by James Axler
Reaching out with the muzzle of the Steyr, Ryan gave the door a hard tap and it swung easily aside. Instantly a cloud of dark fumes flowed into the chamber. Covering their mouths, the companions hastily retreated into the mat-trans unit to get away from the spreading gas. As the cloud filled the chamber, it reached the candles on the wall, and they winked out instantly.
Chapter Two
The companions scrambled to find bits of cloth to use as masks against the encroaching cloud when a familiar smell reached them and everybody relaxed.
"Shit," Jak exhaled, annoyed. "Wag exhaust."
"Inside a gateway?" Dean demanded, fighting back a cough. The fumes were killing his throat.
"At least," J.B. said, shoving his hat farther back on his head, "there's nobody in the next room."
"Hopefully," Mildred warned.
"Making me feel dizzy," Krysty said, touching her temples. In response, her hair was lying limply on her shoulders, hardly moving.
"Can't stay here," Ryan said, noticing a lack of openings for vents or fans. "I'm on point. Let's go."
Quickly the companions prepared their weapons. Jak eased one of his many knives loose and cocked back the hammer on his Colt Python. Krysty checked the load in her S&W .38 revolver, while Mildred did the same with her Czech-made ZKR .38 target pistol. Dean dropped the clip of his 9 mm Browning Hi-Power to check the load, then slammed the mag back into the grip of his semiautomatic blaster.
Meanwhile, J.B. pulled back the bolt on his Uzi submachine gun, and reached behind to pump the action on his S&W M-4000 shotgun. Loaded with flechette rounds, the weapon would blow a person or creature into shreds at twenty yards.
Holding his huge LeMat steady, Doc rotated the cylinder to visually inspect the loads.
Longblaster in one hand, 9 mm pistol in the other, Ryan headed across the chamber, J.B. and Krysty flanking him. As the three entered the next room, the others waited from the doorway ready to give cover in case of trouble.
Both of his blasters sweeping for targets, Ryan stepped through the oval doorway and blinked at the harsh fumes tainting the murky atmosphere. Moving stealthily, he dimly saw a control console, some shelves to the left and a hulking collection of machinery to the right. The room continued for another few yards, then ended in another steel door exactly like the first.
"J.B., Krysty, behind the console," Ryan ordered, leveling his Steyr.
As they took the position, Ryan listened at the door for a moment, then started to turn the wheel. He struggled against the rust, finally forcing the wheel to turn, the heavy levers withdrawing from the four sides of the frame and coming free with a rain of corrosion sprinkling to the floor. As the door disengaged, Ryan pulled it aside. Raw sunlight and fresh air poured into the room, carrying the smell of a jungle.
As the fresh air blew into the gateway, it broke the cobwebs apart and stirred tiny dust devils to dance madly about the metal floor. Blinking at the harsh daylight, Ryan stepped onto a predark concrete sidewalk, tall weeds growing in the cracks. Past the sidewalk was a large expanse of bare ground, the wrecks of wags and assorted debris dotting the black soil in an irregular pattern. A telephone pole rested almost sideways amid the broken things, the remains of insulted cables dangling impotently from the rotting crossbars.
Seagulls called and circled in the sky against a dark expanse of storm clouds laced with orange and purple. Thunder rumbled softly as sheet lightning flashed in the heavens. Ryan sniffed carefully, but couldn't detect any trace of sulfur. There would be no acid rains coming for a while.
A lush jungle rose all around the metal building, colorful flowers blooming everywhere. Somewhere in the far distance, a large cat roared a challenge to the world.
Leaving the door open, Ryan turned and whistled twice, short and sharp. Soon the rest of the companions entered the small room, efficiently spreading out. Less than a minute later, they converged across the room near Ryan. Gratefully they gulped in the fresh air as the jungle breeze swirled the exhaust around and around the room, quickly dissipating the fumes.
"Nobody here," Krysty said, easing down the hammer on her S&W .38 revolver.
"Not anymore," Dean said, jerking a thumb toward the shelves.
Ryan glanced that way, then strode over. He had missed this in the thick clouds, walking right by the poor bastard.
