Red Equinox

by James Axler

  Riding with the Trader, Ryan Cawdor had seen most every kind of wound or sickness or injury known to man or to woman.

  Traveling over rough terrain, often on broken-down highways corrugated by the ripple effect of nukings, meant some bumpy journeys. A sudden turn or lurch could cause sprained wrists, broken ankles and, often, dislocated shoulders. The cure for that was fairly simple.

  Painful, but simple.

  While Doc and Krysty each held a leg still, Jak took the Armorer's other arm and locked it tight in his hands. Ryan sat on the floor, putting his right foot into J.B.'s armpit, gripping the wrist of the damaged arm in both hands. He wriggled around to get comfortable and make sure he had enough purchase to do what had to be done. If it was left more than a few minutes the repair of the dislocation was going to be a major operation and could leave J.B. with a permanent weakness.

  "Ready?" Ryan asked.

  "Do it, Ryan," J.B. gritted from between clenched teeth.

  Ryan braced himself and tugged hard on the wrist, feel­ing the damaged joint snap back into place with an audi­ble click.

  Ryan let go and stood up. "How's that?" he asked. But J.B. didn't answer him.

  "Fainted," Jak said. "Shouldn't have called me 'kid.' Told him."

  FORTUNATELY, apart from some pain and stiffness in his shoulder, the Armorer wasn't too badly damaged. His ears were ringing and his head ached. The blood from his mouth was the result of biting through the tip of his tongue as the explosion hurled him off the chair. He was bruised around the kidneys and down the outside of the right thigh.

  "Good news is that my hat's fine, glasses aren't broke, and pants aren't torn. Never got much good at mending. And all the weapons are fine."

  "And the doors are open," Rick finished.

  Ryan laughed. "They were open before J.B. got to play­ing with them."

  The Armorer gave him the finger.

  In all of the other redoubts they'd entered, the ponder­ous double sec doors had always opened onto an expanse of wide, brightly lit corridor that was part of the main mil­itary complex.

  But not this time.

  Ryan cautiously pushed the left-hand door, careful to make sure that the previous tenants hadn't left yet another plas-ex calling card to greet them.

  "Fireblast," he spit.

  "What is it?" Krysty asked at his shoulder, her own Heckler & Koch P7A-13 blaster at the ready. "What?"

  Ryan loudly sucked in air. "This fireblasted triple-rad tooth of mine gave me a crack. Gotta get it pulled some time. Hole feels bigger than a three-hundred-pound gaudy whore's—"

  "Ryan," she warned, lifting the barrel of the silvered pistol.

  "Well. Hole feels big, and that's the truth, lover. It's bad."

  "Never mind your black-dust tooth, Ryan! What's out there?"

  Ryan looked around the edge of the door, turning back to face the others.

  "Not a lot."

  The walls were made of dirt, not concrete—dusty brown earth, packed tight, supported by thick wooden beams. Up in what once had been Pennsylvania, Ryan had come across an abandoned coal mine. It had been used as an emer­gency nuke shelter, but the bombing had caved in the en­trance. A century of wind, rain and shifting land had opened it up. Ryan had never seen so many desiccated corpses, piled and tangled one upon another. The corri­dors had been supported in the same way as the room out­side the gateway control.

  There was no illumination at all, but Ryan spotted a neat plastic box-switch by the doors. He clicked it down and a few bulbs flickered into hesitant life. The room was barely eight feet across, with a ceiling that couldn't have been more than seven cramped feet in height. Some sort of barred gate was set in the far wall.

  "Looks like the first redoubt ever built," Krysty said.

  But Rick disagreed. "No. Can't be. I know this looks like someone's backyard but the mat-trans technology is…like I said. It's state-of-the-art. Miniaturized circuits, the works. So, this stuff outside doesn't make any sense."

  The air tasted cool and damp, like the cellar of a long-abandoned house, a smell of kerosene and old bicycles, of empty bottles and piles of rotting newspaper tied up with twine.

  "What do you feel, lover?" Ryan asked. "Anything bad around?"

  Krysty shook her head. Her long red hair was still curled tightly around her nape. The effort of forcing the door had taken a toll, and she could barely stand unsupported.

