by James Axler
“Thanks, John. Whatever the cause, I have to radically revise my prognosis for him.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
Mildred glanced up, her brow knotted. “Judging by how fast it’s progressing, instead of a day or two, Jak might have six to eight hours—if he’s lucky.”
Chapter Four
“Hey, Doc, lend me your coat, please?”
“My pleasure, dear lady.” Shrugging out of his frock coat, Doc presented it to Mildred with a slight bow. “It does not look good for young Jak, does it?”
“No, it sure as hell doesn’t,” Ryan answered. He turned back to the panel, which still silently mocked him with its obstinate refusal to work. “Our clock just started ticking a whole lot faster. Either we figure out a way back to the mat-trans, or we get this hunk-of-junk steel box moving.”
“Got four choices.” J.B. pointed at the double doors, then at the elevator floor as he leaned against the wall, his dusty brown fedora tilted up. “Over, under, around or through.”
Even under the circumstances, Ryan couldn’t help smiling at the phrase, one of the Trader’s favorite aphorisms. “Yeah. Let’s try up first. C’mon, I’ll boost you.”
Ryan squatted, and J.B. nimbly climbed on his shoulders. When the tall man straightened, the Armorer reached the elevator roof with ease. For the next several minutes, he looked for any kind of hidden hatch, lever or emergency controls but came up empty. As he was finishing his sweep, he jerked his hands away from the ceiling. “What the—?”
“You got something?”
“Felt something. Wait a sec….” J.B. gently placed his hands back on the plastic grilled ceiling tiles. “Black dust!”
Mildred looked up from tending Jak. “What’s going on, John?”
Ryan glanced up to see J.B. staring down at them with wide eyes. “I can hear them jumping on the roof. There’s gotta be more of those rad-blasted pig-rats.” He slid off Ryan’s shoulders to the floor. “Stirred up one hell of a rat’s nest.”
They all listened, and once again, heard the squeals and thumps of rodent bodies hitting the ceiling, followed by the click-click of their hooves as the muties clattered around on the roof of the elevator.
Ryan shook his head. “What the fuck—fireblasted muties takin’ this personal?”
“Either that, or we smell better than whatever they been eating recently.” J.B. shrugged, as phlegmatic as ever.
“Rats chew on just about anything,” Mildred said with a shudder. “Think they’ll gnaw through the cable?”
“If they do, all the more reason to get the hell out of here. Let’s take a look at the floor.”
Two minutes later, the thin industrial carpeting had been torn up, revealing more of the same smooth metal. Drawing his knife, J.B. pressed the point into the steel as hard as he dared without risking the blade, but didn’t even make an impression. “No-go that way.”
“Right. That leaves the hallway.” Ryan turned to face the doors.
“Lover.” Krysty placed a hand on his arm. “You can’t be serious. You wouldn’t make it ten steps.”
Glancing at her, Ryan took her hand in his own callused one, squeezing for a moment before letting it fall. “Got no plans to take the last train to the coast just yet.”
J.B. joined him, the sallow man scratching his forehead. “What are you thinking?”
Ryan flashed him a tight grin. “Over. The way I remember it, those three pipes ran the entire length of the corridor.”
“Leap up, grab them and scoot. Crazy enough that it might work. How do we open the doors and get out without being overrun?”
“That’s the tricky part. Doc?”
“At your service, good sir.”
“Got any rounds left for that scattergun barrel of yours?”
“I believe I can find a few at the bottom of my capacious pockets.”
Ryan nodded at J.B., who had already picked up on his plan and had unslung the M-4000 shotgun and was checking the load.
“Ryan, you aren’t serious about this?” Mildred asked, rising from beside Jak.
The dark-haired man turned to face her. “Look into my eye and tell me I’m joking.”
She frowned. “The blasts in this enclosed space could permanently deafen us all.”
“Better alive and deaf than hearing and eaten alive. If you want to help, figure out a way to protect our hearing as best you can.” Ryan shrugged off his rifle, leaning it against the corner of the elevator, and made sure there were no loose pieces of cloth on his garments that might provide a convenient rope for the mutie horde outside. “Make sure everything’s secured, J.B.”
