscious. You didn’t see what happened to it. There was no way anyone could have got out of there. The whole tribe, except for mebbe those who stayed behind at the ville, were wiped out. There is no one for you to go back to, even supposing that, by some miracle, the mat-trans took you back to the right redoubt and you could find your way on foot from there without freezing. We only made it as a group because we could support one another. You’d have no one to lean on if you had to.’
‘Yes, I understand completely what you’re saying,’ Doc stated, ‘but can you not see that it makes no difference? This is not about being rational. This is about following an instinct because I cannot trust that which I see and hear around me. As far as I know—in an empirical sense—you may not even exist.’
‘A what?’ Krysty asked. ‘Mother Sonja told me about some old ideas from before nukecaust, but that’s a new one on me.’
‘Doc,’ Mildred said, deciding to try her luck, ‘I’ve listened to what you’ve said, and although I can’t totally understand, I ask you to trust me on one thing. As far as I’m concerned, I know I’m here. And knowing that, I trust my senses. And what they tell me, as a trained physician, is that you’ve been through an immense trauma from fever, followed by a concussion.