“Rot in your own hell,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A BRIEF AND VICIOUS FIREFIGHT with a dozen of the mutie sec men slowed them a dangerous few seconds. Fortunately Ryan’s party took no casualties and were finally in the elevator, climbing fast toward a fresh Oregon afternoon.
The ascent took precisely the eighty-five seconds the descent had taken. The box of dulled steel seemed to rise with agonizing slowness. Once, when they were near the top, the elevator shook, rattling against the sides of the shaft, and they dimly heard the sound of a muffled explosion. Ryan checked his chron; J.B. did the same.
“Coupl’a minutes early,” he said.
“Can’t trust old plas,” the Armorer replied.
When they got to the top, it was a beautiful day. The sun beamed down from a cloudless sky of unsullied azure. A hawk floated majestically between the peaks away to the west. The bowl of mountains around Crater Lake was topped with a frosting of snow, but the air was warm and fresh. The main entrance wasn’t guarded, and there were several of the amphibious boat wags on the ramp under the shadow of the jagged rocks that concealed the complex.
“Look at the water,” Lori said. “It dances.”
They looked.
The impenetrable deeps were a rich blue, normally placid and calm. Now the water was rippling agitatedly, tiny waves rising and breaking against one another and lapping at the stone ramp like thousands of little sucking mouths.
“I can feel it and hear it,” Krysty said urgently, head to one side, her crimson hair like strands of fire in the sunlight.
“The bombs going?” Ryan asked.
“Sure. Can’t you hear it?”
The Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement was buried so deeply that not even Ryan’s keen hearing could detect anything happening. But he could feel it. Through the thick soles of his combat boots, he could sense the faint susurration that was coming through thousands of feet of rock.
“Best go. Who’ll drive?” Ryan asked.
Normally it would have been Finnegan.
“Me,” Jak offered, leaping into the control seat, his snowy hair blowing in the light breeze.
Away above them Ryan noticed a small herd of deer running fast over the gray pumice slopes, their sharp hooves kicking up powder behind them. It looked as if something had spooked them.
The pink eyes of the albino spotted a faint trail that climbed the steep sides of the basin around the lake, and he aimed the amphib at it. He lowered the wheels as they reached land and gunned the motor to force the amphib up among the trees. Behind them the surface of the water was becoming more restless as whitecaps rippled the rich blue.
At Ryan’s command Jak stopped the small vehicle when they crested the rise and reached the blacktop that had once carried camera-laden tourists around beautiful Crater Lake.
“Fireblast! Look at that son of”
The water was beginning to bubble, almost like a monstrous caldron approaching a boil. A snaking tendril of smoke or steam escaped from the dark entrance to the complex. Even from where they stood it was possible to catch the sound of distant explosions, sounding as though they came from a limitless distance beneath their feet.
“Is it going to go?” Lori asked.
“The volcano?” Doc queried, his arm around the waist of the slim young girl as they stood on the edge of the old roadway.
“Yes. Fire mountain?”
“It just might be,” the old man replied, the etched lines about his eyes showing the strain they’d all been through.
As they climbed into the amphib, Ryan glanced back once more. It had been an odd firefight. The odds and the technology had been overwhelmingly on the side of the scientists and their mutie slaves. But they had lost the art of fighting. A handful of determined people, armed with what to the scientists were primitive weapons, had utterly defeated them.
Destroyed them.
As they drove away from the beautiful country and weather around Crater Lake, they passed immense numbers of animals and birds, all fleeing south, away from the doomed redoubt. A dozen mutie timber wolves, their leader nearly as tall at the shoulder as a man, looked contemptuously at the small group of humans, then moved on at an easy lope, ignoring them.