It was a human skeleton lying facedown on the floor, one hand extended toward the mat-trans unit. From under the tattered strips of dingy cloth, bare white bones gleamed in the reflected light from outside. There were no shoes or weapons.
As there was nothing to salvage from the bones on the floor, Ryan checked the wall shelves. But they contained only sagging cardboard boxes that had once been filled with ammo, and other assorted trash lying under a thin coating of dust. He frowned. Somebody had stored a lot of supplies here, probably getting ready for a jump, and when they departed, took everything not nailed down,
"A whitecoat," Krysty observed, identifying the style of clothing of the dead man. "Mebbe the tech who built the gateway."
"How did he die?" Dean asked, standing near the open doorway and keeping a watch on the ground outside.
Ryan noticed the boy's attention, and grunted in approval. "You see anything coming this way, just close the door," he said.
Dean nodded. "Unless it's coming fast," he agreed, crossing his arms so that the sleek Browning pistol rested on a wrist.
"I'll check those machines," J.B. said, and went to the other side of the console. He ducked and was gone from sight.
"Not see lead or arrow," Jak noted, poking among the ribs of the skeleton. "Head not bust, no club job."
"He bled to death," Ryan stated, pointing at a nearby wall. There, in plain sight now, were a couple of steel sharp spikes sticking out from the metal wall. Smeared patterns of brown went from the spikes to the floor, the trails going straight to the mutilated hands of the dead man.
Doc frowned. "Nailed him to the wall," he said. "Where he could watch the others leave."
Taking a knife from her boot, Krysty probed the brittle bones of the hands. "Crude job, center bones are all shattered," she commented. "That's how he was able to get loose. These folks obviously didn't do a lot of this."
"So he was somebody special they hated," Mildred said slowly. "Probably wanted him to starve to death, while choking in the exhaust fume, with escape only yards away."
"Lot of hate," Jak commented, taking a piece of venison jerky from a pocket and biting off a piece.
"Hate is often more powerful than love, my friend. See?" Doc espoused, tracking the dead man's progress with his ebony stick. "This stalwart chap pulled himself off the wall to escape, and died of blood loss trying to follow them."
"Her," Mildred corrected him, lifting the pelvic bone from the ancient skeleton. "This was a woman, middle-aged, good health."
"Recent?" Ryan asked bluntly. The bones looked old, but that didn't mean they were.
Placing the pelvis aside, the physician lifted the skull and unhinged the jaw to glance at the teeth. "Predark," she stated. "This is ceramic dental work, top of the line. Not old-fashioned silver inlays. From my time."
"Hey, what's that?" Krysty asked, and she brushed aside the remains of the right hand, the bones rattling as they rolled under the wall shelves.
Exposed on the floor was some sort of a symbol, written in the dead woman's blood. Two lines of different lengths were bisected by another line at an angle.
"Don't recognize that," Ryan said. "Doc?"
"Not Latin," the scholar rumbled, studying the configuration. "Nor is it from the Greek alphabet, Sanskrit or hieroglyphics. Perhaps Hebrew?"
Mildred shrugged. "Hard to say."
"Tech talk," Jak sniffed as if that settled the matter.
"Mil code," Dean suggested from the doorway.
Thoughtfully Ryan adjusted the strap of the long-blaster over his shoulder. "Could be anything. Or nothing. A person can get crazy when dying from blood loss, sort of like being drunk whi
le freezing to death."
"Nasty."
"There's no good way to die."
"Must have been mighty important for her to write in blood," Krysty said slowly, "and then lay a hand over the symbol to protect it from being smudged."
Licking the point on a stubby pencil, Mildred carefully duplicated the symbol in her yellowed notepad and slid it back into her med kit.
"Might be important," she said.
"Mebbe to her," Ryan said, turning toward the machinery. "Not us. Our concern is getting out of here."
Rising, Jak walked over to the open door and leaned against the jamb, his massive .357 Magnum Colt Python in hand. He offered the rest of the jerky to Dean, who accepted, and the two teens stood guard, chewing steadily. Edging the bare ground was a tattered wooden fence, and some rusted coils of what might have been barbed wire. On the other side was the crushed wreckage of civilian cars, and assorted junk.
