by James Axler
"Nobody, J.B.?" asked Ryan.
The Armorer nodded. "Sure. Point taken. Mebbe a handful of powerful barons might have the tech-power. Maybe. But there's plenty of redoubts scattered all through Deathlands."
"What if the jump takes you to a redoubt where a mountain fell in? You get to reappear inside a million tons of granite."
"No. Rick Ginsburg, your predecessor as the group's freezie, was an expert on doorways. Told us there's a fail-safe locking system. Can't happen. That's what he said, anyway."
Mildred shook her head. "Hope that's right, Ryan. You can never trust a freezie's memory, you know."
They didn't stay long in the control room. The basics, such as food, ammo and beds—if any were left in the rest of the fortress—would be elsewhere, on other levels or in other sections. Some redoubts rambled for miles underground.
Before moving out, J.B. took Ryan aside. "I think this place is boobied. No, I know it's boobied."
"Who by?"
"It's original. Not local ville stuff. There's extra wires and plas-ex all over the place. I figure they were going to blow the whole place and never got around to it. Or mebbe the trigger device didn't work right."
Ryan looked up at the ceiling and saw loops of extra wire, obviously put up in a hurry. "And they never got a second chance to fire them? Yeah. Could be."
"Best step careful. Anything could be tied into the triggering sequence. Once we start it, there might be no way of stopping it. The whole redoubt could go skyway."
"Disable it?"
J.B. looked around him, whistling tunelessly between his front teeth. "No. Cut one wire and you break a circuit. Up it goes. Give me a few hours and I could probably track it through. But if they boobied the entire redoubt, we could be talking days to strip the system."
"Then we all step careful."
The green lever was down in the locked position. They knew from experience that beyond it they'd find a corridor that would lead, eventually, into other sections of the fortress. But there was no way of guessing what else might lie behind the heavy sec-door.
"Ready?" Ryan asked, glancing around from habit, making sure everyone had his or her weapon drawn and cocked.
Everyone nodded. Mildred had been placed third in line, between Krysty and Jak, with Doc and J.B. bringing up the rear.
Mildred had the Czech ZKR 551 in her right hand, finger on the outside of the trigger guard. She grinned at Ryan. "Bring on the bad guys."
Ryan threw the lever but kept his hand on it, ready to drop it again at the first warning of danger. In the past, all manner of unpleasantness had been revealed.
He stopped the door after a couple of inches, waving Jak forward. The boy knelt, squinting under the armored steel and taking his time checking it out.
"Anything?"
"Air's poor. Stale. Dead. Like stone."
Krysty had her eyes closed, using her part-mutie skill at "seeing."
"Jak's right. Can't feel any life anywhere. Dead as an old tomb."
Ryan raised the door another couple of feet, pausing it once more so that the albino teenager could take a second check. "Nothing. Passage. Dust. Nothing."
Now, with the door sliding up to its full height, everyone could taste the peculiar flatness of the air in the corridor. During his life in Deathlands, Ryan Cawdor had often entered buildings that had been sealed shut since the twentieth day of January, 2001, and had tasted air like this. Even with the conditioning systems of a major redoubt, there was no way that air could remain fresh, unless there was some sort of contact with the outside.
The passage was like most of the others. In this case it was close to thirty feet wide, with a curved ceiling around eighteen feet high at the crown. Looking up at the concealed lighting strips, Ryan noticed yet more of the crudely pinned bunches of wires, part of the boobie system that J.B. had spotted in the gateway.
To the left there was a blank wall.
"Right," Ryan said.
"I'll drop the door," J.B. suggested, reaching for the outside control lever.
For a moment Ryan considered leaving the gateway open, but if anything should happen to it, and they were stranded, then he knew they could find themselves in the deepest possible trouble.
"Okay. We'll start—Fireblast!"
All of them jumped.
