“Next week. That is their plan.”
“We’ll stop them, won’t we, Doc?” Lori asked.
“Indeed we will, light of my life, fire of my loins, sweetness of my heart.”
Lori smiled and blushed.
“Just how the fuck do we stop ’em, Doc?” Finn asked, standing up and stretching, moaning as his muscles locked from kneeling on the floor by the old man’s bunk bed for too long.
Doc Tanner opened his eyes again. “Kindly allow me to make myself quite clear, ladies and gentlemen. From the drunken mumblings of poor Dr. Avian, who is madder than the craziest of hatters, I have no doubt whatsoever that within the week Dr. Tardy and her comrades will have put their toys out to play. The result will be the end, within less than six months, of all life, not only in Deathlands but throughout the planet.”
“You mean people, Doc?” J.B. asked.
“I mean life. Animal and vegetable. There will not even be a speck of bacteria. Earth will be utterly, eternally barren. And that must not happen, even if our own poor lives are pawns in the great game.”
“Talk’s cheap,” Ryan said thoughtfully.
“I am aware of that, my friend. I am also aware that the saying goes on about the price of action being quite colossal.”
Ryan glanced at the Armorer. “What d’you think, J.B.? Can we take this place out? It’s the strongest redoubt I ever saw.”
“May just be the weakest as well,” J.B. replied, his glasses reflecting the dim light from the far end of the room.
“How, when and where?” Ryan asked. “That’s what the Trader used to say about making a war plan. Not much else matters.”
“When is the easiest. Has to be in the next couple of days. We have to spring the kid first.”
Ryan nodded his agreement. “Sure, J.B., sure. And where couldn’t be simpler. Here. Problem linked to that is how the flying fuck we get out of here after we’ve done it.”
“Got to blow her up,” Doc said. The old man looked exhausted, blinking away his tiredness. “Set charges and get out. Way that stammering sot put it, there’s enough stuff down here to blow the planet in half. Most’s fission, so we won’t trigger it in a fire or explosion.”
“This place’s fucking deep enough to bury anything, isn’t it?” Finnegan asked.
“Sure. Only problem is” Doc Tanner hesitated. “You know this used to be an old volcano. Mount Mazama? When it went up, it left Crater Lake. These scientists how I hate that word now!they’ve dug so deep they must be damnably close to tapping into the old magma chamber under the caldera. Big bang down here and the force hasn’t anywhere to go. Except down, mebbe.”
“Mountain might go bang,” Lori said.
“As usual, my dearest child, in your simple way you have placed your cunning digit upon the core of the question. It might indeed, ‘go bang,’ as you put it.”
Doc fell asleep shortly afterward, with Lori at his side. The other four went to another part of the dormitory to formulate a plan that would enable them to overcome forty or so heavily armed mutie guards and destroy the most sophisticated weapons complex in the history of civilization.
It took them all of twenty minutes.
Finnegan was the most confident. “Those fucking toy blasters they have. Blasters! Couldn’t blast their way through a gaudy house blanket.”
J.B. was more cautious. “They must work some of the time, Finn.”
“One in a fucking hundred, that’s all. You won’t get better fucking odds in any firefight, I tell you. Easy as hitting a fucking war wag with a Sharps fifty.”
Ryan laughed. “Hope you’re right. You’re too big a target, Finn. That’s your trouble.” He glanced at the big chron on the wall. “Look. It’ll soon be in the red. Let’s get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty
JAK LAUREN HAD SLEPT WELL.
He often dreamed of the old days of childhood, back in the humid swamps of Louisiana. His night phantoms were mutie alligators or swampies with blind eyes that floated over the sucking mud, webbed fingers grasping for him as he danced from them with an elusive ease. The albino always relished such dreams, never dreading the demons that rose in them.