"Now you know. You know who we are, and you know what's been happening in the hundred years or so since you went under."
Ryan leaned back against the pile of blankets, looking around the circle of friends, in case anyone had anything to add. Only Krysty offered to speak.
"That's about five years per minute, Mildred. But I don't think Ryan left much out."
"You got any questions?" J.B. asked.
They were holed up for the night in what had been some kind of staff lounge for the doctors and nurses. They'd found blankets in the closets and plenty of sofas. With the sec doors, it was a reasonably safe place to pass the dark hours.
One of Mildred's first requests had been for some clothes, "So's I can get out of this damned shroud."
She now wore a nurse's white blouse tucked into men's dark blue pants. They had also found white sneakers that fitted her and a heavy wool sweater in case they encountered colder weather.
Now she sat across from the others, almost as if she'd come along to be interviewed for a job. Despite the fact that she'd just been brought back to consciousness after a century of nothingness, Mildred Wyeth didn't seem at all fazed by the experience. And there was no sign, Ryan was delighted to see, of any kind of mental disturbance from the unfreezing.
Not yet, he thought to himself cautiously.
"Do I have any questions, J.B.? Let me see." The hoarseness was easing, though she had a beaker of distilled water at her side, from which she sipped constantly. "I guess that if I really set my mind to it I could come up with at least seven-and-a-half-thousand questions." The gentle smile disappeared. "What the heck do you think, mister? What a damn fool question that is!"
"Sorry, but..."
"Oh, forgive me for speaking while you're interrupting, mister. I've been lying in that icebox for a hundred years. You give me a fifteen-minute synopsis of what's been happening, and then ask if I mighthave a question!"
"Being frozen sure didn't do anything to improve your temper, lady," Doc said testily.
"What?"
"Perhaps it made you a mite deaf into the bargain, did it?"
"You damned old goat! Talk to me like that and I'll knock you on your skinny ass!"
Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Jak watched in absolute amazement. Doc had shown no interest in the newly thawed Dr. Wyeth, totally ignoring her, which was yet another worrying symptom of the old man's withdrawal into catatonia. Now, out of the blue, he had launched into the woman — who seemed better than able to look after herself in any full and frank exchange of views.
"You and whose army, ma'am?" Doc bellowed, drawing himself up to his full skinny height.
"Go piss up a rope, asshole," Mildred snapped, also standing. But her muscles were weakened by the long immobility, and she tottered and nearly fell over.
Doc laughed. "It'll take some time before you can back up all the big talk. You're as feeble as an hour-old colt, ma'am."
"I believe that your name is Theophilus Tanner, is it not?" Mildred asked with a deceptive quietness.
"Such is my name, Dr. Wyeth," Doc replied with a courteous bow.
"Well, Theophilus Tanner," the woman began. Suddenly she raised her voice to a piercing, eldritch screech of insensate rage. "Fuck you!"
Krysty was sitting next to Ryan, and she leaned across to him, whispering, "Doesn't seem much wrong with Mildred Wyeth, lover."
"Long as you keep to the windward side of her temper." Ryan grinned.
The movement woke Ryan, and his finger automatically slid onto the trigger of his SIG-Sauer.
"Don't shoot, Ryan."
"Mildred?"
Most of the lights had been disconnected by J.B. so that they could sleep in something close to darkness. Ryan, on one of the long sofas, could just make out the silhouette of the woman looming over him.
"Sorry to wake you."
"Sure."
"Mind if I sit down here a spell? Legs aren't that strong yet."
Ryan sat up, gesturing to her. "Sure. Pull up a corner."
"Thanks. Got to talk some. You're leader of this group,"
It wasn't a question, but Ryan nodded anyway. "Yeah. I am."
"And this Deathlands is simply the good old U.S. of A. but reverted to a kind of primitive way of life. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Back to Year Zero and all that crap."
Ryan didn't know what she was talking about, but it sounded like a kind of sense, which was reassuring. He nodded again.
"And you and the others are like... like... I guess like a sort of Magnificent Seven."
"There's only five of us now. Six with you. Not seven."
She laughed. "I guess I've got so much to learn that... No. What I'm trying to get to, Ryan, is that the Deathlands is full of baddies. Black hats. And you are the goodies, the white hats?"
He shook his head this time. "No, Mildred. In Deathlands there isn't much of good or bad. Generally it's just a lot of people, doing the best they can." He was aware that the phrase had a familiar ring to it, but he couldn't just remember where he'd heard it before.
"A place of mean streets. But you and the others walk down them and you aren't mean. Something like that, Ryan?"
This time the question was clearly there. "Yeah. Sounds about right, Mildred."
"Then I might be lucky about being thawed out by you and not by some of the others, I guess." This time she seemed to be almost talking to herself. "Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for unlocking Sleeping Beauty from her ivory tower."
"Sure."
Mildred stood up on wobbly legs, smiling down at him, her teeth showing white in the dimness. "Some charming prince, Ryan. Sorry I woke you. Good night, now. Sleep tight."
"And you."
By morning Mildred had recovered still more of her strength. Jak had scouted around and discovered some sealed packs of food-tabs. Though they tasted much like a compressed mixture of mud and chaff, they provided all the essential proteins and vitamins to get a person through a day.