As the Armorer touched the green lever, the sec-door fell—not slowly, controlled by a mass of hydraulics and pistons, but all at once, with the infinite deadweight of solid vanadium steel. Hundreds of tons crashed to the concrete floor, nearly taking J.B. with it.
"Rad-blast it!" he cursed, leaping back with the agility of a hunting puma.
The whole place shook. Dust and flakes of stone fell from the ceiling, creating its own choking fog. Ryan dropped to his hands and knees, cradling his head, ready for a major cave-in. But the echoes of the fallen door were swallowed up in the muffling stillness, and nothing more came away from walls or ceilings.
As the air cleared, everyone looked at the sec-door. The fall didn't seem to have damaged it, but the concrete around its base was severely cracked. J.B. was first to try the green control lever. He pushed gently, then put more of his weight against it. The tendons in his neck tightened under the strain, and a vein throbbed at his temple. But nothing happened, not a sound disturbed the sudden silence to show the lock might be working.
"Fucked," Jak said.
The monosyllable said it all.
The Trader used to say, "Over, under or around. There's always a way."
Both Ryan and J.B. had joined the legendary Trader about ten years ago. They'd ridden with him, fought with him, chilled with him and learned from him.
But the massive sec-door would have been a real challenge, even for Trader.
"Over, under or around?" J.B. said, tapping the steel with his knuckles.
Ryan had folded his hands together in front of him, as though he were in prayer.
"Might find some more explosive in the redoubt. Blast it apart."
J.B. showed his disbelief. "Triple negative, Ryan. Not now it's damaged. We could have mebbe blown the lock, but it's warped some. By the time we blew it open, we'd have blown down the whole redoubt with it."
"Over?"
"No. Nor under."
"How about around?"
J.B. nodded thoughtfully. "Could be best bet. Long shot. Probably pack some plas-ex if we chip out a hole in the concrete. Way bits fell off of the roof, it's probably gone soft. Might work. Can't see any other way."
"Let's go trek out the rest of the redoubt and see what we can find," Ryan suggested. "Come back to this one later."
Almost immediately they began to see signs of serious earth movements. It was common knowledge in Deathlands that the terrible nuking of a century earlier had triggered seismic and volcanic activity across the continent.
There was virtually no recorded evidence of those first hideous weeks when the world almost disappeared, but the evidence was still there. Half of California now lay fathoms deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. What had once been Mount Saint Helens was a whole lot less than nine thousand feet high. Wheatfields were deserts, and valleys had become lakes.
There was no way of knowing yet where this redoubt was, but there was no doubt that it was somewhere underground, in a region that had been badly hit by land shifts.
The corridor twisted and turned, with only a small number of identical sec-doors on either side. Jak, leading them, tried to open the first two or three, but it was obvious that they had been locked tight. Increasingly earth pressures had warped even the strongest of the doors, and the floor became littered with chunks of fallen debris.
"Looking bad," J.B. muttered, walking alongside Ryan.
"Yeah. Don't like this sour air. Could be there'll be a big fall somewheres ahead."
J.B., never a man of very many words, simply nodded his agreement.
If they couldn't open the jammed gateway doors, and there was no path out of the redoubt ahead of them, then it would be a
slow road toward dehydration and starvation.
"What do you reckon, lover?" Krysty asked wearily.
They'd been moving for well over an hour. The corridor had no turnings and no exits, just a lot of impenetrable doors.
Three times they had clambered over piles of twisted concrete and frail, rusted iron that had been torn away from the ceilings and dumped across the passage. Now the lights only worked intermittently, and there would be stretches of a hundred yards or more without any illumination at all.
In his heart, Ryan was beginning to believe that they would soon come across a big fall that would totally block them off from any further progress.
Less than fifty yards farther on, they came around a sharp bend, and there it was.
Chapter Three
FLOOR TO CEILING rubble, a tangle of stone and metal that had been there for nearly a hundred years stopped them cold.
They all stood and looked at it. For some time nobody spoke, then the silence was broken by J.B.
