by James Axler
J.B. was already standing out there, his hands bound and his hat crooked on his head. When he saw Ryan emerge from the other cell he smiled grimly. “Good to know the gang’s all here,” he said. “My cell was bastard cold. Is Doc all right?”
Before Ryan could reply, Doc emerged from the cell, ducking his head under the lintel and smoothing his frockcoat. “That’s quite all right, Ryan, I can answer for myself. My night’s slumber was as restive as one would expect,” he explained as one of the sec men bound his hands loosely, “but this old body of mine is not ready to give up quite yet.”
Once they had been bound, the three men were led down a series of icy corridors to the exterior of the glacierlike ville, using slopes and occasional ladders to descend to ground level. Once there, they joined other gathered prisoners, including Jak and Ricky, who waited in a pen overseen by three armed guards dressed in furs. Jak looked exhausted to Ryan’s eye, and his face displayed a line of nasty purple bruises running from brow to jaw where their captors had beaten him the night before.
Catching Ryan’s eye, Jak shrugged indifferently. “Looks worse than is,” he assured the one-eyed man.
Before long the group was marched away from the ville. There were thirty prisoners—all male—in the party and they were guarded by five men, three of whom rode on the backs of mutated caribou, their curling antlers daubed with bright paint in tribal design.
The sky was still a dark shade that Ryan took to be dawn, though later he would come to realize that the sun never really rose in these parts at this time of the year, leaving the days a sort of grim twilight even at the height of noon. The sec men didn’t bother to explain where they were being taken, but one of Ricky’s and Jak’s cellmates, a pasty-faced, drawn-looking man who had been incarcerated in the ville for several weeks, enlightened them.
“There’s an old bomb site just to the east of here,” the prisoner began, “close to where one of those earthshaker missiles came down, I heard. Place was an army base once, before the nukecaust turned it into shit. Right now the site looks pretty much what you’d expect, but there’s still some good stuff to be found there, blasters and so on. These ice demons been pushing us deeper and deeper into the ruins, seeing what shit we can scavenge up.”
Doc tsked with surprise. “A mining operation,” he said in a low voice. “We’re miners, indentured laboring miners.”
Ryan shot him a warning look. “At least we’re alive, Doc,” he said. “Till we can get to Krysty and Mildred, that’s the best we can hope for.”
Doc nodded apologetically. “Of course, I quite forgot myself.”
As he spoke, one of the guards leaned over from his caribou steed and lightly rapped Doc across the back of his head with his rifle butt. “You, be quiet.”
Chastised, Doc fell to silence and continued to trek out eastward with the other prisoners under the instruction of the dour-faced sec men. Snow littered the ground in sickly little patches like a rash amid the frozen soil, great untouched swathes of white running in a long line where a frozen tributary of the Nome River lay sleeping.
Ricky sidled up to join Ryan and J.B., his head turned against the chill wind. He checked for a moment, making sure none of the sec team was watching before turning to Ryan with a cunning smile on his face. “It’s okay, Ryan,” he whispered. “I have a plan to get us out of here. Just follow my lead.”
Before Ryan could reply, a sec man shouted something at the group and they were forced to thin out again. Ryan didn’t like it. Ricky had only recently joined the group, and was inexperienced. The kid had the arrogance of youth, too, which was fine in its place. But when you had a team to worry about, going off half-cocked could sure as shooting end up with someone chilled. Ryan made certain to find time during their forty-minute march in the bitter temperatures to instruct J.B. and Doc to keep an eye on Ricky. J.B. had been with Ryan right from the start, and Ricky seemed to idolize the man. Putting the two together made a certain amount of sense, at least until they reached their destination.
* * *
HAD ANY MAN in the group of prisoners had the frame of reference to think it, they might have wondered if they were looking at a Salvador Dali painting brought to startling life. A great basin had been carved into the land, runnels of snow streaking across its surface as it stretched three miles across into the distance. The giant pit had sunk into the earth by at least half a mile, trees and the remains of buildings clinging to its sloped sides like pus on the head of a popped boil.
