Free Chrono Spasm by James Axler

hooks.

Chapter Six
    Reluctantly, Doc took another step forward, and J.B. and Ryan followed behind him. The old man took another step into the icy food locker—for it was clear that that is what it was—past the bodies in the darkness. He tried not to look at them as he walked through the room, feeling the acrid taste of bile biting at the back of his mouth.
    “Keep walking,” the flat-faced man snarled from behind him, “all the way through.”
    Reluctantly, Doc walked onward, his right shoulder brushing against one of the bodies where it jutted in the ill-lit storeroom. The body swayed back and forth at his touch, the hook creaking on its thick chain. There, up ahead, Doc saw another doorway, its arch low, carved directly into the ice wall.
    “That’s it, old-timer,” the man behind him chided. “Keep going.”
    With a palpable sense of relief, Doc stepped through the far door and out into the space beyond. He stood in what appeared to be a small lobby from which a half-dozen low doorways spoked in various directions, including the one that led to meat locker behind him. A man was seated there, thankfully alive and wrapped in a fur coat with a blanket of fur over his legs. The man held a snub-nosed .38 in his lap, pointing it vaguely at Doc as he stepped through the doorway.
    “Welcome to the rest of your life, meat,” the man growled, before using the barrel of the blaster to indicate one of the open doorways. “Go through. Two of you.” He peered into the meat locker, where Ryan and J.B. were just striding in Doc’s wake. “Third one, you with the hat—you wait, I’ll show you where.”
    With his wrists still bound, J.B. took a moment to adjust the brim of his fedora and smiled bitterly at Ryan.
    “Sounds like you’re getting special treatment,” Ryan told him, keeping his voice low.
    “Pays to wear a hat,” J.B. replied, sotto voce. “Makes a good first impression.”
    A moment later, the two men had joined the gunman in the ice-walled lobby, and Ryan strode on, following Doc into a frozen chamber just four feet square. Behind Ryan, the gunman was busy sealing the doorway with a wooden sheet that swung in on some kind of track-and-pulley system.
    The chamber’s walls were carved from ice, and a single glassless window was stuck in the far wall of the room, like a ship’s portal. Doc stood at the open window, taking deep breaths of the chill air that blew through it. But he stepped aside to let Ryan take a peek. It was dark out there, too dark to see.
    “Any idea where we are?” Ryan asked.
    The old man looked queasily at Ryan, still sucking in deep breaths. “Hard to say. You saw what was back there as well as I. Do you think that mayhap they plan to eat us?”
    Ryan’s expression was staunch as he eyed the old man in the darkness of the cell. “Don’t know, Doc,” he admitted. But he suspected that the old man was right. Judging by the locker of hanging corpses, they were in the hands of cannies—the nukeshitting dregs of the Deathlands.
    * * *
    M ILDRED , K RYSTY AND Nyarla had been incarcerated in a warm room deep in the bowels of the ice fortress, where five other women were already sleeping. Twelve feet by ten, the room was roughly hewn from the hard-packed ice, and featured a small brass heater in its center in which coals and incense glowed. The incense filled the room with its cloying pungency, a scent so thick that it caused Mildred to cough when she was initially thrust into the room and drew her first breath within. From their journey through the icy corridors of the ville, Mildred surmised that the incense was used to hide the stench created by the gas heaters, masking the smell of burning animal fat.
    The walls of the room were hung with silks and carpets, both to provide decoration and to help trap the heat. The carpets looked old and worn, their colors muted over time. Behind them, a wide wooden door was rolled back into place, sealing the room like a jar. A single window