  "Don't know, lover. Truth is, I don't feel anything but bushed out. Sorry."

  Ryan nodded. "Sure. Let's go find a way out of this tomb."

  He led the way, blaster probing the air in front of him like the tongue of a cobra.

  The barrier in the far wall was high-quality vanadium steel, made from bars as thick as a man's index finger, with a space between them of less than a half inch. The cross­bars were set three inches apart. It was an impressive se­curity device, its quad-lock and bolts set in a steel insert drilled right through into concrete. There was no gap in the door, either at the top or bottom.

  Cautiously Ryan reached out and pushed it, and the barred door swung silently open.

  "Unlocked," he said, unable to hide his relief. It wouldn't have been easy to blow.

  Beyond it was another wall switch. He considered the possibility that this could also have been wired, but re­jected the notion. The charges planted back at the gateway had all the hallmarks of a last-minute decision. Maybe in the final minutes of the withdrawal from the redoubt someone with a few yards of wire and a handful of plas-ex decided to make it tough for anyone trying to break into the mat-trans section of the complex.

  The overhead neon strip stuttered into life. They were all in a small stone-walled chamber, ten feet square. The smell of damp was much stronger, and the earth beneath their boots was moist. The walls were streaked with fungus and slime-green lichen.

  "Look." Jak pointed to a rusted metal cabinet screwed to the wall by the barred door. "Open it?"

  "Yeah. Slow and easy," J.B. said.

  The door wasn't closed and the boy levered it open with his fingers, wincing at the screech of corroded metal from the hinges.

  "Blaster," he said, hooking it out and holding it to show the others.

  "Smith & Wesson .38," J.B. observed. "Or what's left of it."

  The penetrating damp had reduced the handgun to a fragile orange skeleton. Jak dropped it to the floor where it crumbled apart, the brass-jacketed rounds spilling out.

  "I never seen a redoubt like this one," Ryan said to no­body in particular.

  "That way?" Rick asked, pointing to a plain door on the far side of the small room. "Stupid question, Ginsberg. Where the hell else are we going to go? Back to the torture chamber again? Thanks, but no thanks, guys."

  Ryan gripped the handle and pressed it, part of his mind waiting for the starburst of an explosion that would tell him he'd made a poor calculation. There was the click of the lock turning and the door opened. Light spilled from the room behind him, illuminating the bottom of an iron spi­ral staircase, the treads and rails coated with a patina of reddish rust. There was no other exit or door.

  "Up," he said.

  "Wow!" Rick panted about five minutes into the climb. "This is what we used to call a whole lot of no fun."

  He and Krysty were finding the going very hard indeed.

  Ryan tested the stairs, worried that a hundred years of the bone-chilling damp might have rotted the iron. Though the surface flaked away, the main structure seemed sound. The light switch at the bottom of the ladder didn't work, so they ascended in almost total blackness. It wasn't even possible to see how far they had to climb, or if there was any way out once they reached the top. Ryan sympathized with the freezie's comment. It was a lot of no fun,

  "FIFTEEN MINUTES." J.B.'s voice echoed around the con­crete stairwell. "Reckon we've climbed around two hundred feet, allowing for the stops."

  "You talking about me, J.B.?" Krysty asked, pausing for breath.

  He didn't reply.

&nbs
p; "Can't… sorry, folks. I'm utterly… I'm fucked up hill and down." Rick sat on the cold steps, nearly weeping, his face a pale blur in the darkness. The others gathered around him. Krysty was also near the outer limit of exhaustion, head in her hands. Doc was bearing up surprisingly well, his cane tapping away on the sonorous metal, ringing in the sighing space below them.

  Ryan, J.B. and Jak were capable of climbing on forever.

  But it was an eerie feeling. The light from beneath had almost vanished, just a tiny circle of palest yellow, so faint that to blink was to lose sight of it.

  "I swear that this is akin to swimming in the ether, lost between heaven and earth," Doc muttered.

