Crater Lake

by James Axler

But he knew they needed an awful lot of luck for no one else to have heard.

  So, with time running out, Ryan hurried Jak and Krysty along through the weapons complex. The timers had been set to go in just thirty minutes. It didn't leave them much of a margin, but it would also make it hard for the scientists to manage to defuse everything. And he'd even scattered a few clever boobies in the shelving, ready to be triggered if anyone was careless. Either way, the subterranean redoubt should go up around 12:40.

  There wasn't much time for any delays.

  J.B., LORI AND DOC TANNER had returned to the base of the main entrance elevator. The bodies of five sec men lay in a tangled heap at the mouth of the corridor that led toward the scientists' living quarters.

  The Armorer looked carefully at his chron. "I make it 12:16. I don't hear them coming yet."

  EVERYTHING WAS SET AND READY.

  "Twelve-sixteen," Jak said.

  If the explosives did their stuff, a devastating chain reaction would occur in the stores of lethal weapons. The first bang would lead to others, eventually spreading fire and destruction throughout the whole complex.

  All the three of them had to do now was rejoin the other trio near the single exit to safety.

  They were only a couple of turns in the corridor from their destination when Dr. Ethel Tardy appeared from a side door and waddled into the center of the passage. She was holding a chromed handblaster, which was connected to wires that trailed away out of sight. The muzzle was slightly bell-shaped and was pointed in their direction.

  The tiny woman smiled, beaming eyes hugely distorted by her thick spectacles. Her sweet, lisping little voice showed no trace of anger.

  "You have been busy, sabotagewise. We lost track of our surveillance mode operation on Dr. Tanner and the others in your party."

  "Tough shit, lady." Ryan hesitated about trying to blast the diminutive scientist, the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck at the sight of the outlandish weapon she held. What was it, and what might it do?

  She answered the unspoken question. "One move from you and I shall use this. It is one of our prize items of research, tested thus far only on our mutant experimental personnel."

  "Bitch," Krysty muttered, too quietly for Dr. Tardy to hear her.

  "It is listed as an emdee. Which stands for a Molecular Destabilizer. I eagerly anticipate using it upon you three and examining the results."

  "What's it do?" Jak asked.

  Ryan was wondering whether he should try to snap the G-12 onto continuous and rip the poisonous dwarf into bloody ribbons of flesh. But she was too far away—and her finger was on a button that had to be a firing trigger.

  "Your tissue, bone, blood, skin are all composed of molecules bonded together. This will remove those fragile bonds." She could have been lecturing to a class of students.

  Only Krysty had even an inkling of what she was trying to explain. "But if you do that…"

  Dr. Ethel Tardy positively twinkled at her. "Yes, you see it! The entire structure dissolves. You melt into a billion, billion particles. Total disintegration." She smiled broadly. "And it is so painful. The element of consciousness remains surprisingly long. It is one of the best of my own inventions."

  "You death-crazed lunatic," Ryan said, unable to control his loathing for the insane woman.

  "No. Central bless you. We are the saviors of the world. Only through death can you come to a new life. That's how it's always been in the rules."

  "You're sick," Krysty spat. "Sick and fit for death."

  Dr. Tardy wasn't to be convinced. "Wrong, wrong, wrong. Quadruple negative. Central has always wanted what we can now give them. Now we can finally destroy it all. The evil will be purged, the land cleansed by fire and by the horsemen of disease and pestilence."

  Now she was beginning to sound like some biblical prophet, drawing on the Book of Revelation.

  "You'll wipe out the few survivors of the madness of the long chill?" Krysty asked.

  "They will welcome our redemption."

  "A vile death!"

  Dr. Tardy shook her little Buddha-like head. "They are not worth the saving."

  "Some are," Jak said, hand sliding around toward a concealed dagger.

  "Move your fingers another micrometer and you're instant dusty soup," the scientist said. "Good. Now we must know what you've been doing. We know you've terminated our sec men, but we lost you as you came to the research section. What have you done? What can you hope to do? Why check us in our Central-blessed designs? Do you not see how grand is our aim here?"

  Ryan took a half step forward. "Me an' my friends go around the Deathlands and there's times we do us some chilling. There's those needs it. And I like to figure the world's a touch better as we pass on by. I heard someone once talk about the darkness on the land, how he hoped to hold it back some, like carrying a sword into the sunset. Mebbe even carry it on through to a dawn. A new dawn. Sounds fucking stupid to you? Sure it does. But I'm for life. You're not."

