by James Axler
“Think you can handle one on your own?” Jon asked.
J.B. nodded. “Nothing to it,” he said. “Like field stripping a blaster. Just gotta remember where all the pieces go.”
Jon looked at him askance but said nothing.
* * *
IT WAS ALMOST midday by the time the beekeeping crew was ready to check on the outside hives. The morning’s work had been continuous, but it was nothing on the physically demanding work that J.B. had been engaged in at the construction sites. The group had stopped for a midmorning snack of sweetened tea made from the leaves of one of the local shrubs, and some dried fruit, though J.B. had found the tea too sweet for his tastes.
As the sun strived toward its zenith, Jon led the group to the main gates and confirmed their duties with the Melissas who stood guard there. J.B. knew both of the women who were on duty, Adele and Linda, recognizing them from his first day in the mountains.
J.B. watched as the gates were drawn back, feeling a strong sense of anticipation as the greenery beyond came into view for the first time in a little more than a week. He eyed the mechanism of the gate, noting how the cantilevers functioned, storing the knowledge away.
Outside, man-made beehives lined the walk up to the settlement wall. Painted white, they were poised like wooden sheep grazing in the long grass.
J.B. followed Jon and the others as they went to the nearest of the hives and began their work.
J.B. worked for a while, taking things slowly and keeping an eye on the sentry post atop the ville gates. The sec women seemed relaxed, which was understandable—there was no enemy out here; tranquillity reigned.
Once he was certain that the Melissas weren’t watching him, J.B. left the hive he was tending and spoke with Doc. “I’m going to duck out,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t know how long I’ll be. You figure you can cover for me if Jon starts getting antsy?”
Doc looked sternly at J.B. “I hope you know what you are doing,” he said.
“Yeah, me, too,” J.B. quipped. Then he went to talk to Jon, explaining that he was prone to headaches sometimes and that maybe the sun had got to him.
“You need to go back inside?” Jon asked, genuinely concerned. “Get some medication?”
J.B. held up his hand to stall the man. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I usually find I can walk it off. I’ll take an early lunch and clear my head.”
Jon agreed that sounded like the thing to do, and J.B. turned and began to stride back toward the gates. It wouldn’t do to play his hand too early, he knew. Walking a straight line to the redoubt would attract attention; he had to make this look convincing.
While Jon, Thomas and Doc continued to work, J.B. took a slow, meandering stroll and along the ville wall, kicking at the long grass and occasionally pushing his hat back to rub at his head. Jon asked how he was feeling just once, and before long he had been all but forgotten about. It was then that J.B. changed direction and headed toward the trees that littered the east edge of the valley. It was green there and had plenty of shade—it looked just the kind of place a man with a migraine might choose to sit quietly and rest.
J.B. checked back over his shoulder just once, trusting his instincts that he wasn’t being followed and not wanting to give Jon or Tom any opening to catch his eye and call him back. Then he was gone, disappearing among the trees, picking up his pace the moment he was out of sight.
Back at the hives, lunch arrived and Jon and his team took their break.
“What happened to your bud?” Thomas asked as he bit into a sandwich of freshly baked bread and honey-roasted boar.
“He gets these headaches from time to time,” Doc said, backing up J.B.’s lie on cue. “I imagine he has found himself a shady spot to lie down somewhere. Probably fallen asleep.”
“He’s missing out,” Jon said through a mouthful of sandwich. “Let’s save him some boar.”
“He’ll appreciate that,” Doc said, biting into his own sandwich. There was no question that it tasted delicious.
* * *
TAKING A CIRCUITOUS route, J.B. made his way down the slope toward the redoubt. As he got closer, he began to recognize the contours of the land and the positions of the trees from the first time he was there.
Up close, the redoubt looked like a squared-off concrete arch set in a mound of grass, the metal doors wedged half-open and stained with moss and mold, elaborate scaffolding around them. Plants grew at the top of the mound, creepers hanging down over the doors in ineffectual camouflage.
