by James Axler
“Whew! Stink worse week-aced stickie,” Jak drawled, fanning the air with a hand. “What was, poison gas?”
“Just the natural emanations of decomposing people,” Mildred said dourly. “I smelled worse working at the morgue, but not by much.”
“You okay, Ricky?” Doc shouted down the tunnel.
“N-never b-better,” Ricky answered, along with a few coughs.
“Better come on down! We found something!”
“Will do!”
Returning to the door, Ryan peeked through the small opening, but could only see another ceramic brick wall on the other side. Adding a few drops of gun oil to the door tracks, the man braced himself again and started to apply pressure, but now the door easily slide aside on lubricated tracks.
“Guess you just had to ask nicely first.” J.B. chuckled, nudging the man.
Scowling in disapproval, Ryan snorted and swung up the Steyr.
Just then, Ricky arrived with the horses. They were unhappy at being in the smelly tunnel, but also clearly glad to be reunited with their riders.
“Is this a redoubt?” Ricky asked hopefully, tethering the reins together.
“No,” Ryan stated, easing through the doorway.
Carefully he inched along the ceramic brick wall for a few yards, then paused at an iron-pipe railing. It was standard for most military installations.
Around the corner was a long hallway that reminded him of a redoubt again. Both walls were lined with unmarked doors, and a skeleton was sprawled on the floor behind a plastic shield. Only tatters remained of a military uniform, but the combat boots were in decent shape. A 9 mm Glock blaster lay on the floor nearby, the weapon streaked with flaky corrosion.
“Repairable?” Jak asked curiously.
“Not a chance.” J.B. snorted, nudging the weapon with his boot. It skittered across the floor to the wall and broke into pieces.
Kneeling, Mildred dutifully checked what remained of the pockets, but found nothing that had survived the passing millennium: wallet, cigarettes, keys and cell phone, all of them utterly destroyed by implacable time. Only a simple gold wedding ring survived intact. She left that in place.
“How chilled?” Jak said, nudging the skeleton with the toe of his boot.
“Looks like a secondary concussion,” Mildred said, gesturing at the cracked skull. “My guess is that something big exploded outside, and that door stopped the primary concussion. However, the secondary vibrations cause an internal shock wave that crushed the life out of her.”
“This is a guess?” Doc scowled.
“Sadly, I’ve seen this before.”
“So, this girl—”
“Woman,” Mildred corrected, pointing at the pelvic bones. “Middle-age, Caucasian, left-handed, one child.”
“Indeed,” Doc said, bowing slightly.
“Door stop nuke?” Jak asked, looking back at the open door.
“Not a tick on the rad counter,” J.B. announced, checking the device clipped to the lapel of his worn leather jacket. “If it was, it must have been a clean bomb.”
“Fireblast, I know what this was,” Ryan growled, starting down the corridor.
A sagging iron gate partially closed off the corridor in the middle, closely followed by another shield of bulletproof plastic with two more desiccated skeletons. Their M-16 assault rifles were in even worse condition than that of the door guard. But J.B. recovered a handful of the 5.56 mm rounds.
Past the guard station was a turnstile of the sort used in a subway station. Ryan and the others shared confused glances about that.
“Millie?” J.B. asked.
She shrugged. “Beats me.”
Easily hopping over the turnstile, Ryan walked directly to a dented steel door and tried the handle. It turned and the door swung aside on screeching rusty hinges.
In the flickering light of the companions’ candles, the room inside was small, almost cramped, barely large enough to hold two people sitting in chairs in front of a complex control panel. Both were armed with holstered blasters, and J.B. went to check those immediately.
Oddly, the control panel seemed to mirror itself, the left and right sides almost identical, aside from a few personal items for the operators. A framed picture of a young child and an old woman. Rectangular slips of paper that could have once been tickets of some sort, and the obligatory coffee mugs. U.S. Navy on the left, U.S. Army on the right.
