There were old heads with strands of hair pasted thinly across leathery scalps; young faces, with teeth that gleamed in secret, wolfish grins; men with clipped military mustaches; women whose hair was bound up in thin nets to keep it from the preserving liquids.
"Gaia," Krysty breathed. "This has to be the... the ultimate nightmare."
"They dead?" Jak asked.
"Depends on what you mean by death," Ryan replied. He was so disappointed that he could almost taste it. This wasn't what he'd imagined and hoped for.
"I knew of this kind of experimentation," Doc said, sounding more like himself. "To freeze the entire body wasn't proving that successful. We saw the failure rate last time. Microsurgery meant they could always graft a live neck back onto any convenient corpse."
"You joking me, Doc?" Krysty asked. "Old head on a new body?"
"Indeed, yes. Easier, I think. The head and brain are kept wired and nourished. My guess is that the capsules are filled with liquid nitrogen or some such."
"Sick fuckers," Jak hissed as he went to sit in a polished swivel chair at the main desk.
None of the others took any notice of him as they walked along the rows of severed skulls.
Each head bore a coded reference, a string of numbers and letters. Ryan wondered who they were. From what Rick had told them about freezies, they must all have been special. The U.S. government had frozen only people of ultraimportance, and most of them had been scientists — military scientists who had contracted some terminal illness and had been deep-frozen, like so many sides of mutton, to await the new Jerusalem, the age of enlightenment when their diseases could be cured by medical advances.
What nobody could have forecast was Deathlands, a world of brutality, where medicine was at roughly the same level as it had been in the early part of the nineteenth century. These frozen semicorpses didn't have much chance of being successfully revived.
Several of the suspended heads clearly showed signs of illness, and many were emaciated with dark shadows of pain smeared around the sunken eyes. Ryan spotted one or two that still bore scars of operations, the skin seamed and sutured.
He was aware of Krysty, standing at his side. "Poor bastards," she whispered. "Think there's some sort of life there?"
"You mean can they see and hear?"
"I mean... are they sentient, Ryan? Do they know what they are? Do they sense time passing?"
Doc joined them, in front of the head of a middle-aged white man, the pupils of his eyes just visible behind slitted eyes.
"What is time, young lady? It is a series of moments of reality, strung uneasily together to give an illusion of continuity. These... I came close to calling them people, do not feel that. There is neither day nor night for them, both sweet things. Life is endless... nothing." He shook his leonine head. "Who would wish to die? Theywould wish to die, my friends."
The lights flickered, and Jak cursed under his breath, drawing everyone's eyes to him. "Don't fucking look me," he growled. "Didn't mean press button."
"Which button?" Ryan walked quickly to where the albino boy sat looking at the dancing display in front of him, hands flat on the desk top.
"Big one. Blood one."
There was only one large red control on the console, which was set in its own clear plastic box with a flip-top lid to it. In embossed silver letters, it carried the message: Speed-Thaw! Max-Caution. Emergency Override Only! DO NOT ACTIVATE!
"You pressed that red button, Jak?" Ryan asked, realizing that it was really an unnecessary question. From the crazed lights and swelling sound of sirens, it was obvious what had happened.
"Yeah. Didn't read. Can stop?"
J.B., peering owlishly over Ryan's shoulder, shook his head. "Doesn't look like it. Seems them heads are going to start warming up real soon."
"The boy was always a hothead." Doc nudged Krysty in the ribs with a bony elbow. "Do you comprehend my jest, young lady?"
"Yeah, Doc," she replied, turning to look at the nearest row of wired skulls.
"A joke, you see. Hot heads. The heads will soon become warm now that the manual defreeze switch has been activated. Hot heads. You see..." His voice trailed away as he suddenly lost interest and went to sit down at one of the side desks.
"Starting," Krysty called.
"Sorry, Ryan," Jak muttered, shaking his head miserably. "Fucking triple-stupe."
Ryan patted him on the shoulder. "Don't figure that we'd have done much with nearly a hundred heads. Do 'em a favor pulling the plug like that. They didn't have a hope of a future."
"Nor do I," Doc said quietly.
"Gaia!" Krysty sighed. "You want a double-bad sight, then I got one over here."
Ryan, Jak and J.B. joined her, standing horror-struck in front of the small capsules, watching the result of Jak's fiddling with the control.
"Madness," the Armorer said, whistling soundlessly between his teeth.
There wasn't a thing that they could do other than just stand and watch the beginning of the end, the conclusion of a doomed fantasy that had begun a century ago.
Some of the containers were misted over with condensation, as the coolants drained away and the temperatures began to climb. Ryan glanced along the row, stone-faced at the variety of the circus horrors.
Some heads were vibrating with a demonic life, eyes opening and closing, lips parting and soft, pink tongues protruding; a thick colorless slime oozed from the staring eyes of a skull near Ryan; an elderly white woman next along clamped her jaws together with such power that her teeth were splintering into jagged, powdery stumps; there had been some kind of electrical short in one of the microcircuits of a middle-aged Hispanic man. His hair was standing on end and beginning to smolder. His skin blackened and burned, smoke coming from the depths of the mutely gabbling mouth.
"No point staying here," J.B. said as he turned away from the dying puppet-skulls.
"Might as well leave the whole place," Ryan agreed. "We get moving, and we'll be back through the forest and into the redoubt again before dark. I could use another hot, clean shower right now."
"Gets my vote, lover. Looks like this whole place could go through its own roof."
There was the acrid stink of overloaded wiring, and the air was beginning to get heavy and thick with smoke. Sparks flew out of several of the capsules, and at least a half dozen had already cracked open with the heat. Over everything else, Ryan could almost taste the too-familiar stench of roasting flesh.
"Barbecue time down on the old Panhandle Ranch," Doc cried, starting off with a whippoorwill whoop. But he inhaled some of the smoke and it sent him into a nasty coughing fit.
"There's another door that way." Krysty pointed. "Might as well try it."
"Go ahead. Jak, take Doc. J.B., you get going. I'll cover the rear."
Though there was no overt threat, it was automatic with Ryan that anything they did should be done as efficiently as possible. The Trader used to say, "Get it right when it don't matter, and you'll get it right when it does."
More containers exploded as the manual override continued its destructive work.
As the plastic melted, some of the heads were actually tearing loose from the wiring. It was like being in the middle of an exploding charnel house. As Ryan brought up the back of the group, he had to dodge and step over several rolling, smoldering skulls, hair alight, eyes melting in long-dead sockets, teeth clacking in frenzied paroxysms of what might have been rage and disappointment.