J.B. slowed his pace, slipped behind a tree and eyed the open doorway from forty feet away. There was a figure there, dressed in white and curved like a woman. A Melissa.
That didn’t come as much surprise. He had observed the engineering crews leave at dawn on several mornings, usually three or four people accompanied by two Melissas. It tended to be women who went out, but he’d seen one man go with the crew on the ninth day, carrying a huge crate of supplies—packhorse and general hack presumably.
J.B. hunkered down, preparing to wait.
* * *
IT TOOK ALMOST four hours before J.B. saw any movement from the redoubt. By then, he had been sitting behind the tree so long that his backside had gone numb; but he didn’t shift, aware that every unnecessary movement risked attracting the attention of that guard on the door.
The Melissa emerged without preamble, stepping from the redoubt entrance in a swish of white robes. She was the black-haired one he first met—what was her name? Nancy?
Nancy was followed by two other women who were dressed in plain clothes and carried toolkits that were speckled with paint and oil.
J.B. waited, watching as the group gathered just outside the redoubt entrance. They stood around awhile, chatting just loud enough that their voices carried to J.B. but their words did not. He listened, hiding in the shadows, resisting the urge to keep watching.
Shortly, the tone of the conversation became louder, and J.B. figured someone else had joined the women. Warily, the Armorer peered out from behind his tree. Two more women had joined the group, one of them the blond-haired Melissa called Phyllida. J.B. watched, hand over his brow, masking the glint of the sunlight from his glasses.
The group talked for a minute more while two of the women worked on the redoubt doors, sealing them manually from the outside with a crisscross of tied webbing across the scaffold. Then all five women began to march into the woods, heading back in the direction of Heaven Falls. J.B. shifted position and watched them go. He felt certain they had to have finished their shift, that they were headed home for the day. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon, which meant this work crew would be back home by four, leaving no time for another crew to take over the job, unless they ran a night shift. They’d likely pulled a long shift in the bleak, bomb-scarred interior—little wonder they packed up early. It was a good bet that the redoubt was shut up for the day. J.B. hoped so.
Once he was certain they were gone, J.B. moved from cover and hurried down the slope to the redoubt doors. The doors had been hitched together using some baling wire and strong thread made of canvas. J.B. examined the way the wire had been tied, slipped one end out of a hook that had been forced into the concrete arch and unwound it. In a minute, he had the cord loose and could get to the doors.
J.B. pushed the heel of his hand into the ridge between the doors and shoved, gritting his teeth as he put his shoulder muscles to work. Had he thought about it, he might have brought some tools, but despite his preparations he hadn’t, so it was all down to brute force.
The door groaned on ancient tracks before finally parting a few inches, enough that J.B. could get both hands inside and get a better grip. Then the Armorer steadied himself with spread legs and shoved again, harder this time, until the door inched backward. A moment later the redoubt was open enough that J.B. could step inside.
Within, the redoubt was just the same as he remembered it. Dirty concrete walls with metal plates removed and leaned upright again
st the leftmost wall, a thin layer of black mold reaching along the floor and up the walls to about the height of his hips.
J.B. hurried through the open room, heading for the corridor that led deeper into the redoubt proper. Overhead lights fired up automatically, sensing the movement.
* * *
IT TOOK J.B. close to four minutes to navigate the redoubt and find his way to the mat-trans chamber. The redoubt was unmanned; no surprise Melissas waiting to challenge an intruder. J.B. had been confident there wouldn’t be—he’d been watching these people the past few days, knew their routines. “Routine will be the death of them,” he told himself as he entered the empty control room.
The aisle of desks had been cleared of bomb debris, and shone under the artificial lights. Cracks still scored across the walls, but the dust and dirt had been swept away and a broken section of the flooring had been fenced in using some boxes to prevent anyone tripping on it. The comps were either dead or switched off, but J.B. could see evidence where someone had jury-rigged a new power source. That meant the control room should be operational at the flick of that switch.
