Pilgrimage to Hell d-1

by James Axler

  But this was different.

  Dim lights came into hesitant flickering life and Ryan figured they had tripped some kind of beam, still active, perhaps of uranium, that switched on the electrics of the place.

  Sometimes you found corpses. Mummified and dried, like the husks of cocoons after the butterfly's gone. The air tasted familiar to him from breaking into similar establishments, sealed for a century. Dry and flat, with a hint of iron.

  "There another way out of here, Doc?" asked J.B., reloading the Steyr.

  "No." There came a cackle of laughter that often signaled one of Doc's period of craziness. "Not like you mean, Mr. Dix. Oh, dear me, no."

  "This ain't like no Stockpile I ever seen," muttered Hunaker, glancing around at the huge curved roof. The room was in fact an immense tunnel, the ribbed metal ceiling like a cylinder above them that curved away into a dense mass of largely empty shelving.

  "That, ma'am, is because it is not a Stockpile. Oh, there were many of those, most still hidden beneath swamps or earth slips or hot spots. But this is a Redoubt. There are many of these also, but I do not believe many have ever been discovered. They would appear valueless to those who do not know." He shook his head, the stringy hair bobbing about his scrawny shoulders. "And those who did know are so long gone."

  "Make sense, Doc. We're trapped in here. If that's the only door and those sons of bitches are waiting for us... then how do we get out? Are there food and arms in here?"

  "No. Perhaps some water, but it will be brackish and foul. Perhaps some eater tablets. No arms. That is not the purpose of the Redoubt."

  "Then what is, Doc?" asked Ryan, hunching his shoulders against the oppressive feel of the place. Buried underground with nowhere to run was a bad feeling.

  "This is the gateway to Hades, Mr. Cawdor. Look upon the wall where Cerberus himself stands watch. The gateway to the river to the deeps to the darks to the high mountain. All is dust..." And he turned away, tears streaming down his lined cheeks.

  J.B. caught Ryan's eye and shook his head. "Let it lie, friend. No more help there for a while."

  "We can't go out," Ryan said, "so we best go in."

  Hun took Doc's arm, leading him along in the middle of the shrunken party. First Ryan, then Okie and Henn. The green-haired girl and the old man. Krysty and Finnegan. And J. B. Dix at the rear.

  Eight of them, bearing the faint torch of the future, into the past.

  * * *

  Ryan led them past the picture that had caught Doc's gaze. Garishly painted with a crude skill like a comic book illustration, it showed a slavering black hound. Three heads grew out of a single corded neck, their jaws wide open, fire and blood gushing between yellow teeth. The eyes were crimson, the colors bright despite the creature's age. Underneath, in an ornate Gothic script, was written the single word: "Cerberus."

  Apart from that one picture, the place was bare. Ryan had seen Stockpiles that had been ravaged, but they were always a total shambles with rotting food and torn containers everywhere. This was different. It was as if a team of men had carefully gone through the entire place, stripping everything off walls, removing every stick of furniture. Nothing remained.

  Nothing beyond the stale, flat air and the echoing sound of their own boots.

  The walls remained curved, with strips of corrugated steel supports running clear over the roof. Behind them Ryan heard the distant sound of a shell hitting the closed door, but he knew the door to be strong enough to withstand anything short of an antitank shell.

  They headed inward, toward the bowels of the mountain. The tunnel that they followed ran straight for several hundred paces with about a dozen chambers opening off it. Each one was stripped bare. Some of the walls showed the faint marks where cabinets or desks had once stood against them.

  Out of habit, Ryan flicked on the rad counter clipped to the inside of his long coat, by the lapel. It murmured and cheeped a little, with the background crackling it always gave out in the Deathlands. But nothing here to worry-about.

  Nobody spoke as they moved cautiously on. There was a deadliness in the Redoubt that oppressed the spirit. Doc was mumbling to himself, a quiet string of nonsense. Ryan wished to the bottom of his heart that the old man hadn't lost so much of his mind under the tender care of Teague and Strasser. He was absolutely certain that Doc held the key to limitless secrets. How could he have known about the fog and Cerberus and the code to the door that had saved all their lives?