“I’m on it.”
Mildred shook her head, then looked around. “You two are both nuts.”
Ryan saw red for a second. “Fireblast, Mildred! If you aren’t helping, you’re hindering! Now get useful, or get the hell out of the way!”
Mildred’s face tightened, but Ryan didn’t give an inch, pinning her under his icy glare. Finally she turned away. “We need cloth, cotton wadding, anything to shield our eardrums.”
“How about that carpet we tore up?” Krysty borrowed J.B.’s knife and began cutting it into long strips.
Mildred felt it, then nodded. “Got just enough padding to do the trick. Make them narrower if you can. The more we can cram into our ears, the better.”
J.B. glanced over at their work. “At least it’ll muffle the noise of those little bastards slamming into the door.”
“I’ll get Jak ready.” Krysty moved to the motionless albino teen, plugging his ears and covering his head with Doc’s coat.
Doc had finally fished out a round for the shotgun barrel of his LeMat, and now stood with the pistol ready in both hands. J.B. had his shotgun ready, his gaze on Ryan. “Who’s going?”
Ryan smiled. “You and me, of course. I need your devious mind in case the cards are locked up or hidden somewhere.”
J.B. sighed. “Hip-deep in the shit, as usual.”
“Where else?”
Doc pressed his ear against the door. “Is there any chance that waiting a bit might make the cretins leave us in peace and seek more suitable prey?”
“They might, but if Jak’s getting worse—”
“Which he is,” Mildred broke in from the corner. Ryan glanced over to see the kid convulse and vomit a thin stream of pale bile onto the floor.
“We’ve got to move now. I think this is our best bet. Hellfire, it’s the only one we got. All right, let’s go over the plan.”
Ryan scooped up the unconscious Jak and moved him to the other side of the elevator, sweeping mutie corpses out of the way with his boot. “Krysty, you’re on the door. We give the signal, you hit the button. As soon as J.B. and I are out, close it triple-quick.”
“You just don’t let it hit your ass on the way out.” She smiled, but it vanished from her face as quickly as it had appeared. Her vibrant crimson hair was tucked up tight at her nape, revealing how she felt about this whole idea.
“Doc and J.B., you’re the firepower. Soon as the door opens wide enough, you both let fly with everything you got. Doc, hold your blaster at this angle.” Ryan adjusted the man’s hands to get maximum spread of the shotgun pellets.
The old man nodded, his limp, white mane flying around his shoulders. “Never fear, Ryan, I shall endeavor to send as many of the feral scum to hell as possible.”
J.B. didn’t say a word, only removed his beloved fedora and handed it to Mildred who, not having anywhere better to set it, perched it on her own head, where it sat incongruously over her beaded plaits.
“That’s the spirit, Doc, but just fire the one round, don’t switch to the cylinder. Mildred, you hang back and grab J.B.’s M-4000 when he’s empty. You know how to reload it, right?”
Wordlessly, she accepted the round magazine from J.B. and nodded, handing him a wad of carpet strips in exchange. “I got it.”
“Way I figure it, in less than five seconds, you two shoot, then we scoot
. You seal that door tight after us.”
Krysty’s full lips were pressed tight with concern. “Assuming you find the card, how do you expect to get back inside?”
“We’ll just knock on the door, and you’ll do the same thing again.” Ryan looked at all of them. “Ready?”
Everyone nodded. Doc took a tighter grip on his LeMat, carpet strips sprouting out of his ears. J.B. braced the M-4000 shotgun against his hip, ready to spray the corridor. Krysty was poised at the door controls, her face pale. Mildred stood in the middle of the elevator, ready to grab J.B.’s weapon. Ryan folded up a strip and inserted into his left ear, then did the same with his right, feeling the noise inside the elevator fade away into a dull buzz.
Ryan paused for a moment, removing the carpet from his ear. “Hey, hear that? They’ve stopped.”