Beyond the vast indentation in the earth, the air in the distance seemed to shimmer like a mirage, occasional flecks of color running across the dark sky. Ryan wondered if these were the fabled Northern Lights or if they might be something else. So much of Earth’s environment had become scragged by the nuclear exchange that it was often impossible to judge what was going on in the atmosphere anymore.
The thick tail of a missile poked out from the center of the basin, a metal tube painted yellow and black with four fins studded equidistant around its sides. The fins tapered down toward the buried front of the missile, disappearing in a mound of snow and churned-up soil. A radial pattern of cracked earth spread from this epicenter, thick lines of broken soil running outward like cracks on a windshield. And around this, a mining colony had been set up—a great structure of underground tunnels held in place by metal scaffolding and thick wedges of wood, some of them still discernible as the tree trunks they had started life as.
Three sec men waited at the main entrance where it burrowed underground, wrapped in furs with blasters resting on their laps or beside them. They looked up as the group appeared, and one of them shuffled over on wide-soled snowshoes.
“About time you got here,” he said. “We’re freezing our balls off out here.”
“What’s the shift haul?” one of the mounted guards of Ryan’s group asked, leaping down from his mutated steed.
“Not great,” the man in the snowshoes said regretfully. “New seam over here—” he pointed “—but we’re still trying to shore up the walls.”
The dismounted rider jabbed back at the group of prisoners with his thumb. “We’ve got some new muscle. We’ll get to it, see what’s inside,” he boasted.
The man with the snowshoes looked up at that, eyeing the prisoners more carefully for the first time. “Some of these slaves are new?” he asked with a broad smile. “Hearing that almost warms my frozen balls. Maybe we will get a decent haul out of this dump before sundown.”
Overhearing that, J.B. eyed the dark sky with disapproval and leaned over to whisper to Ryan. “You reckon sundown will be any time this week?”
Ryan smiled at the comment despite himself.
The prisoners were walked into the gaping mine shaft and led, under armed guard, through the underground complex. The place was shored up with creaking wooden poles and metal struts, a series of dim gas lamps poised along the low ceiling at steady intervals. The burning lamps made the air stink, but they were too widely spaced to provide good illumination. As such, the line of prisoners-turned-miners had to pick their way slowly along the uneven floor of the mine shaft while the sec men berated them and hurried them along.
Spreading from a single entry point, a number of mine shafts had been dug deep into the earth beneath the sunken basin. As Ryan and his colleagues moved through them, they saw the walls had been shored up with metal plating scavenged from old military vehicles and packaging, the familiar olive-green paint scuffed almost to oblivion, but still visible to the trained eye. J.B. noted a fragment of stencilled lettering similar to that he had spotted on their arrival at the redoubt the night before. He had to tilt his head to read it, but when he did so he laughed. Upside down, the stencil read This Way Up.
After a couple of minutes walk through the underground passageway, they reached a fork and the prisoners were split into two groups. Ryan and Doc found themselves among the group following a wide pathway leading to the right of the underground development while J.B. was tossed in with
a group of twelve prisoners that included Ricky and Jak. He hurried to join them, but one of the guards pulled him back.
“What’s the rush, speedy monkey?” the man taunted. “You’ll get where you’re going, just have some patience.”
It rapidly became evident to J.B. that the mines had been burrowed into an existing military complex, and he suspected that it had already been underground before the subsidence resulting from the missile attack. Some of the original corridors still existed among them shored-up mine shafts like ghosts of another era.
The group was split again shortly thereafter, leaving two groups of six captives, each group guarded by a lone sec man. Their guard was armed with a compact pistol that he displayed proudly in his belt, trusting he needed nothing else to keep them in line. He was probably right—most of the captives were worn down from days or weeks in the frozen cells of the ice fortress, and all of them had their wrists loosely bound with cord or metal links that granted enough freedom of movement for them to work but would still hinder them from overpowering their captors.
