“Right. Soon as I give you the word.”
Ryan gripped the P-226 blaster in his right hand and crouched on the floor, slightly to one side of the door.
“Ready?”
“Go,” Ryan said.
Nothing happened.
He glanced sideways, seeing that the Armorer was wrestling with the green lever, trying to move it upward.
“Nothing,” J.B. panted. “Like the mechanism’s totally jammed.”
“Means that they’re somewhere on the other side of it and it jammed after they left this area.” He paused, thinking aloud. “Or it could also mean that it’s been jammed for countless years and they never jumped here. Fireblast! Why can’t things take an easy turn for once?”
“Manual override?”
“Is there one? Not always one.”
“Sure. Small panel at the side here.”
The handle that could be used to wind up the sec door was only six inches long, folded back out of sight. To lift the enormously heavy weight of the massive bombproof door, it had to be linked into an intricate system of gears and counterweights.
J.B. flicked open the lid of the panel, unfolding the brass handle and setting it carefully in place. He gave it an experimental couple of turns, and the door trembled and moved upward a fraction of an inch.
“Looking good,” Ryan commented. “Take it away.”
“Brilliant machinery,” J.B. said as he started to turn the handle. “Makes you wonder at the wonder of it. Some things they knew how to build in those days.”
Ryan flattened himself on the floor, ready to squint out beneath the slowly ascending door. If this redoubt was like the majority of others that they’d visited, there would likely be a passage outside that would ultimately lead into the rest of the redoubt and then on into the open air.
Raising the sec door by hand was immensely slow and laborious. After thirty seconds it wasn’t much more than an inch off the concrete floor.
Ryan held the SIG-Sauer ready, laying his face flat, squinting under the door with his one ice-blue eye-staring straight into a pair of dark brown eyes, less than a foot away.
Chapter Four
“You stupe kid! I might’ve put a full-metal-jacket round through your damn-fool head!” an angry Ryan gritted after J.B. had finally raised the door and the companions were together again.
Dean Cawdor shuffled his feet. “Sorry, Dad. It’s just that as soon as the door started to move, we all figured that it had to be you and J.B. there.”
“Suppose it had been one of those Japanese samurai guys we ran across a while back?”
“Well I didn’t think”
“Right. You didn’t think. Might have had a sword blade through your eye, Dean.”
“Suppose so. Sorry, Dad.”
“Come on, lover,” Krysty said, putting her arms around Ryan, hugging him tightly. “Main thing is that we’re all safe together. What happened back there?”
J.B. answered the question, holding hands with Mildred. “Tried to burn us out. Flooded the complex with gasoline. Didn’t quite make it. We jumped.”
“Both look dreadful,” Jak stated, running his long fingers through his mane of stark white hair. “Bad jump?”
“One of the worst.” Ryan shook his head. “Still feel like I’ve been run through the wringer.”
“The natives didn’t get in after you?” Doc asked. “After we deprived them of their godhead, there was some serious grief. They seemed unusually persistent in their efforts. I believe that the poor wretches would gladly have given anything to have laid a hand on you.”
Ryan laughed. “Well, they came close to laying a hand on us, Doc. But that was all. Just one hand, and it’s lying out by the gateway door.”
BOTH RYAN AND J.B. were still weak from the effects of the jump, and they elected to wait in the control area for an hour or so until they felt better.
Dean was eager to explain how they’d opened the sec door while waiting for Ryan and the Armorer to come along. It had worked perfectly well that time, and everyone had gone out into the corridor beyond.
“Then we all heard this harsh snappin’ noise, like a half-track breaking, you know? And the whole door started to move on down.”
“Falling?”
“No, Dad, not like free-fall. That would’ve been a real triple-hot pipe. Start a quake clean across Deathlands if it had crashed down.”
“So it came slowly?”
The boy sniffed. “Not real slowly. More sort of not fast. I don’t know the right words for it.”
“Well, when you’ve gotten some learning, then you’ll know all the right words, son.”