  "Should I call in to Cohn?" asked Henn. "If we go much hellfired deeper they won't be able to hear it."

  Ryan shook his head at the suggestion. "No point, Henn. That door and this concrete will stop anything gettin' out."

  The corridor reached a T-junction. It was a momentary temptation to split the party, but Ryan elected to keep together. Eight wasn't a big enough group to divide and then hope to survive a firefight. Despite what Doc had said, there might be another entrance. Or the Indians might be able to force the main door, now that they had the added incentive of pursuing them inside.

  He led them to the left, wandering along a snaking passage for some minutes until it ended abruptly in a rock-fall. It looked as if half the hill had come bursting in through the roof.

  There was a doorway partly buried under the stone, and Ryan scrambled up to push it open. It moved back uneasily on warped hinges and he glimpsed light and some wooden pallets. "Somethin' here," he called.

  "Old stores. Left behind," said Doc.

  Ryan beckoned for Krysty and J.B. to follow him, leaving the others immediately outside; there was no obvious danger of a fight, and they would give warning of any attackers. It was a corridor with a rounded ceiling, made of rows of stressed metal ribs. On the right were dozens of stacked boxes, with a few more piled loosely on the other side. At the farthest end he could see the red and silver of the sky, patched with purple chem clouds; the end of the cave was open to the world. Some of the boxes had been opened, and Ryan and J.B. began to investigate. Krysty walked to the opening, less than fifty paces away.

  "Blasters," said J.B., sitting on one of the containers, peering at a bizarre weapon by his feet. It was like a large pistol with a massive ammunition drum that had chambers for a dozen rounds.

  "What the hell does that fire?" asked Ryan.

  "Seen a pic of one. Colt M2-0-7,40 mm gren launcher. Twelve different grenades. Laser sight and high-low propulsion system. I might come back for it once we've scouted around."

  Ryan had taken a gun from its box, wiping the grease off on the sleeve of his long, fur-trimmed coat. "Nice. Close assault blaster, Heckler & Koch 12-gauge scattergun. Night scope and image intensifier. Be good 'gainst stickies in the dark." Reluctantly he laid it back in its box. "Yeah, might take some of these babies on the way out. If we get out."

  Krysty appeared cat-footed at his side, her hair reflecting the fiery brightness of the sky behind her. "Not gettin' out that way. Land slip's taken off the edge of the whole mountain. Clean as a knife. Drops clean down to the gorge, and that's a long way. Not a hope."

  They turned away from the small Stockpile and rejoined the others in the corridor. Ryan told them briefly what they'd found and that there was no way out.

  "I believe I had already mentioned that probability, Mr. Cawdor," Doc said with a grin.

  Ryan ignored him. "Let's go."

  They retraced their steps, and Henn moaned about carrying the radio.

  "If we ain't usin' it, then why in blazing shit am I humpin' it on?"

  Finnegan patted the tall black man on the backside. "Ice your asshole, Hennings. You got the radio and I got my big gut to carry."

  The other branch of the corridor went a couple of hundred paces, then forked like a sidewinder's tongue. The lights had failed in the one end but burned brightly from the roof along to the right. "That way," said Ryan, leading the others.

  As they went, they checked off all the rooms, on the chance that one of them might contain some clue, some indication of what had happened in
this place.

  Hun picked up a torn piece of card tucked in behind one of the plastic doors. Holding it up to the light, she read the faint pencil lettering.

  "Forty-Niners over the Dolphins, twenty-four to twenty-one," she read. "Now what the scorch was that? Some kind of firefight casualties?"

  She tucked the scrap of paper in a pocket of her overalls.

  The corridor ended abruptly. A door of vanadium-type steel ran ceiling to floor, its surface polished and gleaming, throwing back their own reflections as if it mocked them. There was no sign of any lock or control, just smooth walls on either side.

  "Try that other way. Where the lights had gone out," suggested Hunaker.

  Doc waved a careless hand. "Waste of time, my emerald-locked elfling. That corridor curls all the way around the Redoubt complex and returns behind that rockfall. There is nothing there."

