End Program. James Axler

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      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.”

      “Where’s Krysty?” Ryan asked. “Is she okay?”

      “She’s fine,” Mildred told him, leaning closer. “Doc too.”

      “Well, mebbe a bit more ornery,” J.B. added, “if you want my opinion.”

      Mildred shot a look at J.B. “Everyone made it, Ryan,” she said. “We’re all okay. The people here in Progress went above and beyond to patch us up.”

      Ryan nodded, reaching up with one hand to feel at the alien eye that had been placed in the empty socket. “So I see,” he said, the irony of the phrase lost on him. “What is this thing, Mildred? What did they do to me?”

      “We’ve been here two weeks, Ryan,” J.B. replied before Mildred could speak. “Some of us were badly wounded by the armaglass. We’d all lost a lot of blood.”

      “The locals treated us,” Mildred stated. “They saw the damage to your face, and they plucked out all the debris you’d got showered with. When they saw your missing eye, well, they improvised.”

      “So, I can see again?” Ryan asked. He knew that he could, but he wanted to know how.

      “The locals will explain it to you more fully,” Mildred told him, “but basically they’ve fused a computerized camera to your optic nerve, allowing you to use both eyes once more.”

      “It has crosshairs,” Ryan said, glancing across the room to where the blonde stood. Jak was watching her too, he noticed; as usual, the albino was alert, suspicious of anyone he didn’t know.

      “Your new eye has a lot of things,” Mildred replied. “From what they told me, that’s a pretty serious piece of hardware they’ve put inside your skull.”

      “And they did this for nothing?” Ryan asked, knowing that everything had a price. He gazed out the window behind Mildred, focusing his vision, changing the depth. The artificial eye responded seamlessly, and when he drew a close bead on something in the distance those faint crosshairs reappeared over his left field of vision.

      “As far as we can tell,” Mildred replied. “They have a philosophy here in Progress about changing the world and making things better again. They want to fix the mess that the nukecaust left us. They want to repair the Deathlands so people can live here and prosper.”

      Ryan looked at Mildred, then turned to J.B. before addressing them both. “Where is this place?” he asked.

      “California,” J.B. answered. “Some part of it that survived the San Andreas problem.”

      Ryan looked out at the blue sky, wondering what they had walked into this time; wondering if they could survive in a place where survival didn’t seem to be a struggle.

      * * *

      SHORTLY AFTER THAT, two of the locals joined Ryan’s group in the lounge, carrying his clothes—repaired and freshly laundered—as well as his combat boots and his familiar weapons.

      The locals were a man and a woman, the man was quite young while the woman looked to be approaching middle age, slivers of iron gray in her hair, wrinkles clawed around her eyes. They seemed pleasant enough, albeit subservient in their attitude. They reminded Ryan of his childhood, growing up as a baron’s son in Front Royal, where his every need was attended to by servants.

      Ryan began to disrobe there in the lounge, but the woman held her hand up before her and suggested he follow her to a separate room, where he might dress in privacy. He followed her out of the lounge, into a white-walled hallway to a door. It slid aside at the woman’s touch, and Ryan looked at her confused.

      “How’d you do that?” he asked.

      The woman held up her left hand, and Ryan noticed the unobtrusive band of silver she wore on her middle finger like a wedding ring. “The doors are programmed to respond to this,” she said.

      Ryan nodded, not really sure what to say. He had seen technology before; of course he had—the redoubts he and his companions used to travel the secret roads of the Deathlands were graced with working technology that dated back over a hundred years, and seemed far in advance of anything humankind was capable of these day. He had also fought with mechanical devices before now, robotic things that walked like norms but chilled with the coldheartedness of machines. Even so, this was new—this ville with its hidden locks and uncluttered, almost sterile environment.

      The room’s walls were painted white like the other parts of the complex that he had seen, with illumination СКАЧАТЬ