“Sure. I know that. Anyway, the control lever, the green one, didn’t work it and there was no override outside in the passage. So we was fucked.”
Krysty had been listening. “That’s not the right thing to say, Dean.”
“Sorry. You mean saying ‘fucked,’ Krysty?”
“I mean that. Partly. Also, you shouldn’t say that we ‘was fucked.’ Bad grammar. Say we were fucked.”
Ryan grinned. “Better still, don’t say fucked at all, Dean. Not until you’re a little older.”
SINCE THE CONTROLS WERE so obviously shot, Ryan decided that it was safest to leave the sec door raised three-quarters of the way toward the ceiling.
“Someone could get in at the gateway,” Mildred warned, “leaving us in deepest ordure.”
“Have to take that chance.” Ryan sniffed the air. “Still smells like nobody’s been in here for a hundred years. You didn’t find anything interesting?”
Krysty answered him. “Never got to do any exploring. Like Dean said, the door came down too quickly. Good job that you and J.B. stayed behind. If we’d all been together, we’d have been trapped on the wrong side of making another jump. And we don’t have the nuke-missile power to blast the sec door open.”
“You feel any signs of life anywhere else in this redoubt, lover?”
She shook her head, her mane of fiery hair dancing across her shoulders. “Nothing. Be surprised if I’m wrong. Like Uncle Tyas McCann used to say back in Harmony ville, feels deader than a beaver hat.”
Ryan whistled softly between his teeth. “Then we might as well get moving, friends. Let’s go ahead on orange and we’ll see what we see.”
Orange meant having the option to draw your blaster if you wanted. Red meant there was no choice.
Even on green it didn’t mean you walked free as air without paying attention.
You never moved carelessly in Deathlands.
Ryan led his friends out in a casual skirmish line, leaving the gateway behind. The passage was fifteen feet wide, with concrete walls that rose vertically and then curved in toward the arched ceiling, at least twelve feet above their heads. There were sections of neon strip lights at intervals, casting a ghostly pallor over everyone. About one in four had failed over the years, but there was still plenty of light in the tunnel.
Every forty or fifty yards small sec cameras were fixed at ceiling height, some with tiny ruby lights showing that they were still dutifully obeying their programmer’s instructions and sending pictures back to some hidden control center.
The setup they found was similar to many of the other redoubts that they’d visited. The gateway was located at the farthest end of the line. To the left of the sec door the corridor ran along for less than fifty featureless yards before ending in a wall of solid stone. There was the familiar feeling of being deep below the earth.
Ryan strode along to the right, his boot heels clicking on the cold stone. Krysty was second, followed by Dean. Doc was fourth, his knees creaking at every step, while Jak padded silently at his heels. Then came Mildred, walking together with J.B. at the rear.
There was no sign of life anywhere in the redoubt.
The farther they went along the featureless passageway, the more lights had failed. But there had been no side corridors or doors on either side.
The corridor seemed to wind ceaselessly around to the right and to climb slowly.
“It’s like being inside the shell of a snail,” Dean observed. “Been walking miles.”
“About a mile and a quarter,” J.B. corrected him, checking his wrist chron.
“Certainly going up and up and around and around.” Jak shook his head. “Where we finish up?”
“Inside our own rectal orifices if we go around many more times,” Mildred commented. “I swear that I’m starting to get dizzy. This layout remind you of anything, Doc?”
“I don’t believe so. Though the simile proposed by young Master Cawdor was unusually accurate. Around and around the little wheel goes, and where it stops, nobody knows. What does it remind you of, Dr. Wyeth?”
“Place in New York. A big art gallery called the Guggenheim after the guy who paid for it. Got the same kind of shape. You go up to the top and stroll down and around.” She stopped walking for a moment. “Thoughts like that are bad, aren’t they? Brings back a tiny part of what was lost. Last time I went there with my Uncle Josh, Dad’s younger brother, they had a beautiful exhibition of paintings by Chagall.”