"Nourishing, they may be," Doc said, "but delicious they are not."
Mildred grinned at him. "Just for once, Doc, you and I are in agreement."
"Then I hope that it will not be the last time, Dr. Wyeth," he replied gallantly.
"And my name is Mildred, if that isn't too familiar for you."
Doc half bowed. "Mildred it shall be."
Krysty caught Ryan's eye and winked at him. The change in Doc was astounding. The arrival of this freezie, with her opinionated manner, had been just what the old man needed to nudge him from the madness of the triple jump.
After the meal the companions headed out. When they reached the doors that opened onto the tropical jungles of Minnesota, Ryan eased cautiously through, then beckoned the others to follow him into the humid sweltering air,
Mildred was third out, and she paused, looking around in amazement. Then she turned angrily and accusingly to Ryan.
"Some damned joke, isn't it?" she snapped.
"What?" Only part his attention was on her. Most was focused on searching for potential threats from the alien landscape.
"Funny, Ryan. If that's your real name. This institute was in Minnesota, near Duluth. I don't know what's going on here, but I know fucking well, if you'll pardon my French, that this is notMinnesota. It could be Hawaii, but Duluth it ain't, Jack!"
"This is the Shelley Cryonic Institute, Mildred," Krysty said. "Sign says so, right there."
"Nuking blew the world apart," Ryan reminded her. "There was a botanical complex here. The hot spots must have changed the weather and scattered some freak mutie seeds. That's our guess."
"Well, I'll shove my vibro through a flying doughnut! When they brought me in here it was bleak midwinter."
"Snow on snow." Doc carried himself a nod of appreciation from the woman.
"Near twenty feet, if I remember right. By God! But this is so wonderful! I always wondered what would happen if... Now I know, and I'm fine. Freezing really works."
J. B. Dix hawked and spit in the lush turf. "Not often, lady," he said, laconic as ever. "We tried thawing out lots, and you and one other guy were the only ones who made it."
"How come you froze?" Jak asked. "Look fucking good me."
"Thanks, son."
Jak opened his mouth, closed it again, opened it and to the amazement of the others, said nothing.
Mildred watched this performance with some surprise. "What's the matter, son?"
"Please, don't call 'son' or 'kid' or nothing like that."
"Sure thing, Jak. Sorry. You asked me why I was frozen. I went into Bethesda for a routine checkup and biopsy, suspecting an ovarian cyst. Surgeon didn't think it was serious."
"But they found it was..." Krysty struggled a moment for the word she wanted. "Malignant? Was that what they found?"
Mildred shook her head. Her black hair was shaped into dozens of tiny, tight plaits, and they glinted in the watery sunlight. "No. Never got that far. I had this totally freak reaction to the anesthesia and the preop, and I went into convulsions. Really far out, like I was up there on the ceiling of the operating room watching my body down below. I went into a coma for a time. All the vital signs were failing. Because I was important in the cryo field, they wanted to keep me if they could, and coptered me up here. Snow was everywhere. I remember that. I could see and hear, but I couldn't move a damned thing. Then they started the cryo-processing, and the rest, as they say, is silence."
"And now you find yourself here, in this wicked, ravaged world," Doc concluded. "Believe me, dear lady, you have my entire sympathy for your grievous predicament."
In his careful introduction, Ryan had touched on the backgrounds of himself and the other members of the group, so Mildred understood the reason behind Doc's kind words. She nodded and smiled at him.
"Thanks. I guess, like you, there'll be times I find all this madness easy to cope with. Other times it'll be harder." She paused, looking out over the rich vegetation and the slow-flowing river. When she spoke again, her voice crackled with emotion. "Knowing that everyone you ever loved... has gone — not just gone, but long, long gone — that's not easy. Ma must have passed away at least eighty years ago. My nieces... all dead."
"You were not married?" Doc asked gently.
"No, no. Work came first for this child, and fighting for rights. My people's rights and the rights of women. You folk can't realize what a shit-world it was, back then."
"Times it's like that here, Mildred," Krysty told her.
"Ma told me that life wasn't just a bowl of damned cherries," Mildred continued, "and, by God, she was surely right."
A dragonfly darted from the trees beyond the water, fully eighteen inches in length, shining with a dazzling, iridescent purple sheen. It hovered for a few moments near the group, then moved away, its wings a shimmering blur.
The freezie watched it in silence, before shaking her head in disbelief. "And now you'll tell me that it isn't just the trees and flowers that have gone extra-freaky! That was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life. Are there more of those around the Deathlands?"
Ryan answered. "Beauty and horror. Most species, including humans, have mutated over the past century. You'll see something of both sides of the jack around here, Mildred."
"I can't wait." She looked at the five friends in turn. "Seems to me I've got a fair range here, from what you told me about yourselves. A redheaded medium, an albino street punk, a two-hundred-year-old fart, a gun freak and a one-eyed killer." She laughed. "Ma always used to moan that I made some odd friends. Boy, oh, boy. If she could see me now!"
Her amusement was infectious and they all began to laugh.