"No. Just get out!"
"I've altered..." began Doc, but Ryan elbowed him aside, pulling the door and slamming it shut behind J.B. and himself.
The lights came on and the thick mist rose about their feet.
"Here we go," said Krysty softly. "Where to this time?"
"Somewhere better," Ryan began to say, but he felt the suction of his mind and the atoms and molecules of his body being displaced.
But even as the displacement occurred, and in spite of it, Ryan Cawdor knew with a profound and gratifying certainty that, in fact, they had already achieved, truly achieved, what he and Krysty had set out to do. They had broken from the bonds that were at the heart of the Deathlands, they had entered the forbidden places, deep into the Darks, and they had found... something, something other than their dreary experience in the Deathlands, something that by its very newness spelled hope for a different life, a different future.
That was what they had always yearned for, quested for, put their lives on the line for. Now Ryan and his woman and J.B. and their warrior allies and the strange character called Doc were free at last of the deadening reality of the Deathlands, free to live anew even if the new life was hazardous and unknown.
Through love and through death they had come this far, and they had seen so much, and now they would conquer...
And the darkness fell once more over them all.
Epilogue
Ryan opened his eye.