J.B. eyed the sec man’s blaster, recognizing the weapon from his vast catalog of knowledge as a Colt Anaconda, a vicious six-shot pistol with plenty of punch. If he could get his hands on that then mebbe...
The mismatched party moved on, passing caved-in storerooms that had been stripped bare, the last of their broken contents strewed across the floor or heaped in piles along the walls. The only reason to come down here was to find weaponry, J.B. knew, and it looked like these ice pirates had been scavenging this site for years. No wonder that just about everyone in the ice ville had been armed to the teeth. They had the twenty-first-century equivalent of a munitions factory here, a fully stocked museum of death that they could raid at any time.
Little wonder then that they were top dog in the local territory—who would stand a chance against a heavily armed ville?
* * *
RYAN AND DOC meanwhile had been placed with a larger group of prisoners. Within a few minutes, however, the prisoners had been split into smaller groups and, accompanied by one sec man per group, were led into different sections of the underground complex. Ryan made sure to stay near Doc. It wouldn’t do for them to become any more split up than they already were.
A five-minute walk brought them to a hollowed-out chamber whose low, curved ceiling echoed their footsteps. Six people were in the group now, including Ryan and Doc, along with a sec man dressed in thick furs and armed with a Kalashnikov longblaster and a Smith & Wesson he had rammed into his waistband beneath the furs.
“Now you work,” the sec man spit. “Find ammunition, yes?”
One of the other prisoners spoke up and Ryan recognized him as part of the group that had been picked up along with his team outside the redoubt the night before. Despite the cold, the man was sweating profusely, his eyes wide with distress. “H-how much?” he stuttered. “How much do you expect us to find?”
Ryan looked around the vast chamber, assessing their surroundings. The man had a point. Even in the dim light of the wide-spaced lamps, it was clear that this storage area had been plumbed almost dry. The overall effect was more like a dump now than a military warehouse. There were stacks of crates and all of them had been broken open and emptied, many so carelessly that they were now little more than firewood. The floor was uneven with debris strewed everywhere, including ragged clothes and a mound of electronics—circuit boards and wiring whose copper lines glinted as they caught the illumination of the nearest gas lamp.
“You bring me your weight,” the sec man said, “head to toe. You carry as much as you can, the rest we come back for. You bring less than this, you don’t eat tonight. Clear?”
Grimly, the prisoner nodded.
The sec man eyed Ryan’s broad shoulders. “You, tough guy, huh?”
Ryan didn’t answer.
“Over here,” the man instructed. “And you,” he added, indicating Doc.
The storage area was large enough to house half a football field, but a great chunk of the ceiling had caved in over time. Some sections were propped up using thick metal posts, and Ryan guessed it had been backbreaking work shoring the roof up like that.
While the other prisoners got to work exploring the piles of junk in the vast room, Ryan and Doc were brought over to a stack of the metal poles waiting to be added at the edges of the ruins. The sec man pointed to them, indicating the tools that had been left there. There were two shovels along with a hammer, thick rivets for the scaffold poles and metal clasps that would lock them in place.
“You dig the shit back,” the guard explained. “Once you have enough space, you prop ceiling up so we can search here. You unnerstand?”
Ryan nodded. Backbreaking work was right, and it would be made all the more wearying by the fact that he and Doc were still shackled at the wrists.
Grimly, Ryan and Doc each picked up a shovel and started sifting away the clustered junk.
While the six prisoners worked, the guard sat back on what appeared to be a scarred plastic lawn chair that he had propped near the doorway. Ryan slyly looked around, assuring himself that it was the only way in and out of the room.
“This is an impossible task,” Doc grumbled as he raked away a wedge of debris. The debris appeared to be a congealed amalgamation of concrete and metal plate, melded together in the white heat of the explosion that had ripped through the complex.
“Impossible or not,” Ryan told him, “we’re all out of options right now. For now our hands are tied. Literally in this case.”