Everyone cautiously removed one of their earplugs to listen. It was now ominously silent.
J.B. frowned. “What you think that means? They get tired and left?”
Doc cleared his throat. “More likely, John Barrymore, they are regrouping to plan another method of attack. I recall a fascinating study on the common rat that proved the rodents possessed the ability of meta-cognition, previously found only in humans and some primates—”
“Skip the lecture, Doc. What the hell are you talking about?”
With a sigh, the old man stared pointedly at Ryan. “My point, my impatient companion, is that rats are one of the few animals who think about thinking—on an instinctual, primal level they are able to analyze their own thought processes. Beating themselves against the door was not working, so they are now trying to find another way into the elevator. The more salient point is that these mutated animals are probably more intelligent than you are giving them credit for. A dangerous assumption indeed.”
“Mebbe so, but we’re about to give them the surprise of their lives. Let’s see what your supermuties do when we charge straight into them,” the one-eyed man replied.
Ryan inserted his wedge of carpet earplug again. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter Five
On Ryan’s nod, Krysty stabbed the door button. There was a pause, and Ryan thought the whole plan might go to hell before it even began if the doors didn’t open.
He felt a tremor shiver through the floor and made sure J.B. and Doc were both ready. He was more worried about Doc. J.B. could be wakened from a sound sleep and be alert and ready to chill in less than three seconds. Sometimes Doc was the exact opposite, snoring through events that would rouse an entire ville. But now he looked more than ready, his eyes alight as he waited to unleash blood and thunder.
Ryan’s breath hissed through clenched teeth as he waited for the doors to open. His hands itched for a weapon, and he was acutely aware of the oddity of not leading this assault by example. But neither his hand-blaster nor longblaster was suited for the job, and he needed to get into the corridor and on the pipes triple-quick so J.B. could follow before being mobbed by the surviving muties.
After what seemed like an hour, but was probably just a few seconds, the double doors separated with a squeal, pulling apart to reveal the boiling, furious mutant mass outside. Ryan was counting on a moment’s surprise as the pig-rats took in this new development, and he was well rewarded. As one, the churning crowd all looked up at the suddenly disappearing barrier in front of them.
But as the muties took in this new development, Ryan’s breath caught in his throat as he stared out at what they were up against.
The hallway was completely buried in squirming, wriggling pig-rats, crawling on and over one another in their single-minded desire to get to the end of the hallway and the live food trapped there. They were at least five or six deep in the hallway, a living carpet of gray-brown fur, dotted every few inches by a pair of large, black eyes and thousands upon thousands of needle-sharp teeth.
For a millisecond, everything came to a halt. The mutie rodent host stared up at them, and Ryan and company stared back.
The moment was broken by the soft chime of the elevator announcing to all that the doors had opened.
“Now!” he shouted.
Primed and ready, Doc unleashed his shotgun round first. The concussion slammed through Ryan’s head like a wall of bricks had fallen on him. The cluster of lead balls smashed into the first group of rats, already crouching to leap at them. The pellets ripping away limbs, tearing through faces, pulverizing bodies, disintegrating the point guard in a welter of blood, bone and brains.
A heartbeat later, J.B. opened up with the M-4000. With each shell containing dozens of razor-sharp steel fléchettes, he laid down a curtain of metal moving at a thousand feet per second, obliterating anything in its way.
The next wave, already running toward the door, was pulped where they stood, their remains bursting apart to splatter comrades behind them. Encountering little resistance, the fléchette wave continued into the next line, each tiny dart carving into another furry body, and another behind that.
For a moment, Ryan thought he knew what the sound of the bombs going off during skydark sounded like. The Smith & Wesson’s awesome roar reverberated through his head like the pounding hooves of Death’s hellhorses. His plugged ears trembled in agony, and his skull felt like it had been stove in by a sledgehammer.
But the gambit worked. For a few precious seconds, the pig-rats’ onslaught was broken as they retreated before the impenetrable steel veil of death sweeping through them.
