Ryan looked at J.B. and pointed at the ceiling. “You know what to do, J.B.,” he whispered.
As the one-eyed man started to step out from behind cover, J.B. stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Nah, let me do this one,” he whispered back. He handed Ryan his M-4000 shotgun. “It’ll make us even for all the times you’ve saved my sorry butt.”
“Better screw on your hat,” Ryan said, softly racking the pump gun’s slide.
The Armorer grimly adjusted his fedora, then said to the others, “Everybody get ready to yell…”
His hands up, J.B. stepped into the line of fire, ducking under the archway. “Now, take it easy,” he said to the tall, backlit figures just inside the cave entrance. “You know we can’t hurt you. You don’t have to prove anything more to us. We’re giving up. See?”
He dropped to his knees in the sand and held his arms lifted high over his head.
Black figures approached with their laser rifles pointed at his head. One of them came within ten feet of him before it stopped. “Where are the others?” it said.
“Yahhh!” J.B. replied, bellowing at the top of his lungs.
“Yahhh!” Ryan hollered as he swung out from behind the rock. The others yelled, too, as hard as they could, to keep from being deafened as the Smith & Wesson pump gun roared in the enclosed space. Orange flame from the muzzle blast licked the ceiling. Ryan racked and fired, racked and fired as fast as he could.
On the third blast, there was a mighty groan from above, then in a cloud of dust, the ceiling of the entry chamber came crashing down.
Chapter Seven
Behind Dr. Huth, in the back of the lumbering bus, the three sluts were passing the time with a noisy dice game in which the winner got the right to bitch slap the losers across the face. Oblivious to their squeals, and to the pounding vibration of the rutted road, their satiated customers lay in a snoring heap on the mattresses.
Outside the bus, the landscape was uniformly bleak. To Huth’s left, across the beige, featureless plain, were distant mountain slopes. Poisoned by radiation, they looked like monstrous heaps of brown dirt. To his right was the gray green glacier of nuke glass, along whose southernmost edge they had been driving for more than half an hour. Though the Slake City phenomenon keenly interested him, the combination of surface glare and road vibration made it impossible for him to study its details.
Huth found it droll that the most significant act of this reality’s whitecoats had been to supply the means for a civilization ending, global holocaust. Four hundred years of creative, thoughtful inquiry into the diverse mechanisms of nature had produced thirty minutes of spectacular hell. From Huth’s alternate universe perspective, the nukecaust was nothing short of a blessing. The removal of ninety-five percent of the human beings from the planet had forestalled the real end game scenario, which, as he had seen, came with the whimper of starving billions, not an earth shaking bang.
When the driver started blowing the bus’s horn, Huth lost his train of thought.
“Now arriving at Slake City,” Mike the Drunkard announced as he tapped the brakes.
The lanky former whitecoat jumped quickly to his feet. He clung to one of the stainless steel support poles in the aisle and squinted through the dirt rimmed windshield. The repeated bleating of the horn roused the other passengers from their stupor. Eager to gaze upon the Promised Land, they lurched forward and pressed in close behind Huth, exhaling an eye watering fog of alcohol fumes.
What they saw made them cheer and hoot and stamp their feet.
A short distance from the edge of the nukeglass, the Slake City encampment was just as Mike the Drunkard had described it. This was no typical Deathlands shantytown. No hodgepodge of rusted out car bodies and scavenged fiberglass and scrap metal. It consisted of a cluster of shiny, black, segmented domes, the biggest of which was seventy feet in diameter. All of the structures were interconnected by black tubular walkways.
Huth’s heart soared. The prefab mil-spec shelters were definitely the product of FIVE’s technology. Made of the same synthetic, artificially intelligent material as the battlesuits, they could deflect conventional and laser attacks. Next to the clustered domes were a half dozen, all black, all terrain assault vehicles, state of the art killing machines designed for high speed pursuit and merciless interdiction. Closer to the thermoglass massif, beside the start of a crude road that cut over it, stood a group of huge black semitrailers and tractors. These, too, had all terrain capability. On the far side of the domes, a half dozen attack gyroplanes sat on a landing field, lined up and ready to scramble. From the number of otherworld domes, vehicles and aircraft, Huth had no doubt that his people had come across in force this time, and that they had come prepared to stay.