Doc nodded grimly, glancing to the lounging sec man in the lawn chair. The man had the Kalashnikov braced across his knees as he leaned back in the seat, pushing the chair back so that it balanced on the back legs, the front legs no longer touching the ground.
“I can feel something here,” Doc whispered when he was sure the sec man wasn’t watching them.
Ryan shot him a look. “A blaster?”
“No.” Doc shook his head. “Not here—but here,” he said, indicating his skull. “I have the strangest sensation that Emily has cooked me dinner tonight.”
Emily Tanner, Doc’s wife, had been dead for two hundred years.
“Snap out of it, Doc,” Ryan ordered. “I can’t have you going to la-la land on me right now.” He had seen the old man drift in and out of lucidness before now. The man was plagued by his fractured memories, his brutal journey through time leaving his mind sometimes out of sync with reality. Their situation had to have triggered this latest bout. Ryan could only hope that Doc could keep it together long enough for them all to get out of this hellhole alive.
Doc nodded, shoveling another payload of detritus out of the way, feeling the muscles working in his shoulders. But in his mind, something seemed almost to be calling from the shadows, not a voice perhaps but another sense, a familiar smell or a sound he had not heard in two hundred years.
* * *
THE DAY PASSED in grim exertion. J.B., Jak and Ricky had been set to work sorting small caches of ammunition, single bullets that had been removed from their clips or strips in some forgotten past. There were three other prisoners working with them in a dimly lit cavern, its walls still scarred with ancient, peeling paint that hadn’t been altered in a century. Together, the group perched on a line of crates and formed a little production line while their captor oversaw from outside the doorway.
The sec man couldn’t imagine a threat from these prisoners. They were in a room with ammunition but no blasters—how much threat could they pose?
It was hard work, boring in its repetition and made uncomfortable because of the claustrophobic conditions of the cramped, warrenlike cave. Around the three-hour mark, another sec man came down the tunnellike corridor to relieve his companion. They spoke in a guttural combination of Russian and English, clear enough that J.B. could make sense of it if he listened. Their conversation was of no import, he decided, just the usual young man bragging about sexual feats that likely neither of them had actually a
chieved.
While the sec men were engaged in their conversation, J.B. leaned across to Ricky and Jak, speaking in hushed tones. “You said you had a plan, Ricky?”
The kid nodded. Then, glancing around to ensure they weren’t being watched, he pulled out something that had been hidden inside his jacket lining. It was the sheathed hunting blade, the one he had lifted from the guard he had argued with outside of the glacier-like ville.
J.B. made a face. “That isn’t going to do us a shitload of good against these bastards,” he said, shaking his head. “You never heard the expression ‘bringing a knife to a blaster-fight’?”
Ricky smiled. “We’ll wait until the other guy disappears,” he said, using a tilt his head to indicate the two sec men. “I figure if we move fast enough we can take out one guard. Me and Jak will disarm him while you get the others moving.”
J.B. looked over at the other prisoners with whom they shared the production line. They looked dead inside, all their spirit gone. It would be a challenge getting these half-starved wretches motivated. They had to be cajoled not to simply soil themselves where they sat.
J.B. turned back to Ricky and Jak, sitting opposite him on the production line. “You have an exit figured?”
“Same way we came,” Ricky said. “At least we know it gets us back to the surface.”
“There’s going to be guards that way,” J.B. warned. “Likely a lot of them, too, I reckon.”
“I reckon so, too,” Ricky agreed. “But we’ll have the blaster by then.”
J.B. glanced at the two men outside the room, surreptitiously eyeing their blasters. They were still engaged in their conversation about the sluts of the ville. “Best you’re going to get there is a six shot,” J.B. averred. “Not exactly ideal.”
Outside the cavern, the two sec men had finished their conversation and one of them came striding back into the room. “No talking,” he snapped, running a paw over a line of bullets that had been sorted and tossing them to the floor. “You! Start over. And stay quiet.”