  "Reminds me of Pontchartrain Causeway," Rick said, fighting to gather breath. "Long bridge that brings you into New Orleans. Guess I should say that it used to bring you in. Must be gone now. It was so damned long that when you were driving across and you were around the middle—" A coughing fit cut off the words. "Sweet Lord! Oh, bet­ter now. Yeah. In the middle you could look to both sides and see nothing but water. Look ahead and you couldn't make out the city. Just water. And you looked behind and the land vanished. Just more of the same water. Scared the shit out of me when I was a kid."

  Ryan leaned on the rail, feeling it give a little under his weight. He straightened, looked down, then up, trying to make out an ending of the spidery staircase. "Yeah, Rick. Know what you mean."

  "Here!" Jak called, his faint voice floating down from the angelic heights far above the others.

  "Door?" Ryan shouted.

  "Yeah. Can't move. Shall… ?"

  "No. Wait for the rest of us!"

  He climbed swiftly, J.B. at his heels, leaving the other three to fumble their way up after him as best they could.

  There was a platform, big enough to hold a dozen men, but as Ryan set his foot to it, he felt the tremor of move­ment and turned to the Armorer, behind him. "Stay there! It's swaying some."

  "They can't have done this trip every time they wanted to use the gateway," J.B. said, no more out of breath than if he'd taken a stroll around a garden on a spring morning. "Got to be an elevator someplace here."

  "Could be it got wrecked during the nukings. They put this in as a standby."

  "Mebbe. Tell you, Ryan, this is the damnedest place I ever did see."

  Doc was closing in on them, his voice ringing like a ca­thedral bell. "Oh, if my love were in my arms…"

  "Take it easy," J.B. called, silencing the song. "Plat­form here's not that safe. Tell the others behind you."

  They heard the old man relaying the message down the spidery staircase.

  Ryan felt his way toward the albino boy, grateful for the avalanche of snowy hair that guided him like a beacon.

  "Got it. There's…" He ran his hands over the whole door, feeling two small sec bolts at top and bottom. He slid them both open, turned the handle and pushed the door away from him.

  A rush of bitingly cold air swept over him, air so fresh it almost brought tears to his eye.

  "We're out," he said, looking into a wintry night.

  From the delicate coral pink of the eastern sky, dawn wasn't far off. The six friends huddled together for warmth. Ryan, arm around Krysty, looked around and tried to make sense of what he saw.

  The door had been cunningly concealed as a part of a chimney flue, so cleverly camouflaged that it was no sur­prise it had been hidden for a century. But this was no re­doubt.

  They were in the ruined attic of a large house, almost a mansion from what they could see of it. Some of the roof tiles had disappeared, revealing the star-spangled heavens, though scudding clouds made it impossible to recognize any of the constellations. Snow came in fine showers between the stark rafters, piling under the eaves.

  Jak was all for exploring, but Ryan told him to sit still and not risk moving around in the dark. Ordered him, pointing out that the state of the outer roof spoke of seri­ous damage. And who knew what worse damage was lower down.

  Doc and J.B. fell asleep and Krysty dozed a while in Ryan's arms. Jak was sulking at being told off. Rick, on Ryan's left side, was still awake.

  "What d'you figure?" he whispered.

  "Fucked if I know, Rick. It's no official redoubt, that's certain."

  "Could be a private sec center. I heard some rich folks— seriously rich, you understand—had their own cryo cen­ters."

  "Private freezies?"

  "You hear of someone called Walt Disney?"

  Ryan nodded. "Course. Invented Mickey the mouse. Seen old vids."

  "Sort of. Well, the word was old Walt had himself fro­zen—he had the big ''C—and he was kept on ice in a sort of fun fair, in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Kind of appropri­ate, isn't it?"

  "Sure." Ryan had no idea what Rick was talking about.

  Soon as the first light of the sun appeared, J.B. took out his minisextant and computed where they were.

  He repeated the procedure and shook his head. He did it again. And again. By now they were all awake and watch­ing, puzzled. Ryan asked the question.

  "Where are we?"

  J.B. swallowed hard. "Something wrong with this," he said, shaking the sextant. "Either that, or we're smack in the middle of Russia. Somewhere near their old city of Moscow."

  Nobody said a word.

  Chapter Five

  "COULD BE."

  "Never."

  "Why not?"