Spanning the wall was a huge window, but anything on the other side was completely hidden by a millenium of crud, dust and dirt.
“Son of a bitch, this is a nuclear missile base,” Mildred said in growing wonder. “I’ve seen this in a documentary on cable! These two men had to turn special keys at precisely the exact same time to activate the weapons system.” She pointed at the matching hexagonal keys jutting out from the control panels.
“Must have held a lot of rockets,” Ricky said, using the ball of his fist to try to clear an area on the window. He only managed to smear the dirt on this side, revealing that the opposite side was blocked solid with dried roots of what resembled ivy.
“It only held one rocket,” Ryan answered. “A triple-big bastard called an ICBM.”
“An icy bm?” Ricky quipped in surprise.
Ryan repeated the letters more slowly.
“Oh!” His eyes went wide. “Just the one? Was it...you know...for going into space? Something for a sat?”
“No, this was a nuclear missile silo,” Krysty whispered, bowing her head. “As the incoming nukes burned down our cities, we launched missiles to take out their cities in revenge.”
“The idea was that nobody would ever attack us, America, because we would guarantee that they’d also be destroyed,” Mildred said with a sigh. “It was called MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.”
“Madness, indeed,” Doc grumbled, resting both hands on the ebony swordstick. “Entire nations acting like coldhearts fighting to the death over who was the strongest. Childish insanity.”
She shrugged. “It worked for a while.”
“Damn, these are useless,” J.B. said, dropping the two rusty blasters into a plastic wastebasket. “There’s nothing useable here but the damn coffee mugs.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan replied, turning and leaving the room.
Returning to the corridor of doors, the big man left wet footprints behind as he checked each one with his candle. Every door was slightly warped from the hammering concussion that had killed the base personnel, except one. It looked like ordinary wood, but when he rapped it with the barrel of the SIG-Sauer there was a pronounced metallic ring.
The door was locked, but by nothing electronic this time, purely mechanical, and it easily fell before the adroit manipulations of J.B. and his collection of picks, probes and jimmies. The same as before, the companions stepped back as the door opened. But this time there was only a soft exhalation of fumes that carried a familiar metallic smell of inert gases.
“Jackpot,” Jak whispered, grinning widely.
The large room inside was packed with racks of longblasters, pallets of grenades, boxes of handblasters, crates of knives and endless plastic drums of assorted ammunition.
“Looks like the Trader was right,” Ryan said, taking a gooey M-16 from a rack. “Missile silos always have the best weps.”
A brief survey showed that every longblaster and handblaster was thickly coated with a brown goop the ancients used to call Cosmoline. It protected the metal from any possible oxidation, or corrosion, and easily washed off with shine or spring water mixed with a little piss.
“Any food packs?” Krysty asked, pulling out a belt knife to start cutting open the plastic wrapping on a crate of grenades. “MRE, self-heats, anything?”
“Nary a crumb, dear lady,” Doc espoused sadly. “Merely en
ough ironmongery to frighten the mighty Hephaestus himself!”
“Fine by me,” Jak stated, stuffing his jacket pockets with plastic-wrapped boxes of .357 Magnum rounds. “Easier get food with brass than other way around.”
“Too true, my young friend.” Doc chuckled, then turned away to start ripping open cardboard boxes. “Here you are, Remington .45 cartridges, solid lead or copperjacketed hollowpoints?”
“Both!” Ricky exclaimed eagerly, taking the boxes. “Wow, a hundred rounds! Never had this much live brass in my life. Yanni would have split a gut laughing if I ever claimed...”
His voice trailed away at the mention of his missing sister, and the youth started grimly going through the pallets taking grenades and anything else useful.
“Anything here that can stop that APC from before?” Mildred asked, rummaging through a first-aid box bolted to the wall. “LAW rockets, landmines, satchel charges?”
“Just brass and grens,” Ryan stated. “What else would the base personnel need?”
“I suppose,” she relented, taking down a bottle of dried iodine residue and a small box of bandages.