"I was wondering why the earth movements hadn't triggered any self-defense autodestruct boobies. Then I remembered that all the wires vanished off from this corridor early on. That was 'fore we got to any real damage. This has to be an unimportant part of the redoubt. Otherwise there'd only have been some dust around here. If the bombs had been triggered."
Mildred brushed dirt off her sleeve and laughed. "You guys are the limit, you know that? We're entombed in here like we were lost in the Johnstown floods, and you wonder why some bombs didn't go off a century back. How about doing some thinking on getting the hell out of here?"
"Because there's no hurry, Mildred," Ryan replied. "This fall's not going anywhere. Mebbe we'll have to go back and try to spring the gateway door, but that's not going away, either."
Like a hyperactive child, Jak was clawing his way across the face of the earth fall, touching it with gentle hands, laying his head against it, listening intently.
"Do you hear any message from the ether beyond, my dear sprite?" Doc asked, leaning on his cane.
"Fucking solid, Doc. Could be mile deep."
"Doesn't much matter. If it's more than about twenty feet we'd never break through. And by the look of the ceiling, anything you move'll just bring down another hundred tons of concrete."
Ryan's words brought another long period of silence from everyone.
This time it was Krysty who interrupted the stillness.
"I can feel different air. Not a lot fresher, but different."
"Where?" Ryan asked, looking around and trying to detect whatever it was that the woman had felt. But he couldn't sense anything.
"From over… this door here."
It was a sec-door like all of the others that they'd passed. Ryan had already decided that on their return to the gateway they'd have to check out every exit with extreme care, just in case they'd missed something.
Krysty knelt against the bottom of the door, closing her eyes to concentrate. Her long red hair seemed to caress the pale gray metal of the door.
"What?" J.B. asked.
"Quake's pushed this one off the hinges. It's just sort of hanging here. If we shift it… Like Ryan said, we could bring the roof down on top of our heads."
Ryan gestured for her to move, and he stooped to examine the sec-door, finding it exactly as Krysty had said. The shifting of the main structure of the redoubt had tipped it away from the hinges, and it was supported only by its own weight. He pushed a hand against it and felt it move.
"Take a look, J.B.," Ryan said, edging out of the way.
The Armorer tested it with a gentle shove, then eased his shoulder against it. He looked up at the others. "Reckon a good heave and it'll just fall in."
"Then what?" Mildred asked.
"Then one of two things happens. We can get through and find a way out of here into the rest of the place. Or we all get crushed."
"Make it the first option, J.B., if you don't mind."
"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "Everyone else back down the passage. No point all getting flattened. Me and J.B.'ll do it."
For a moment he thought that Krysty was going to argue with his order, but she simply laid her hand on his arm and kissed him softly on the lips. "Don't get squashed, lover. Lose a lot of your charms that way."
When the other four had moved out of sight, Ryan and J.B. knelt together on the floor. The slight man grinned at his one-eyed friend, and said, "You and me again, huh?"
"Like old times with the Trader. One day we'll get the short straw. Been bucking against the odds for too long."
J.B. shook his head. "Not us. We're immortal."
"Then let's do it. First sign of trouble… you know what steps to take?"
J.B. grinned again, at the old joke. "Sure. Damned long ones."
"Gaia, aid them," Krysty whispered from her position around the sharp bend in the corridor.
They all heard the harsh sound of metal grinding against stone and the pattering noise of falling rocks.
"Ryan?" Krysty shouted.
She dashed back along the corridor, seeing a cloud of white dust and two spectral figures coughing at its center.
"Ryan?"
"All right!" he called. "Just stay back a minute. Let the dust settle. Make sure nothing else is coming down."
They waited, seeing the dark gap in the wall where the sec-door had been. A few more shards of concrete tumbled noisily from the cracked ceiling, but the structure seemed sound.
"Come on," Ryan called. "Slow and easy, and don't knock into anything."
It was a bitter disappointment, once they were through into a different section of the redoubt, to find that the air was only a little less stale than in the corridor they'd just left.