  "My dear Richard, it must surely be obvious even to someone whose brains have been addled and whipped into a cold collation."

  "Up yours, Doc. Just tell me why we couldn't be in Russia."

  "A gateway!"

  "Yeah. A gateway. A mat-trans unit. Jumps for the making of. Why not?"

  Doc shook his head, the rising sun glinting off his sil­very hair. "Because it's absolutely out of the question, Richard, that's why. You hardly think our Communist brethren would have allowed such a thing, do you?"

  Rick nodded. "Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do."

  Ryan interrupted the quarrel. "Come on, Rick. I wasn't there, but I've seen and read enough to know that there wasn't too much love lost between them and us."

  "They started sky-dark," Jak added.

  "Sure they did," the freezie agreed. "But you gotta look back a while. Back to the late eighties. A guy called… Oh, shit! What was his name? Khrushchev? No. Something that ended like that. Gorby? Gorbachev. Yeah, I think that was it."

  "Oh, him. But we all know what happened to him, don't we? And his plans for…let me see. There was a buzz­word, was there not? Glasnost. An ending to the cold war. Scrap all missiles. Eternal peace and love and brother­hood. I remember that, my dear Richard. Indeed I do."

  The freezie stood up, clapping his hands together. "Jeez! It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a polar bear. Cold enough for Russia, J.B., I'll give you that. But listen. Dur­ing glasnost there was an opening of frontiers. Barriers came down for a while. Now, suppose this had once been some kind of American embassy or whatever."

  "And they built a gateway inside it," Krysty said. "Se­cretly."

  "Sure," Ryan agreed. "Look at that hidden door. Even with the sun coming up, you can't see it. If we hadn't come through it, we'd never know it was there. Stairs go down inside that fake chimney, I guess. Secret's lasted a hundred years."

  "Could be," Doc admitted grudgingly. "Shouldn't take us long to find out. Or for them to find us out. Would you not say?"

  Once there was sufficient light for them to find their way around, Ryan led a recce party.

  It had obviously been a very large house, a positive mansion. They could now see that about a quarter of the original roof had been destroyed. The blackened and charred beams told their own story of the fire. Ryan wrig­gled cautiously to the edge, peered down and saw that the building had originally been four stories high.

  "Lots trees," Jak observed, lying flat on his stomach alongside Ryan, the chill wind tugging at his fine white hair.

  It was a fair comment.

&nbs
p; As far as Ryan could see the house was surrounded by a rambling forest, reminding him of his own birthplace back in the blue-topped Shens of Virginia. But these trees were mainly conifers, huge, nodding pines and firs, with larch and spruce dotted among them. And the whole scene was blanketed in soft, rolling banks of snow.

  Ryan eased back, conscious of the way his breath plumed out into the morning air.

  "See anything, lover?" Krysty asked.

  "No."

  "Think J.B.'s sextant's right?"

  "You mean, do I think this is Russia? How should I know? I've never seen Russia. Not much on old vids. Trees and snow."

  "Could be the Shens," she pointed out.

  "I just thought that. I guess we better find a way down to the ground and see what we can see. Doesn't look like nuke damage."

  "No. Would've brought down the chimney. Gaia! It's cold."

  Picking their way over the beams and joists, they even­tually found a trapdoor with a broken bolt that took them down a ladder onto a narrow, dark landing. The steps were missing every other slat, and hung crookedly to one side.

  "Boy!" Rick exclaimed. "This place sure took a pounding. Looks like a New Jersey street

  gang's been us­ing it for practice."

  "You said it could be some place near to Moscow, my dear Mr. Dix?" Doc asked.

  "Could be. I don't know the references outside Deathlands. Not that well. But it sure as black dust is Russia."

  "Why, Doc? Why d'you ask?"

  The old man stood in a pool of sunlight where the ceil­ing had been brought down. He rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. "Because, my dear Ryan, there is a little something that nags at my memory. Yet…?" He shook his head.

  "Something about this place?"

  "Yes. The name of Peredelkino comes to my mind and—"

  "How's that?" Rick asked.

  "Peredelkino."

  The freezie nodded. "Hell's bells. That brings it back, all right."

  "What, Rick?" Ryan asked.