"Invasion force?" Dean asked casually.
"Hell of a fight," Jak said.
"Yep," Dean agreed.
Swallowing, Jak took a deep breath. "Smells good."
"Like home?"
A frown. "Bayou swamp, not jungle." Then the albino cracked a rare smile. "But close enough."
Crossing the room, Ryan went to the hodge-podge assortment of machinery. The collection reached from the front wall to the wall of the mat-trans unit. At the front end was a pile of nuke batteries. At the other end was a coil of highly polished copper, apparently filled with lots of smaller coils inside and a single massive iron bar in the middle. What it could be he had no idea.
Dusting off his hands, J.B. rose from behind the console and started flipping switches on the control board.
"Tell me," Ryan said, coming closer.
"Damned if I know," the short man replied, turning dials. Nothing happened. "Everything here seems to be in working order, so that's not the problem."
Going to a large metal tank extending from the side of a motor, J.B. unscrewed the cap and looked inside. Then he stuck in a hand, his fingertips coming out barely moistened.
"Nuke me, we're trapped," he stated glumly.
Just then, something loudly clicked and the machinery struggled into life, spewing out black clouds of exhaust, but it stopped after only a few seconds.
Ryan scowled darkly. "Doesn't sound broken. Out of gas?"
"Yeah. Not a drop left in the fuel tank."
"The mat-trans runs on gas?" Dean asked incredulously.
"How is that possible?" Krysty asked, joining the men at the console.
Pensively J.B. removed his fedora to scratch his head, then jammed the hat back on. "Ryan was right. These folks were desperate to leave. This is the most ramshackle piece of equipment I've ever seen. I'm astonished it ever worked."
Going to the machines, J.B. said, "These nuke batteries start this big motor, which turns this modified car transmission to increase its rpm and turn this electric generator really fast so that it can feed high-voltage current into a step-up transformer, which boosts the voltage again and pours the electricity into this homemade Tesla coil until there is enough power to run the mat-trans."
"Brilliant," Doc rumbled, eagerly approaching the copper coil for inspection. "A homemade lightning bolt. Most impressive."
"Freeze!" J.B. barked, and stepped between the scholar and the machinery. "The mat-trans needs a bastard load of power to work, and while that coil doesn't have enough to send us anywhere, it's still got sufficient volts to kill you. Won't be anything left but ash and an echo."
"Indeed," Doc muttered, backing away from the predark power plant. "Thank you for the admonishment, John Barrymore."
"Be more careful, you old coot," Mildred chided.
"I will, madam." Doc smiled, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. "Next time, I shall have you touch it for me."
Once again, the motor tried to start and died.
"Homemade gateway, jerry-built power plant," Ryan growled, studying the control panel on the turbine and flipping a cutoff switch. Several weakly glowing indicators faded away into darkness. "Hell, we're lucky we ever made it here alive."
Ambling to the console, Jak went to the fuel tank and sniffed. "Only gas?" he asked pointedly. "Or shine okay?"
Alcohol, now there was a good idea. Ryan rubbed his unshaven chin. Most wags ran on some sort of alcohol these days. Anybody could make that.
"Well?" Ryan asked.
"No, doesn't have to be gas," J.B. replied with a crooked grin. "Shine should do the job, too. This isn't a car motor, but an emergency generator. Turbine, not pistons. Designed to run on just about anything fluid that burns."
"We have this," Mildred said, hauling a glass bottle into view from her med kit.
Ryan took the Molotov cocktail and shook it gently. The brownish fluid inside the bottle frothed slightly, but didn't foam.
"Good. No soap mixed in," he said.
"This'll work fine," J.B. said as he took the bottle, but then he frowned. "Just not enough. I'd guess that we need a full gallon to recharge the system. This is less than a quart. Nowhere near what we need."
"But a good start," Doc stated confidently. "We can make the rest. Eh, my dear Jak?"
"Sure. Shine no prob. But need time. Week to turn mash. Need copper pipe for distill. Sugar no prob. Jungle got lots fruit for sweetening."
"It does not have to taste good."
"Sweetening makes to turn faster."
"Ah."