  "Just how d'you know all this, Doc?" asked J.B. "Maybe this is the place and time to tell us."

  Doc's cunning eyes turned to J.B. "This is a place and a time, sir. But not thetime or theplace. When that might be, I do not know. It is beyond my control."

  "You knew about the main door to the Redoubt. How about this one?" asked Ryan. Casually he allowed the barrel of his gun to move toward the old man.

  Doc noted the gesture. "Ah, Mr. Cawdor... a threat. Over the years I have become overly familiar with threats."

  "The door?"

  "It is the last door before the gate."

  Ryan closed his only eye, fighting for control. There were times when a great scarlet mist drenched his senses and an entirely insensate rage possessed him. There was the temptation to take this doddering imbecile with his antique clothes and rich baritone voice, take him and rip the seamed old face from the skull. Things were tough on Ryan now. The realization that Krysty Wroth was probably a mutie had already shaken him. He'd fallen in love with a mutie! Once this was over he would need to clear his mind on that one. But for now...

  "Can you open the door, Doc?" in a voice calm as buttermilk.

  "If I were within, then it would be a matter of the utmost simplicity."

  "Within what?" asked Finnegan.

  "Inside the door, stupe," hissed Henn.

  "It cannot be opened from out here."

  Ryan looked at J.B. Suddenly both of them chorused, "Over, under or around."

  It had been one of the Trader's pet sayings when confronted with a problem that could not be solved directly.

  "Over's impossible. Under, as well, without digging gear."

  "Go back and radio the war wag for help?" suggested Hunaker.

  "What about goin' in the side?" Ryan asked. "In that room there. Maybe the walls aren't as thick. Worth a try."

  The room was a bare office with only a grease mark on one wall showing where someone had sat and leaned back against it.

  The first high-ex bomb broke the outer layer of the walls, exposing hollow cavities of concrete and rusting iron rods. The room was perfect to contain and compound an explosion. More grenades opened up a great hole in the far wall, clean through to the other side.

  The smoke and bitter fumes took some time to clear in that underground expanse of still air. Ryan and J.B. went first, checking that the main structure was not about to topple in on top of them.

  "Looks good?"

  "Yeah. I'll call the... What was that?" Ryan's acute hearing had caught the faint rumble of a distant explosion, hollow and metallic.

  J.B. had heard it, too. "Main door?"

  "Could be. If it is, we'd best find a good ambush spot. We'll need it. Else those bastards can starve us out."

  The others joined them. "Hear that?" asked Krysty. "They've managed to blow the main door."

  "We'll stand and fight," ordered Ryan. "Only choice we got."

  Doc coughed. "If the gate is still functioning, then there is that option. The makers said it would last a thousand years. But others have made such a boast and been proven wrong."

  "What is this nukeshittin' gate? Where is it?"

  "It is the alternative way out of the Redoubt. And it lies through that hole."

  They all scrambled through successfully, though Finnegan managed to tear his sleeve on one of the jagged pieces of twisted metal. Inside, the rad counter on Ryan's coat began to cheep and mutter to itself a little louder, indicating a marginally higher count of radiation. But it was not enough to worry them, and Ryan switched the device off.

  It was like nothing any of them had ever seen. Great banks of dials and flickering lights, red, green and amber, with thousands of white switches. Circuits hummed and crackled, and loops of tape moved erratically in a row of machines. Occasionally they had found Stockpiles that held ranks of electrical machines that none of them could figure out. But this was something else.

  "Through there," said Doc, pointing with a bony forefinger past the consoles to a doorway.

  Again Ryan led them through, into an anteroom. It had a polished table on one side and four empty shelves on the other. Beyond it was another door.

  "The gate is there. In that next room. Are we ready for it? It is the gate of gates. From this point the hills will become more and more shallow, but the valleys will become more and more deep."

  "We lost him again," said Hun. Once Doc's mind began to wander like this, it might be hours before they got any sense out of him. By Ryan's reckoning it would take the Indians about thirty minutes to track them down.