J.B.’s shotgun clicked on an empty chamber, the overpowering roar echoing off the walls to beat through Ryan’s head one last time before fading away. He glanced around to see similar expressions of shock and awe on the rest of his companions’ faces.
“Let’s go!” Ryan said, his voice sounding muffled and far away, even to him. Stepping into the corridor, he saw the multitude already massing for another run. Turning to face the group, he leaped up and clamped both hands around the pipe on the left, using the wall to climb up until he could wrap his legs around it as well, and shimmying forward as fast as he could. He felt the strain on the pipes as J.B. followed suit, then the crack of a blaster from the elevator.
“Shut it!” he yelled back, but immediately stopped as the effort unbalanced him, nearly causing him to lose his grip on the cold metal.
“They got the doors closed,” J.B. grunted behind him. “Move, move, move!”
Clinging to the pipe, Ryan began inching down the corridor, aware of the fanged, clawed death that awaited below if he slipped. Left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot. Inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, he made his way along. Once he brushed the middle pipe, only to draw back in surprise.
“J.B., the middle pipe’s bastard hot. Watch it.”
“Got it.”
Below, the pig-rats went absolutely crazy. The squealing and gnashing of their teeth was deafening now, and Ryan sensed movement below him, closer than he would have liked.
“Hold up.” Twisting his head, Ryan looked down just in time to see one of the muties launch itself at his face, its claws outstretched to rip the skin from his cheeks, dripping fangs bared and ready to feast on his eyes, nose, and tongue.
“Shit!” Unable to move, Ryan pressed himself against the pipe, staring as the beast grew larger in his vision. But about a foot away from him, it reached the apex of its jump and fell away into the writhing mass below. “Fireblast!”
“What happened?”
“Mutie nearly chewed my face!”
“Get you?”
Even though he’d seen it fall before striking, Ryan took a second to check. “No!”
“Then get moving!”
“Just a sec!” Making sure his left grip was secure, Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer, thumbed off the safety, pointed down and fired three times. The pained squeals of the wounded pig-rats ended quickly as they were torn apart by their ravenous, uncaring brethren.
“Little free with the ammo, aren’t you?”
“If what Doc said was true about how these bastards think, I want t
hem to know if they try for me, they pay the final price.” Holstering his blaster, Ryan crept forward mechanically, his leaden arms and legs clamped on to the pipe, his fingers growing more numb with each yard gained.
After what seemed like an eternity, Ryan saw the pipes bend at a right angle and vanish into the wall a couple of yards away. Carefully hanging his head down, he saw the doors to the mat-trans anteroom just beyond them. Turning his head sideways and looking out of the corner of his eye, he watched the pig-rats tumble and swirl over and around one another, with the occasional one making a futile leap at him, only to fall back into the teeming mass.
It was at that moment Ryan realized the fault in his plan. “Son of a bitch!”
“Yeah?” There was an odd tone in J.B. voice that Ryan couldn’t place, but he had more pressing things to worry about at the moment.
“How in hell are we getting’ through the bastard door without bringing half the muties in with us?”
“I thought it might come up, so I made us a little door knocker,” J.B. replied. “Wedge yourself between the pipe and the wall, eye closed, mouth open.”
Ryan knew what was coming, and scrambled to brace himself into the narrow space between the cold gray wall and the colder green pipe. Forcing his body into the crevice, he secured himself firmly enough so that he could also cover his left ear, which would suffer the most from what was about to go down.
“Ready?” J.B. called.
“Ready.”
“Fire in the hole!”
Ryan squeezed his eye shut and opened his mouth to equalize the coming shock wave. A few seconds passed before another thunderclap erupted in the corridor, and he felt an invisible force press against him for a moment, right before his entire left side was splattered with sticky wetness.
“Go!”
Without looking, Ryan dropped his legs from the pipe, trusting J.B.’s skill to have cleared a path. Even before his feet had touched the ground, his SIG-Sauer filled his fist, ready to chill anything that might still come at him.