Most of the other gateways Ryan had passed through had been clean and orderly. Once everyone was on their feet, blasters cocked and ready, he reached out and opened the door.
For several seconds nobody moved or spoke. Then Ryan said, very quietly, “Fireblast!”
It looked bad.
Chapter Two
THE ROOM BEYOND THE DOOR was around five paces in length by three paces wide. The walls were painted a muted cream, faded with age. Virtually all the other gateways Ryan and his companions had been through had been thoroughly cleaned by the Americans nearly a hundred years ago. Kept immaculate and sealed, they had been so well hidden that nearly all trace of their presence had been long forgotten, all records lost. But this one looked as if it had been vacated only thirty seconds ago. That was the first reaction from Ryan and the others.
Ryan’s finger tightened instinctively on the trigger of the G-12, ready to spray the room with a veil of instant death. He could feel the tension all around him as everyone waited. He sniffed at the air.
“Doesn’t smell right. Krysty?”
The girl was at his elbow, so close that her arm brushed against his. She shook her head slowly. “No. Can’t hear anything. The air’s stale. By Gaia, but it’s years stale in here!”
There was a newspaper open on the plastic-topped table, with an aluminum can that once contained Coke resting on top of it. A plastic plate held the remnants of a meal, a maroon plastic knife and fork placed casually beside it, as if the eater had been interrupted moments before.
Several notices were pinned to a board near the far door, which, as Ryan saw instantly, was locked. A pack of chewing gum lay on the floor by one of the table legs. The room was totally, utterly still and silent.
“Looks like the Parody Club at five in the morning,” Doc Tanner said, his memory leading him down some arcane corridor of his mind.
A large sign was screwed to the wall above the entrance to the gateway. Its message was the same as that of other redoubts Entry Absolutely Forbidden to All but B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-trans.
“All right, people, take care. Just a mebbe that something’s boobied here.”
J. B. Dix sucked at a hollow back tooth. “Don’t see it, Ryan. No wires. No batteries. Nothing big enough to hide a gren. That’s ‘part from the cupboard there.”
Against the wall next to the heavy vanadium steel door was a green metal cabinet.
“I’ll look,” Jak said, sliding past Ryan, eager to prove himself.
“Easy, Whitey,” Finnegan rasped.
The boy moved slowly across the room. When he was about halfway to the cupboard, Ryan called out urgently for him to stop.
“Why?”
“Look at the floor.”
None of them had noticed the dust. Jak’s feet had left deep impressions in the velvet-soft layer, nearly a half-inch thick.
“Sloppy fucking housekeepers they got here,” Finnegan muttered.
“Has to be untouched for years. Maybe decades,” Ryan said. “Look at the table. It’s everywhere.”
The young albino flicked a finger at the door of the cabinet, as if he feared an electric shock. His fingers made the faintest pinging sound as it brushed the metal. He hesitated only a second, then grasped the handle and swung the door open.
It was full of paper.
There were six shelves on the left and five on the right, each filled with neat stacks of paper in different colors and sizes, along with folders and envelopes in cream and white and light brown.
All blank.
Jak pulled sheets off here and there, holding them up to show the others the smooth, untouched blankness. “Must be a store,” he said. “Nothing used.”
It was a disappointment to Ryan. As he moved through the Deathlands, he was always hoping to come across more information about the times before the great fighting. He’d seen books, films, vids, tapes, papersbut all of that gave only a glimpse through a tiny crack in time. He dreamed sometimes of finding some key to the past, some way of learning what madness had raced through the planet nearly a century back. Like a blinding virus, it had been an insanity that had torn apart the world, wrecking it beyond any hope of redemption. Too much had been lost for it ever to be put back together as it had been. The population had been decimated once and then again and again. Most science had been lost forever, and that, Ryan believed, was no bad thing. From what little he’d learned about the years before 2001, it seemed that the scientists should carry almost as heavy a burden of responsibility for Deathlands as the rabid politicians.