  Ryan opened the far door, hand on the butt of his pistol. And faced yet another door, made of what looked like smoked glass. There was a neat panel by the side of the door with a variety of numbered and lettered buttons, some glowing brightly. Above it was a notice in angular maroon lettering.

  Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans.

  "Matter transmitter," said J.B. wonderingly, taking off his glasses and wiping them. "Damnedest thing. I'd heard they had somethin' like this."

  "How does it work?" asked Krysty, running her fingers over the smooth glass of the door.

  "Who knows? Chance is it doesn't work at all. When the long chill came, they was workin' on a lot of clever things like this. I read they were close to..."

  Doc pushed past them all, sweeping open the door and bowing low. "Here be dragons, lords and ladies. Enter and leave."

  It was a chamber, six sided, all the walls of the same brown tinted glass. The floor was patterned with metallic disks, raised very slightly. The pattern was repeated in the ceiling. The opening of the door triggered some sort of mechanism and a few of the disks began to glow faintly in a seemingly random form. A faint mist appeared in the room, swirling and darting. Ryan drew a slow, deep breath, remembering the fog outside. Was this the same? Some deadly trap by long-dead hands...

  Doc stepped in, beckoning them to follow. "Around and around the little wheel goes, and where it stops... Come in."

  Nothing more happened. The mist coiled about the cracked boots, rising no farther than the knees. More of the disks were gleaming with a silvery light, and Ryan could hear the faintest of humming sounds.

  "Hell, why not?" he said, and stepped in, followed by all the others.

  With a cackle of manic glee Doc immediately leaped and slammed the door shut so hard that the room vibrated.

  "Off we go!" he yelped, voice rising to a banshee wail.

  The hum rose to a whine. The lights flashed a pattern that dazzled and forced the intruders to close their eyes. Ryan was aware that the fog had thickened, climbing all about them, filling their lungs. He coughed, unable to breathe. There was a dreadful pressure in his ears. For a moment it felt as if a huge fist was reaching inside his head and squeezing his brain like a sponge.

  His body grew light, and he knew that he was passing out.

  Ryan's last thought as he fought his way into unconsciousness was that he should have killed Doc days ago.

  Even that was swallowed by an impenetrable blackness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ryan
opened his eye.

  There was a mild pain across his temples, like after a night of drinking home brew. His pulse was up and so was his breathing. He lay still, aware of a tingling sensation at the tips of toes and fingers. He lifted his hands and touched his face, feeling a faint numbness. And his black, curly hair bristled with static electricity. He closed his eye and opened it again, blinking up at a ceiling of patterned metal disks that glowed. A glow that was fading even as he looked up at it.

  He tried to work out just how he felt. His stomach swirled as if he'd been riding War Wag One over the bumpiest road in all Deathlands. And his brain relayed the curious sensation of having been sucked into itself and then dragged through a vacuum before being rammed back into his skull.

  But he lived.

  Whatever that bastard machine was supposed to have done, it had failed. The trap had not been properly sprung. Maybe over the decades the gas or poison or whatever had lost its power. He thought again that he ought to kill Doc. Now, without any further hesitation.

  "Ryan? You all... Mother, my head aches."

  Ryan sat up, looking around, seeing all his comrades either slumped unconscious or showing the first signs of recovering. Krysty blinked and sighed.

  "How d'you feel?" he said.

  She licked her lips, brushing a hand through the tumbling hair. "I've felt better. What was it? Death trap went wrong?"

  "Don't know. Doc knew about it, the old..."

  "Where are we, Mr. Cawdor?"

  Ryan drew the LAPA, finger on the trigger. "We're still in the Redoubt and we're all alive. Trick didn't work, Doc."

  "Trick? Upon my soul, but it is no trick. And it didwork."

  "What? Knocked us on our asses, that's all."

  Doc was up, tottering, steadying himself with a hand on the streaked glass of the wall. Everyone was now back to some degree of awareness.

  "What color were the walls of the gateway in the Redoubt, Mr. Cawdor?"

  "Brown and..." Ryan's jaw sagged a little. "Fireheat! These are green. They've changed."