  "I'm for—" Dr. Ethel Tardy began, when Dr. Theophilus Tanner appeared like a ragged angel of vengeance and shot her carefully through the back of the head with his two-hundred-year-old Le Mat pistol.

  "Rot in your own hell," he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A BRIEF AND VICIOUS FIREFIGHT with a dozen of the mutie sec men slowed them a dangerous few seconds. Fortunately Ryan's party took no casualties and were finally in the elevator, climbing fast toward a fresh Oregon afternoon.

  The ascent took precisely the eighty-five seconds the descent had taken. The box of dulled steel seemed to rise with agonizing slowness. Once, when they were near the top, the elevator shook, rattling against the sides of the shaft, and they dimly heard the sound of a muffled explosion. Ryan checked his chron; J.B. did the same.

  "Coupl'a minutes early," he said.

  "Can't trust old plas," the Armorer replied.

  When they got to the top, it was a beautiful day. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky of unsullied azure. A hawk floated majestically between the peaks away to the west. The bowl of mountains around Crater Lake was topped with a frosting of snow, but the air was warm and fresh. The main entrance wasn't guarded, and there were several of the amphibious boat wags on the ramp under the shadow of the jagged rocks that concealed the complex.

  "Look at the water," Lori said. "It dances."

  They looked.

  The impenetrable deeps were a rich blue, normally placid and calm. Now the water was rippling agitatedly, tiny waves rising and breaking against one another and lapping at the stone ramp like thousands of little sucking mouths.

  "I can feel it and hear it," Krysty said urgently, head to one side, her crimson hair like strands of fire in the sunlight.

  "The bombs going?" Ryan asked.

  "Sure. Can't you hear it?"

  The Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement was buried so deeply that not even Ryan's keen hearing could detect anything happening. But he could feel it. Through the thick soles of his combat boots, he could sense the faint susurration that was coming through thousands of feet of rock.

  "Best go. Who'll drive?" Ryan asked.

  Normally it would have been Finnegan.

  "Me," Jak offered, leaping into the control seat, his snowy hair blowing in the light breeze.

  Away above them Ryan noticed a small herd of deer running fast over the gray pumice slopes, their sharp hooves kicking up powder behind them. It looked as if something had spooked them.

  The pink eyes of the albino spotted a faint trail that climbed the steep sides of the basin around the lake, and he aimed the amphib at it. He lowered the wheels as they reached land and gunned the motor to force the amphib up among the trees. Behind them the surface of the water was becoming more restless as whitecaps rippled the rich blue.

  At Ryan's command Jak stopped the small vehicle when they crested the rise and reached the blacktop that had once carried camera-laden tourists around beautiful Crater Lake.

>   "Fireblast! Look at that son of…"

  The water was beginning to bubble, almost like a monstrous caldron approaching a boil. A snaking tendril of smoke or steam escaped from the dark entrance to the complex. Even from where they stood it was possible to catch the sound of distant explosions, sounding as though they came from a limitless distance beneath their feet.

  "Is it going to go?" Lori asked.

  "The volcano?" Doc queried, his arm around the waist of the slim young girl as they stood on the edge of the old roadway.

  "Yes. Fire mountain?"

  "It just might be," the old man replied, the etched lines about his eyes showing the strain they'd all been through.

  As they climbed into the amphib, Ryan glanced back once more. It had been an odd firefight. The odds and the technology had been overwhelmingly on the side of the scientists and their mutie slaves. But they had lost the art of fighting. A handful of determined people, armed with what to the scientists were primitive weapons, had utterly defeated them.

  Destroyed them.

  As they drove away from the beautiful country and weather around Crater Lake, they passed immense numbers of animals and birds, all fleeing south, away from the doomed redoubt. A dozen mutie timber wolves, their leader nearly as tall at the shoulder as a man, looked contemptuously at the small group of humans, then moved on at an easy lope, ignoring them.

  "Wish we could've taken that molecule destroyer thing you spoke about," J.B. said sadly.

  Doc Tanner heard him and grasped the Armorer's lean shoulder in a bony hand. "Don't say that, my friend. If we have done our work well, then that place of hellish enchantments will be buried forever and a day, until the dead rise gibbering from their graves. That's best."

  Lori smiled winsomely at him. "Like you said—the only good scientist is a chilled one."

  The little boat made good speed over the bumpy roads. It seemed to have a kind of floating suspension that carried them smoothly over the worst bumps. Since none of them knew how the silent engine functioned, there was a very real danger of running out of whatever fuel powered it. To be stranded in that fiery cold wilderness could have meant death.

