End Program. James Axler

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      Chapter One

      Ryan lay flat on his back, naked, cold. He stared up into black, nothingness all around him. He raised his head, struck something just an inch above his forehead and felt pain run through his face. The pain made his nose twitch, as if he needed to sneeze, and a flash of brightness seemed to lance across his eyes in a firework burst.

      He moved more cautiously the second time, arms first, feeling around him. There were walls to either side of where he lay, their cool hardness running the length of his body. Ryan estimated that there was no more than an inch gap between the limits of his broad shoulders and those cool walls, as if he had been placed in a narrow tunnel.

      He flexed his feet, noticing for the first time that he was not wearing his boots. Those boots had been with him for more miles of Deathlands road than he cared to remember. He would have removed them to sleep, but he could not recall where or when that had been. But now he was naked, his body cold.

      When he stretched his toes, he felt another wall, pressing close enough that he could not stretch his feet to their fullest extension. Above too, a wall or roof pressed at his feet, and he could not bend his knees without meeting it.

      Where was he?

      His face still hurt. It was more than just the sudden shock of striking the panel above him, he knew. There was a rawness there, running down the left side of his face, where he had lost an eye to his deranged brother, Harvey, who had made a power grab to rule the barony of Front Royal. That had been a long time ago, before Trader, before J.B. and the others, before the long roads of the Deathlands.

      Something nagged at Ryan as he thought that, and he reached up to his face and probed gently, tracing the cicatrix scar and continuing to the eye patch that should cover his missing eye. The patch was gone.

      Ryan closed his eyelids and touched at the depression of flesh all around his left eye, reaching for the alien thing he could sense was there. When his fingers touched the surface of the eyelid, he could feel something hard pressing back: An eye? He had an eye where he not had an eye in more than twenty years.

      “An eye,” Ryan whispered, barely believing it. The words hissed out and were gone, but saying them somehow made it more real in the darkness.

      He ran the tips of his fingers across the surface of the closed eyelid, brought up his other hand and did the same with his right eye. They felt similar but different. The right eye gave under a little pressure, sprung, like a lump of jelly quivering on a plate. The left eye was harder with no give, more like a rock that had been planed off and worked into the empty socket.

      He had been cycloptic for so long that he had almost forgotten what it had felt like to have two eyes, the way it changed how one saw dimensions and distance. In darkness, Ryan could tell nothing about the new orb that resided within his left socket. It could be dead, unworkable.

      Ryan drew his fingers away and opened his eyes, staring into the darkness once more. He could see nothing, just blackness, the way the countryside got at night when the moon was in hiding and the stars had been painted over by clouds. And yet, he could see something, the way that even in complete darkness a person could still see something—edges, shapes.

      “Where am I?” Ryan muttered, reaching up again for that panel that rested above him. “And how the nuking hell did I get here?”

      His mind drifted back, recalling the last hours that he could remember.