"Anybody got a better plan?" Ryan asked the group at large. "Okay then, we build a still, make shine and jump out of here in a week. Mildred, what's the food supply?"
"Three days, maybe four," she said.
"Then we'll need to go hunting," he declared. "Let's recce the local area and then make camp."
Everybody dropped their backpacks with sighs of relief, then started from the building. The last one to leave, Mildred took the chair from the console and tipped it over, sliding it underneath the oval door, jamming it open. Unlike a redoubt, the gateway didn't have a keypad lock, and she liked to make sure they always had a clear path of retreat.
Uzi cradled in his grip, J.B. stayed by the gateway as the anchor man, while the rest circled the building. As the companions moved off on patrol, Krysty went directly to the sagging fence and studied the junkyard. There was a hint of barbed wire on the posts, no more than rusted pieces of wire now. But there sure seemed to be a paved road under the piles of debris. Damage from a nuke quake? Made sense.
Starting along the perimeter in the opposite direction from the others, she could see the section of ground they were on was actually a small mesa, a column of ground thrust some ten feet or so straight up from the rest of the jungle. More nuke landscaping, but that was good news. It would be an easy climb down, but that ten feet would stop most nighttime predators. This was just about as fine a base camp as she had ever encountered. Even from this height, she could see a dozen different types of fruit hanging from the branches of the nearby trees, and the lush growth reached to the distant horizon. Very faintly Krysty caught the sounds of waves on a beach somewhere. Worst case, they could live for quite a while. As long as they found clean water.
Leading the others, Ryan strode into view from around the corner of the building and stopped upon seeing the redhead. They exchanged nods, announcing everything was fine.
Not for the first time, Ryan realized how amazingly beautiful Krysty was. Once he had found a stash of old porno mags from predark days, and none of those ancient beauties could hold a candle to the fiery redhead. Then he pushed that thought from his mind. They had work to do right now.
"See anything?" he asked, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Krysty placed her hand on top of his and squeezed back. "Not a thing, lover. No villes in sight where we could buy juice," she said, shifting her stance so that a warm thigh rested against his.
"No ruins, either," Ryan agreed, dropping his arm to go about her waist and rest on the full curves. "We're all alone for on
ce."
"Sounds great," Mildred grumbled, holstering her piece. The physician shook out her wild tangle of beaded hair. "We've been in a lot of tough scrapes lately. Be nice to just sit and rest for a while."
"Amen to that, dear lady," Doc rumbled, resting heavily on his ebony stick. '"Ere the heart of a warrior break and die, he needs to sit sometime, and dream of nigh.'"
Biting a lip, Mildred tilted her head. "Um, Longfellow?"
"Catullus."
"Ah."
"Damn strange about all these traps," J.B. said, standing at the fence.
"Traps?" Dean asked, furrowing his brow. "Looks like junk."
The Armorer smiled. "Most things look that way after getting blown apart. There's a minefield out there."
"We're going to have a bitch of a job carving a path through," Ryan said, releasing the redhead and going to the fence. But not too close. "Hundred-year-old land mines tend to detonate whenever they feel like it."
Just then, Krysty jerked her weapon free and glanced upward.
"Something?" Jak asked, raising his hand cannon and following her gaze. But the sky was clear. Just the usual stormy clouds full of acid, sheet lightning and fiery rads.
"A shadow," she said softly. "Mebbe just a cloud."
"Mebbe not," Ryan said grimacing.
"Hot pipe!" Dean cried as he drew his blaster, pointed it at his father's head and fired. The muzzle-blast of the semiautomatic pistol warmed Ryan's cheek, and he spun with the SIG-Sauer in his fist.
Falling from the sky was a huge bird, its chest pumping blood from the bullet wound. The creature hit the ground with a feathery thump, and tried again to launch itself into the air toward Ryan, its enormous wings savagely beating the air as it screamed a high-pitched cry.
Ryan fired twice, the 9 mm Parabellum slugs slamming the colossal bird in the belly and the throat. It went quiet, and after a moment slumped lifeless.
"What is it?" J.B. demanded, going closer to the corpse. Gingerly he prodded the bird with the barrel of his Uzi.
"Condor," Mildred said grimly. "Biggest bird in the world."