J.B. walked to the mat-trans chamber and peered inside. The armaglass had been patched and resealed; ugly smears of a substance resembling putty ran across the space where the glass had been damaged in the bomb blast. Inside, the floor had been patched, too, damaged tiles replaced with new ones that had been located somewhere in the redoubt, maybe plucked off the walls of another room. Smoke damage blackened the back wall, and J.B. could see where the bomb had gone off. But someone had made a good effort at repairing everything, and checking it over he was pretty sure the door could be sealed shut, which meant that if the mat-trans was operational, it would be able to transfer people and gear to another redoubt.
J.B. stood, studying the repair work. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make things right again, someone who wanted an operational mat-trans that could be used when it was needed.
The Trai had rebuilt this thing, which meant they planned to use it. But what did they need it for? Where were they planning to go? In J.B.’s experience, the mat-trans technology was too unpredictable to target a site. He and his companions had used them to travel across the nuke-scarred remains of the United States and to a few places outside, but they had never known where they would end up. Either the Trai had figured out a way to set the destination, or they didn’t care where they went—like explorers.
That didn’t make sense, either. The Trai had everything they needed here. Fertile land that yielded abundant food and a safe location that had strong natural protection. The Regina had said something at the rally about taking light out into the darkness or some such hogwash, J.B. recalled, but using the mat-trans still seemed awfully random. Who knew where they’d end up?
Unless maybe that was the point of it all, he thought. To end up anywhere. To end up everywhere.
“Shit,” J.B. cursed as the realization dawned on him. He had told Ryan that they could be training an army up here in the mountains. If that was the case, then here was the transport for that army, a way to shunt troops out across the Deathlands and to chill all opposition before they even knew what hit them.
Just then J.B. heard a noise behind him and realized that he wasn’t alone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There were two Melissas standing in the doorway to the anteroom. One was Phyllida, their leader, and the other was Nancy, her black hair piled high atop her head. Behind them, the three other women were just filing in.
J.B. watched from where he stood inside the mat-trans chamber, the light through the glass painting the Melissas’ white robes red-violet.
“What are you doing here?” Phyllida asked, locking J.B. with a fierce glare.
“Got lost,” J.B. responded automatically.
“You’re not allowed in here,” Nancy stated.
“You broke in,” Phyllida added. “We saw where you forced the door.”
“I came to see what you girls were up to in here,” J.B. replied innocently. “Did some good work.”
“You’re not allowed in here,” Nancy repeated. “No one can be here without the Regina’s permission.”
“Yeah, about that,” he said. “I thought I had permission.”
“You don’t have permission,” Phyllida snapped, striding toward J.B.
J.B.’s hand slipped behind his jacket as he spoke, reaching for the sheathed Tekna blade. “Mebbe I got muddled up somewhere,” he admitted.
“You didn’t get muddled, Mr. Dix,” Phyllida said. “You broke in here.”
“Well,” J.B. said, his right hand gripping the hilt of his hidden knife, “chalk that down to curiosity. I haven’t touched anything. I’ll leave now.”
“No, you will stay exactly where you are,” Phyllida commanded, “with your hands up where I can see them.”
J.B. inwardly cursed, but he removed his fingers from the hilt and raised his hands. “Look, this is just a mistake.” He tried to bluff. “I thought the redoubt wasn’t in use. I was mistaken.”
“On your knees,” Phyllida said. She was standing now in the open doorway to the mat-trans chamber, blocking J.B.’s only escape route.
“You’re real wound tight, aren’t you?” J.B. said, making no attempt to obey her order. “Let’s just call this a mix-up and leave it at that, okay?”
Phyllida moved then, a blur of motion, her white robes trailing behind her like the afterimage of a torch in the night. J.B. had no time to respond; he tried to step out of her path but she was on him before he had even taken the step, the knife-flat edge of her right hand sweeping through the air and slamming against the side of his neck with a crack.
