Chapter 4

2069 a.d.

Dream Walker

Tanya woke up. She was in complete darkness, lying on something soft and bony that really stank. Like badly rotted meat, the stench left a heavy greasy coating in her mouth and throat that made her want to choke with every breath she took.

She tried to sit up and slipped, her head banging on a very low, concrete ceiling. Blindly feeling around her environment, she realized with some dismay that she was surrounded by low concrete walls and a concrete roof, about the size of a tomb, or something equally horrid. There were several decomposed corpses within an arm-reach of her. She was glad now that she couldn't see them – some of them had felt ... incomplete.

'Status report, ' she subvocalized, activating her body monitor.

Her inner ear resonated with the response. 'Blood pressure one sixty over ninety-five. Heart rate is one hundred ten. Your blood sugar is sixty-eight. You are eighty-five percent hydrated. You have been unconscious for seventy-six hours. Location is ... unknown.'

"What do you mean, 'unknown'," she asked out loud. "What is my GPS position?"

'No GPS signal is being received, ' the unit responded. 'Your transponder is not transmitting.'

'Damn!' Tanya thought, angry, disgusted and a little frightened. 'Fucking thing must have broke when I fell! Frank won't be able to find me! Seventy-six hours? Christ – that fucker must have killed me with that last shot ... I must be buried with the rest of his victims!'

'I gotta get out of here!'

Feeling her way over yet another dead body (this one was still slippery and was the main reason the air smelled so bad), Tanya found one side of this strange crypt she was in and managed to slide up the wall and stand up.

'Your pulse is one thirty-five and your BP is one eighty over one fifteen.'

"Shut up!"

Where she was at now was some kind of overhead vent, perhaps a chimney. Where she had tried to stand originally, the ceiling had been much lower. Standing on her toes, she reached as high as she could, but couldn't feel the top of her compact little prison. But, at least, the panic she felt was lessened simply by the fact that she was able to stand up.

The narrow vent, or chimney, where she was, was about four feet from side to side. Pressing her shoulders and head against one side, she began walking her knees and feet up the other side, determined to climb up the shaft, spider-style.

'It's a good thing I keep in shape, ' she thought to herself as she struggled up the chimney. 'All that fucking makes good, strong stomach muscles. But Jeez! My ass has never felt so heavy... '

It was a hard fifteen-minute's workout to reach the top of the shaft. Tanya was sweating profusely and gasping with the closeness of the air. There wasn't much oxygen in here, especially in the narrow little shaft she was in, and her legs and back were starting to cramp really fierce.

'Warning! Your heart rate is one hundred eighty and rising. Your blood press... '

"I said, 'Shut up!'"

Holding herself as steady as she could, pressing her shaking legs against the far wall, Tanya reached up and pushed against the top of the shaft. It didn't move. In that instant she felt defeat and started to let herself slip. Savagely gritting her teeth and forcing every muscle in her body taut, she stopped her downward slide and, gasping for air now, worked her way back up to the top of the shaft.

Pushing upward as hard as she could this time, she felt the top move up, then drop back down, still in place. 'Fuck!' Panting for a moment to catch her breath, she realized it was now or never. She was out of air and starting to feel dizzy from the intense effort of holding herself against the sides of this shaft.

'If I don't get this lid off now, I'll die down here!' Tanya thought angrily and with a touch of panic. 'Frank will never know what happened to me... '

The thought of leaving her lifemate behind and alone spurred her to incredible effort. Tanya shoved heroically against the top of the shaft, twisting a bit as she pressed upward so that the corners wouldn't fall back into the groove this time. When it dropped down, there was a large gap. Fresh air flowed in and Tanya took several deep, grateful breaths, then started shoving the top sideways until there was a large enough gap for her to climb out.

There was enough light coming through for her to see now. She didn't want to know what she was covered with besides the fresh scrapes and bruises she'd managed to acquire while forcing her body up that horrible chimney. She smelled bad enough to know that she was filthy. Beyond that she didn't want to guess. She reached up for the edge of the shaft.

Her legs suddenly gave out, completely numb, just as her fingers grasped the top of the ledge. She hung there for a moment, taking several deep breaths to calm her shattered nerves, then pulled herself the rest of the way out and rolled over onto the floor. She lay there several more minutes while she recovered from her incredible, nightmarish ordeal.

Sitting up and looking around, she found herself in a game room. There was a pool table, a ping pong table and an old-style computer console. An old-style mechanical pinball machine was providing the only light in the room from its display cabinet.

She grinned at her own annoyance caused by the flickering lights coming from the pinball machine.

'Shades of Tommy Walker! It's a good thing I don't have astigmatism, ' she thought to herself, amused. 'Pinball Wizard' began playing in her mind.

There were no windows, and the walls were solid. No sound from outside came through, so Tanya decided that she was in a basement, or possibly even further underground, perhaps in a bomb shelter or something. She pushed the entrance stone to the underground tomb back into place, then stood up and started searching for an exit.