She barely had room in her medical bag for the new items, as it was packed with anything she could cobble together: curved needles from upholstery shops and blue nylon fishing line to suture wounds closed, plastic bottles of boiled water and raw shine, a jar of powder sulfur, a nearly empty bottle of antiseptic mouthwash, a plastic bag full of boiled cloths to use as bandages, a pouch of bark from a willow tree to brew tea that contained a mild version of aspirin, a tiny bar of hotel soap, and such. It was a laughable collection of junk in comparison to the contents of a medical bag from back in the twentieth century, but nearly magical in comparison to the crude instruments of most other healers in the Deathlands.
In short order, the companions were fully armed.
“Not a whole lot left,” J.B. said smugly, hefting the bulging munitions bags. “Aside from a useless load of 5.56 mm brass for those longblasters.”
“Any 40 mm shells for the grenade launchers?”
“According to the manifest they’re on back order,” Ryan said, tucking another box of 9 mm Parabellum rounds into a pocket. “Any 7.62 mm for my Steyr?”
“Sorry.”
“Fair enough,” Ryan said, taking an M-16 and a nylon bag of magazines.
“Now, I prefer my longblaster,” Ricky said, affectionately patting the DeLisle carbine.
“Same here,” Ryan said with a rare smile, slinging the M-16 over a shoulder. “But an M-16 will buy us more than a month of room and board at any friendly ville.”
“Maybe we’d better bring the horses in for the night,” Mildred said, checking her watch. “We can load them up in the morning, and heaven knows I’ll certainly sleep better with a locked door and steel walls protecting my back.”
Doc grinned affably. “Agreed, dear lady.”
“Okay, let’s find the ward room,” Krysty said, fighting back a yawn. “There’s bound to be a sofa there, or some carpeting that we can use for bedding.”
“Sounds good. Doc and Ricky, get the horses inside,” Ryan directed. “Jak, guard the door until relieved. The rest of us will go hunting for the ward room.”
Everybody got busy.
As expected, the ward room was located at the extreme end of the hall, just far enough away from the armory that the officers might survive if there was an explosion. The lock was a joke, and inside were several comfortable sofas, plus a kitchenette and a small washroom. Since the base was designed to survive a direct nuclear blast, the chemical toilet worked, but the shower only delivered a thick brownish sludge that might have once been called water. However, there were plenty of hygienic personal wipes under the sink, for both ladies and gentlemen, and the companions used all of them to get as clean as possible under the circumstances.
Everything edible in the cupboards and drawers of the kitchenette had long since yielded to the passage of the years, as had the propane stove. But J.B. got a hotplate working by hardwiring together a couple of ancient batteries from other sec cameras. Soon, the circular element was glowing a bright red, and filling the small room with a pleasant wave of iron-scented heat.
Dinner was pan-fried squirrel and beans, washed down with melted snow. The horses got the last of the feed, mixed with a pile of pine nuts and acorns gathered by the companions along the way.
After the meal, Ryan replaced Jak at the door, and everybody made crude beds from the sofa cushions and bathroom towels. Soon, the sound of gentle snoring filled the air. Then a dull thud sounded from deep within the missile base.
Drawing weapons, everybody stirred, and looked dully around the ward room.
“Somebody in crapper?” Jak slurred, blinking away his dreams.
Doc fought back a yawn. “Quite possibly, my dear Jak,” he began, then stopped as the thud came again, only much louder this time.
“Sounds like it’s coming from the control room,” Krysty muttered, pulling on her cowboy boots.
“Sure as hell hope not,” J.B. said, sliding his glasses into place.
The dull thud came once more, closely followed by a loud shattering noise and then an inhuman bellow of bestial rage.
Scrambling into their clothing, the companions charged out of the ward room just as Ryan appeared from down the corridor.
“Control room,” Krysty said, her hair fanning out in every direction.
“Should we leave?” Mildred asked.
“Not without the horses,” Ryan said. “Mildred, Doc and Ricky, get them into the tunnel! Be ready to leave.”