  It was near dusk when they reached the friendly ville of Ginnsburg Falls. Everyone ducked low, and Jak gunned the motor, pushing their speed up to around fifty miles an hour. They heard shouts, and what might have been a blaster, falling away behind them, but no harm was done.

  "And so we say farewell to Ginnsburg Falls, nicest little town in the West," Doc Tanner said, his words almost whisked away by the driving wind.

  They pressed on through the valley, following the blacktop as it snaked higher and higher. The skies were darkening, with deep crimson chem-clouds soaring toward them from the far west, bringing the threat of a severe storm.

  "Not far to go," Ryan said. "Follow the trail and watch for the fork up to the redoubt. Save having to climb all around and go through those bastard tunnels."

  They were lucky. It was so dark that only Krysty's part-mutie vision spotted the blur of the road. Jak turned the amphib, angling carefully around the jagged boulders that had fallen from above. For the first time the engine was making noises, a faint angry whirring that didn't bode well for continued progress. Fortunately they reached the main entrance to the redoubt within a quarter of an hour.

  The massive doors were closed, the metal scored and pitted from the efforts of generations of muties to break them down. Doc clambered out and stretched, knees and shoulders creaking.

  "Hope it's the usual three-five-two code to open her up. Don't much relish making like a mole to go back into them holes."

  Three, five, two did the trick, enabling them to trigger the colored lever beside the control panel. It was a tribute to the technical skill of some of the pre-Chill engineers that the door still worked.

  J.B. and Lori kept watch against possible attack by the small mutie killers who'd nearly wasted them when they'd first arrived through the gateway. But the slopes of the mountains were quiet and deserted.

  "Let's go in," Krysty said.

  "Sure. But… Fireblast! Look at…" His voice faded away into silent awe. Everyone turned to look where Ryan stood, frozen, staring north toward Crater Lake.

  The earth was exploding.

  Mount Mazama had been awakened from its long slumber, provoked into a violent eruption by the bombs and fires that Ryan and his companions had triggered far below the deep blue waters of the lake. Flames and lava jetted thousands of feet into the night sky. Even at that distance they heard the bass rumbling of the mountain heaving itself into destruction.

  "Hell of a funeral pyre for Finn," Ryan said. "Man couldn't ask for a better memorial."

  They watched the spectacle for several minutes until the extreme cold began to bite deep. It felt like around fifty below, with the wind bringing it another twenty lower. Ryan felt the hairs in his nostrils clogging with shards of ice.

  Doc Tanner shivered. "Western wind blowing, Mr. Cawdor. Time for us to hie ourselves to another place." As he spoke, his breath froze in the air, descending all around them in a shower of miniature crystals like tiny diamonds. Doc noticed it. "Sign of the cold. Hear them fall? The Russians call that the whisper of the stars; Pretty name, isn't it?"

  They progressed through the long-abandoned redoubt, toward the mat-trans gateway. At the back of Ryan's mind was the staggering knowledge about Doc Tanner. About his age. About the fact that some gateways could be used for time travel if their secrets could be unlocked. It was something to think about.

  Leading the group, J.B. paused as they reached the familiar sign: Entry Absolutely Forbidden To All But B12 Cleared Personnel. Mats-Trans.

  The vivid red armored glass walls of the chamber glowed to greet them. The disks of polished metal glittered brightly in the ceiling and on the floor. Jak entered first, followed by Lori, both of them sitting down with their backs against the walls, legs stretched out. Doc sat next to Lori. J.B. hunkered down, cross-legged, pulling the brim of his fedora over his eyes like a man on a stoop readying himself for an afternoon sleep. Krysty sat next, resting her chin on her arms, looking up at Ryan, who stood by the door, ready to trigger the mechanism.

  "I'll miss that fat old bastard Finnegan," she said reflectively.

  "And me," Lori said.

  "We all will." Ryan paused. "Everyone ready for the jump? Then here we go."

  He pulled the chamber door firmly shut, hearing the mechanism click into action. He quickly sat down by Krysty, holding her hand. Doc had his arm around the slim figure of Lori.

  The lights began to brighten on the disks, and the walls darkened.

  "If they're the future, then they can fucking have it," came the quiet voice of J.B.

  Ryan felt his head beginning to throb with the building pressure of the jump. As he started to slip away, he heard Doc's quavery voice singing.

  "Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

  That small rain down can rain?

  Christ! If my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again."

  The blackness spread slowly through Ryan's brain. The last few days had been as bad as anything he'd ever known. Wherever the gateway took them, it had to be better.

  As his eye closed, that was the last thought Ryan Cawdor took with him into the swirling dark.