J.B. staggered back, groaning as pain shot through his neck and shoulder. “What th—?”
Phyllida followed by kicking up and out, striking J.B. high in the chest and knocking him back against the far wall.
J.B. grunted again, sagging there, neither standing nor falling. “Look...” he began.
But the white-robed woman was on him again, swooping at him like a bird of prey, her outstretched arms crossing through the air in rapid blurs before meeting against either side of J.B.’s skull with a blow that sounded like a thunderclap.
J.B. staggered again, but with nowhere left to fall he was trapped against the armaglass wall as the Melissa attacked him. She was moving fast—too fast to be real. J.B. could barely process it, could not follow the speed with which each strike came. He perceived the next one as it began, the blonde woman’s tanned left leg kicking up in a billow of white skirts, but before he could block it the blow had struck him in the gut, driving the wind out of him in a painful blurt.
J.B.’s vision swam, but Phyllida kept coming, smacking at him with little blows, each one perfectly placed to hurt him, the attacks striking different parts of his head and body, moving and exaggerating the pain so that it felt as if his whole body was on fire.
The Armorer slumped back against the wall, tasting the blood in his mouth, feeling wetness on his face. The Melissa was standing over him, getting ready to strike again, her robes billowing around her like breakers on the beach.
“No one is to interfere here,” Phyllida said, her words hard to hear over the sound of rushing blood coming to J.B.’s ears as though through a broken speaker.
J.B. watched Phyllida move toward him again, tanned skin and white robes blending together in a swirl of gold and white. He felt the blow against his kidneys, figured it for a kick, yelping in pain. Phyllida was saying something else, but J.B. couldn’t seem to hear it or to process it; he just knew it was about chilling him, he felt it had to be.
The blond-haired woman swam in and out of J.B.’s whirling vision as he lay on the floor of the mat-trans. He could hear her bare feet slapping against the tiles, could feel the way those movements shuddered through the floor.
The Armorer’s hand moved, snatching for the knife hilt once more at the small of his back. As the Melissa closed on him, J.B. whipped out the Tekna c
ombat knife and thrust it upward, driving it not at the woman but at the space he thought she would occupy in the next nanosecond, the space she wasn’t when he had begun the thrust.
There was a scream accompanied by the heavy feel of the weight against J.B.’s knife. But he was thinking slowly, struggling to process everything and to just remain conscious. His next move was automatic. He slashed with the knife, pulling it from left to right as though wiping grime from a window, pushing hard against the hilt at the same time with all the force he could muster.
There was another shriek and then a gurgle, and J.B. felt the rush of hot liquid wash over his hand where it held the knife. It was only then that he pulled the knife free.
The woman in the white robes slumped forward, crashing to her knees on the tiled floor, a kind of ticking-bubbling sound coming from her throat. J.B. felt more than saw her as she sagged against him, and he shoved her away with his eyes closed, forcing himself up to stand.
Someone was screaming. Several someones, their voices mingling like some awful choir held in agony. J.B. took a deep breath through his nose and let it out through clenched teeth as he opened his eyes. Phyllida was lying in a pool of blood on the mat-trans floor, her mouth wide and eyes open, the whites turned pink.
J.B. moved forward, forcing one foot in front of the other, agony coursing through him with every step. Phyllida had beaten him hard, sending spikes of pain through his whole body. He focused past it, gazing at the doorway to the control room with the blood-slick knife still in his hand.
“Get back, everyone,” Nancy said, placing herself protectively in front of the three engineers. J.B. guessed they had been taking a break when he had seen them exit and lock up, or maybe they had come back after forgetting something. It didn’t matter now; he had been injured, and he had to get out of there quick before they regrouped and turned on him.
Nancy glared at J.B. as he staggered forward.
“Get out of my way, girl,” J.B. warned.