“We’ll just do a fast recce,” J.B. said, tightening his grip on the Uzi machine pistol.
Maintaining combat formation, the companions moved swiftly through the corridors. Kicking open the door to the control room, the companions paused to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.
The withered corpses were still sitting in front of the deactivated control panel. Only now the unbreakable plastic window was smashed and, standing inside the launch tube in a circle of the sunlight streaming down from above, was a giant flower. It was more than a dozen yards high, the petals spreading out wide to display yet more different-colored petals. Its beauty was almost breathtaking.
However, strewed around on the dirty floor of the launch tube were dozens of men and women, shuffling woodenly along. Their clothing was in tatters, and trailing behind each of them was a leafy vine that went directly back to the colossal flower.
“Meat puppets,” Krysty stormed, her voice tight with hatred. “It’s a vine master!”
At the sound of her voice, the plant actually turned in that direction. A split second later so did all of the slaves, their faces slack, but their eyes rolling in silent terror.
Without pause, Ryan, Krysty and J.B. each pulled out a grenade, yanked the arming ring, flipped off the safety lever and tossed the military spheres through the smashed windows.
An inhuman roar sounded as they ran out of the control room and slammed the door shut. Then the grenades cut loose, the confined blast sounding louder than any possible missile launch. The door buckled, almost coming off the row of hinges, and hot gases slammed into the companions, knocking them down and throwing them across the dirty floor.
Using their hands and feet, they stopped themselves from hitting the far wall, and hastily screamed erect.
“Again,” Ryan shouted, pulling out another grenade.
But as he opened the door, a shambling corpse staggered into view, the fleshless hands reaching for his face. Diving backward, Ryan got out of the way just in time as J.B. cut loose with the Uzi. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds hammered the living corpse back into the control room, and Krysty managed to toss in her grenade before slamming the warped door shut once more.
The lock engaged, then fell off. In wordless accord, th
e three companions frantically scrambled up the ramp. As they hopped over the iron railing, the grenade exploded. This time the bestial roar was even louder, and oddly accompanied by the very human moans of agony and dismay. It sounded like the very gates of hell had swung open wide.
That was more than enough to refuel their desperate scramble out the vanadium door and into the access tunnel.
“Vine master!” Krysty called to Doc and the others, turning to pump several rounds from her S&W .38 into the open doorway.
Slamming the heavy door shut, J.B. fumbled with the locking mechanism. “Dark night, I can’t lock it from this side!” He cursed, backing away fast.
“Then run for it!” Ryan growled, firing his weapon into the gloom. There came loud meaty thwacks, but no cries of pain.
Then the door burst aside and out boiled a mob of partially dressed people. Their heads lolling to the side, the slaves of the plant stiffly shuffled forward, their arms held to grab a companion, their filthy clothing alive with crawling vines.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc snarled, firing the LeMat as he backed away. One of the enslaved humans jerked as the .44 hollowpoint round slammed directly into a temple. Crashing against the wall, the meat puppet slumped to the floor, his sad eyes seeming to bless the man for the sweet gift of death.
Stroking the trigger on her S&W revolver, Krysty blew out the knee of the closest man. As his leg erupted, the man sagged, but in spite of the tremendous blood loss he clumsily rose again to head toward her.
No command was needed for the rest of the companions to form a defensive line and cut loose with every weapon they possessed. A score of the living slaves staggered from the barrage of gunfire, but none of them dropped. Hideously wounded, the meat puppets kept moving forward, clawed fingers trying desperately to grab any part of a companion.
“Head shots only!” Krysty bellowed, quick firing her revolver. As the blaster emptied, she dashed away to yank an M-16 longblaster from the gunboot of her saddle. Her horse whinnied in fear and didn’t run.
Mentally thanking the excellent training of the Granite Empire sec men, Krysty yanked the arming bolt and flipped off the safety. She sprayed the entire advancing crowd of humans at head level.