Deathlands - 00 - Encounter by James Axler & Alan Philipson

Author:James Axler & Alan Philipson [Axler, James & Philipson, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Men's Adventure, Science Fiction, Adventure
ISBN: 9781599505077
Google: xn4AAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0373811977
Barnesnoble: 0373811977
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1999-09-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Doc Tanner sat huddled on the floor in the far corner of his cell, with his forehead resting on his knees and both arms wrapped around his shins. The light from a guttering candle on the barred windowsill cast bizarre shapes around the bleak prison chamber, dancing spirit forms. Doc’s mind, because it was a rational organ, and because it belonged to a man well-trained in making sense of nothing, took those fleeting, erratic movements and made them into things familiar. While tears rolled down his cheeks.

He saw children skipping, heard them laughing.

A horse and carriage, clattering as it rushed past.

A ballroom crowded with stately dancers. Stringed instruments tuning up somewhere behind the milling throng.

Only when the candle finally burned out did he regain his sense of surroundings. He was plunged back into the dank and musty cell, oppressed by the weight of the iron collar and chain that bound him to the ring set in the wall above his head.

If this was reality, he told himself, then life had no meaning. Its myriad cruelties were senseless. And largely redundant. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, a man of faith, was coming to the end of his tether.

He tipped up his face to the blackness that hid the ceiling and cried, “I need no more instruction!”

His words echoed, and then the echoes faded away.

Doc could weep no more; he’d emptied himself of grief. In the center of his mind, the terrible curse was already formed and enunciated. On the tip of his tongue, an oath against God, the Creator.

Was to think it the same as uttering it?

Did God hear thoughts?

If the Lord heard prayers, Doc decided, He could hear thoughts.

“I have prayed to you hourly to bring about the moment of my death,” he said aloud, his voice cracked and strained with bitterness. “That I might be delivered from the hands of these malefactors. And you answer me not.”

“Tomorrow,” he said to the darkness, “I will most likely die. When the doors of Spearpoint part at my command, Zeal and Shabazz will surely have me killed. Then I will see at last. I will see whether there is an intelligence behind all this torment, this unspeakable evil, or whether it is merely an engine, a machine running without an operator, the grim embodiment of Descartes’s mathematical universe.”

“Deep in my heart, I now believe that I will find only oblivion on the other side of the eternal gate. No welcoming arms of Emily, no Rachel, no Jolyon. After all this, after all I have suffered, all that I have lost, I tell you now, God who never answers, oblivion will do very nicely.”

With that, Doc Tanner closed his mouth and closed his eyes. In his endlessly long life, this was his darkest hour. The terrible weight of it seemed to suck the energy from his body. Exhausted, he slipped into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

IN ANOTHER PART of Baron Zeal’s big house, in a much more genteel cell, Trader was starting to feel poorly. His abdomen had become severely bloated.

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