"Still smells like this store's been long closed," Krysty said.
"Not a touch of clean outdoors, is there? Means it's been recirculating all this time. Surprised it hasn't all vanished up its own ass."
She smiled at him. "Least the damage doesn't seem so bad in this passageway. And the lights still work."
Ryan glanced up and suddenly noticed that there were more of the festoons of red and green wire, looped along the roof. "J.B.?"
"I seen it."
Ryan had never encountered a redoubt that had been more totally cleared. There was nothing left.
They moved from the corridor into open sections of the fortress, through echoing rooms several hundred feet long that had probably been either storage or living quarters. Not a scrap of paper remained. Not a cigarette butt or gum wrapper.
"Nothing," Ryan said, after they'd been walking for another twenty-five minutes.
"I must confess that I am feeling somewhat wearied," Doc said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his kerchief.
"Not even a plan left on a wall," J.B. complained.
"Most times you head up and eventually you find a way out," Krysty stated. "I just don't like this bad air. But after a hundred years I suppose it's no surprise, is it?"
"We don't find something or a way out real soon," Ryan told her, "then we'll just have to go back and face that locked door. We'll probably have to face it some time, anyway. It's our only way of getting away from this redoubt."
They reached what was obviously a major junction, which branched out into half a dozen different passages. J.B. pointed out that the wires that he suspected were part of an intricate defense bomb continued along only one corridor.
"And it goes upward," Ryan agreed.
"Could I remain here while you go ahead on a short reconnaissance?" Doc asked, sliding down the wall and sitting on the dusty floor.
"No. We stick together. Take five, if you like, Doc."
"I would be obliged, Ryan."
"Dead end," Jak called.
"Fireblast! Best turn around and head for the gateway."
"Shit," Mildred hissed. "My feet are killing me, and I'm hungry and I'm tired and I want out of this damned warren!"
"We all do," Krysty soothed.
"There was a side turn
ing coming up here," J.B. said. "Worth a look?"
"Sure," Ryan agreed. "Long as it's on our way down."
"There's a sign on the wall," Krysty called from her position on point.
"What's it say?" Ryan asked.
"Emergency Evac Supplies."
"Could be some food. Chins up and shoulders back, friends," Ryan encouraged.
It was an area of the redoubt consisting of two smallish storerooms and another larger room, which contained a dozen beds. Each bed had a hard square of folded gray blankets set on top, and a wall cupboard held twelve plates, knives, forks and spoons, and twelve mugs. Basic cooking utensils were available for use on a stove that stood in the corner of the room. And there was an emergency water supply and a locked cabinet containing medical supplies.
"Self-heats!" Jak shouted from the first storeroom, not bothering to conceal the disgust in his voice.
"Anything else?" Ryan asked. Like everyone in the group, he'd sampled more than his share of self-heat cans. Generally they only raised the temperature of the contents to a tepid sludge, and it was often difficult to tell what you were eating.
"Yeah. Packets of dried soup. Cans beans 'n stuff."
"Best eat and rest," Krysty suggested.
"Guess so. Then a recce. Gotta find if there's a way out of here."
"Nothing at all in the second storeroom," J.B. reported. "Hoped for blasters and some plas-ex. There's nothing at all. Not even any mouse shit."
The Trader used to talk about getting caught between a stone and a hard place. Ryan was beginning to think that the man had been right.
The stale air seemed to close in on everyone, and Doc voiced the general feeling.
"I feel rather like someone caught in the sarcophagus of a long-dead pharaoh. I had not thought before how wonderful is the open sky and the clean air. Even the fouled air of parts of Deathlands is better than this arid, barren filth."
When it came to examining the range of food on offer, nobody felt all that hungry. Over the years some of the cans had blown and split open, spilling their contents in sticky black rivulets. Others showed ominous signs of bulging and rusting. Many of the labels had fallen off and lay in brittle rectangular slices on the shelves and on the floor.