In the next room, there was a staircase. There was still no light, but she heard footsteps on the ceiling above her and realized that this was only a basement, after all. She nearly cried out when the light came on over the staircase, completely blinding her. She staggered blindly into the shadows underneath the stairs as the door opened above her. Someone stepped onto the landing over her head and closed the door.

Whoever was up there didn't start down the stairs. Instead, they stood there for a moment, occasionally moving, scraping a foot against the platform and, perhaps, waiting.

Then Tanya heard the doorlatch. It sounded like it was being locked.

"Cats Eyes," she heard a male voice say. The overhead light went out. There was still light radiation. It made her eyes hurt, but she couldn't see. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, it seemed to be reddish, rather than pitch black. Once again, the only visible light was the flickering of the pinball machine in the next room.

"I know you can hear me," the voice said. "I know you've escaped, and I know from where. That stench is unmistakable."

He started down the stairs. "How do I know you're loose? You tripped a motion detector – a simple, but extremely effective alarm. If you show yourself now, I promise you a quick death. If I have to find you, I promise that you will know the loss of each arm and leg before you die. You will learn what your entrails taste like. Choose quickly, for I grow impatient."

Tanya couldn't see where he was, but she could hear him. He was so busy blowing up his ego that she was on top of him before he saw her with his night goggles. She saw his eyes widen in shocked surprise in his lighted goggles as her stiffened fingers crushed his throat.

As her hunter fell to the floor, his fingers squeezed the trigger of the energy weapon he was holding. The bright flash was blinding as it sprayed its fury across the room. Tanya twisted desperately to one side to avoid the blast, getting her left hip cooked in the process. The beam continued across the room, setting fire to the walls and furniture. After a few more seconds, it went out, the weapon's energy depleted, but the damage was already done.

Blinded and badly wounded, Tanya lay gasping on the floor. The fire was making her surroundings more visible, but it was also using up all the air. She dragged herself to the stairway and started up, then remembered that she had heard the man lock the frigging door. Crawling back to the body, she searched frantically until she found a key.

"Thank God for stone-age technology!" she declared, firmly grasping that vital key.

Then she started crawling up the stairs and into the smoke collecting near the ceiling. It only took a minute to drag herself up the length of the staircase, and ten seconds more to unlock the door, once she found the keyhole, but in that time, she was completely blinded and was suffering from severe smoke inhalation. She was nearly defeated when she found that the door opened inward and she had to move out of its way in order to open it. Even though her microwaved hip was almost healed, she nearly fell off the landing and back down to the basement floor, catching herself just in time on the burning banister. It tore loose in her hand just as she climbed back up.

"This is just too fucking many near misses in one goddamned day," she told herself.

She staggered through the door, filthy, naked and coughing violently, followed by a thick plume of blackish gray smoke. The fire behind her raged as fresh oxygen pouring down the stairwell, replacing the thick gray smoke that billowed out around her.

She was almost to the outside door when she heard someone scream. There was someone else in the burning house. Taking a deep breath and venting it out in frustration, Tanya turned back and began exploring.

"Where are you?" she yelled out.

"Help me!" a woman's voice cried out from another room.

Tanya turned in that direction. "Keep talking so I can find you!"

The smoke was getting thick and the floor was getting hot. She would have to leave soon or she'd find herself in the basement again. She suspected she wouldn't get out so easily next time.

She went around the corner into the next room, then stopped and stared. Then she threw up.

There was a woman strapped to a table. She was cut from her rib cage to her pelvis and surgical clamps were holding her abdomen open. The woman was alive and conscious, and probably in a good deal of pain.

"Help me!" she cried weakly. "Please!"

"You want me to kill you?" Tanya asked, her voice unsteady and her eyes blinded with smoky tears. "Cause that's what'll happen if I try to move you."

"I don't want to burn..." she replied, hesitantly.

Tanya blinked her eyes clear for a moment. The woman was an adult, probably only in her mid-thirties, but the look in her eyes told Tanya that she knew her life was over. Then she got an idea.

"Do you have a monitor?" she asked the woman on the table.

"He took it out," she replied and moved her eyes to show where it was.

Tanya picked it up and pressed it back into the woman's neck where she was still wounded. It crawled inside and immediately began to blink.

"Help is coming!" Tanya told her, hoping that the monitor's transponder was still working.

Forcing herself to look at the butchery that was done to the woman, Tanya noticed that she actually wasn't bleeding much. That fucking bastard may have been a butcher, but he knew his way around the inside of a body, and had evidently wanted to keep this woman alive for awhile.

She looked at the table. 'It has wheels on it!' Tanya noticed, suddenly becoming ecstatic.

Checking around the table carefully to make sure nothing was attached to the woman and there was nothing that would impede the table's progress to the front door, Tanya shoved it out of the room and into the hallway.

The floor was smoking, now, and very hot on her bare feet. She knew that it would ignite in a few more seconds and the whole room would go up in flames. She pushed the table down the hall to the front door, then switched ends.