Chapter Twelve

When the air in the middle of the street began to shimmer, Ryan had already made up his mind to grab the woman and make her his hostage. But as the earth trembled and the shimmer took solid form, a funnel cloud, spinning, flecked with glittering points of light, his resolve slipped away. It was replaced by awe. Even in Deathlands, tornadoes didn't appear out of cloudless skies. And tornadoes didn't grow brighter and brighter, until the light was like a knife point thrust through the center of his eye. He shielded his face as thunder boomed, and the force of the shock wave jolted him back on his heels.
When Ryan lowered his hand he saw the funnel cloud was gone. In its place, in midair, the fabric of space was unzipping. As the slit widened, he choked on an odor, caustic and vile like burning plastic. In the gap he saw something, a gridwork of black pushing forward, out of nowhere. Ryan held his breath and held his ground. The edges of the opening gaped wider and wider, and the grille, bumper and headlights of a massive vehicle appeared. With a roar of its engine, it lunged forward, and as it did, it stretched and split the orifice to a towering height.
Indeed, it was a monster wag, black, dripping with oil. A helmeted figure, the driver, sat behind the gleaming windshield. As the front wheels appeared out of empty space, so did the nose cone of an enormous red-and-white missile, looming high above the cab. It had the word FIVE written on its side.
With another roar of its engine, the huge truck tractor emerged from the opening with one hundred feet of cargo. As the oil-dripping tail fins of the missile and the rear of the truck bed cleared the slit, it slammed shut with another clap of thunder.
The apparition didn't completely disappear, though.
Ryan could still see something hanging there in space, vague, glittering, a spinning mist. He noticed that all the people in black armor were giving the affected area an extremely wide berth.
His first thought about the wag and rocket was that they had to have come through some kind of mat-trans gateway. He and the companions had uncovered the predark whitecoat technology and used it whenever they could to move around Deathlands. It was part of the Totality Concept, an ultrasecret U.S. program to develop weapons for future warfare. One of the research missions under the Totality Concept umbrella, known as Operation Cerberus, involved the transfer of matter, organic and inorganic, from one remote location to another. Another mission had been the time trawling that had brought Doc Tanner forward from the past.
As far as Ryan knew, the matter-transfer process was confined to gateway chambers that were airtight and lined with armaglass. All transfer was along a network of such chambers hidden around the world in fortified, underground redoubts. There sure as blazes wasn't a gateway chamber in the middle of Moonboy. And even if there was, he'd never seen one big enough to handle a load this size.
The missile had three stages and sat in a specially padded cradle on the track trailer's bed. And it came with its own loading crane, which was part of the chassis of the truck.
After conferring with the driver, the colonel stepped over to Ryan, untinted his helmet and announced, "It's time for us to make a deal."
"What do you want from me?"
"Just some cooperation. You know things that we want to know."
"And in return I get what?"
"You get to live, and so do your friends."
Ryan had been wondering when the subject would get around to his companions. "The others are long gone by now," he said. "Vanished into that desert out there like a pack of mutie prairie dogs."
The remark made the colonel smile.
"You think that's funny?" Ryan said.
"See the top stage of the rocket?"
It was conical, like the nose of a bullet Ryan wasn't impressed. "If you brought that thing here to nuke something," he said, "I hate to break it to you, but you're a hundred years too late."
"It's not a nuke," the colonel said. "That's our eye in the sky, friend. Once it's aloft, we'll be able to use it to count the hairs on a prairie dog's butt, if we so desire."
Ryan shrugged. "Whatever gets you through the night."
"But it's not just a spy satellite," the colonel continued. "The onboard laser cannon has an effective range of five hundred miles and can bull's-eye a target the size of a man's head. After it's in orbit, the laser can be remote-fired from anywhere on the planet. Zap! And your hat size is zero."
The colonel paused for this to sink in, then said, "Are you going to cooperate with us?"
When Ryan didn't answer right away, the man said, "Consider what you've already seen our shoulder-fired pulse weapons do, if you think we're bluffing."
"What sort of cooperation are you looking for?"
"You do what we say. Answer our questions. No resistance. No lies."
"Until?"
"Until we decide we're done with you."
"And the alternatives?"
"Actually, there's only one. We foam you now, and crisp your friends as soon the satellite achieves orbit Take your time and think about it. You've got fifteen seconds."
Ryan didn't have to think about it. Based on what he'd seen, he was pretty sure the colonel could deliver what he had promised. "Just tell me what you want from me, and I'll do it."
"Good," the colonel said. "Nara, here, is going to escort you back through the passageway."
The woman stepped up behind Ryan.
"Through what passageway?" he said.
"Nara will show you."
The blond woman put her gloved hand to the middle of his back and gave him a push in the direction of the spinning mist. It was no gentle shove. She was a lot stronger than she looked. The push from behind lifted the soles of his boots from the ground and sent him flying forward. He should have regained his bal- ance as his body lost speed and his feet landed. But neither of those things happened because he never lost speed. Gripped by the tornado's suction, he flew faster and faster.
Ryan clamped his eye shut as the glittering light flared in his face, then a thunder clap half deafened him. When he opened his eye, he glimpsed a giant, toothless maw, gaping wide. And inside that, blackness.
It swallowed him whole.