There was a wide plateau of bare rock just outside, then the fringes of what looked like a solid wall of green pines towering skyward.
Ryan stepped into the opening, glancing toward the blue sky, noting the streaks of white clouds, with some swelling thunderheads away to the north. A bird of prey, looking like a bald eagle, was riding a thermal a thousand feet above him, scanning the forest below for signs of potential food.
The blaster slid back into its holster as Ryan stood, feet apart, taking in a deep breath of the fresh, bright air. “Fireblast! But that’s good.”
He turned toward the Armorer, who’d taken the tiny comp sextant out of one of his capacious pockets.
“Where do you put us?” he asked.
“Just a minute.”
Jak had been scanning the ground outside the sec doors for any signs of life, animal, human or mutie. “See nothing. Looks like nobody found place.”
Ryan nodded. “That forest seems solid as a wall. Must’ve grown fast and sealed off any road there might have been way back around the long winters.”
“What’s that?” Mildred had shaded her eyes against the brightness of the sun, peering out toward the west, over the tops of the trees.
“What?” Ryan and the others looked to where she was pointing—all except J.B., who was still fiddling with the controls of the minisextant.
“Silvery,” she said. “Big lake. Or…or maybe even a sea of some kind.”
“Cific Ocean,” J.B. said, putting the instrument back in one of his pockets. “Near as I can make it, we’re in the middle of California.”
“Really!” Ryan looked across at his old friend. “Bit more specific?”
J.B. had an amazing memory for the topography of the old, long-gone United States of America.
“I’d say that the closest of the old villes to where we are now would be Fresno.”
“I took part in a free-pistol competition there, back in ’99.” Mildred smiled at the memory. “Beat everyone in the Pan-American Games. Scored 996 if I remember right. Four more than a skinny little guy from Brooklyn.”
“Fresno would’ve been around fifty miles west of us, over yonder.” J.B. pointed to where there was the glint of distant water, the sun flickering off the lenses of his spectacles. “That’s the Cific, all right.”
“But it only looks to be a scant forty or so leagues away,” Doc said. “Surely the coast should be closer to 150 good miles off?”
Ryan squinted down, running the gray dust through his fingers. “You’re forgetting skydark, Doc. Word from the old ones who lived through it was that most all of western California simply slipped into the sea. Hundred percent death toll. The San Andreas Fault went at hour one, and the whole maze of seismic lines opened up like wet string. Dumped the land into the sea, bringing the coast way up into the foothills of the Sierras.”
“I forgot that!” Doc exclaimed. “What a fuzzy-minded old fool I am, to be sure, to be sure. So, we could be close to that part of California where the tall trees used to be.”
J.B. nodded. “National parks in this region, and we know that redoubts often got themselves built in such places. Sequoia and King’s Canyon.” He shaded his eyes with the brim of his fedora. “The tall trees, Doc.”
Ryan had walked across the plateau, looking down at the clearly man-made surface of impacted gravel, still showing the century-old marks of deeply ridged tires. As he closed on the fringe of sky-scraping pines, he noticed that there were the remains of some stubby stone bollards circling the edge of the roadway. At one point there were the traces of a two-lane blacktop running toward the northwest. But the greening had enveloped the road, and it vanished under the shadowy branches.
“We stuck here, lover?” Krysty said at his side, her hand resting lightly in the crook of his right elbow. “Be a shame if we can’t do some exploring. It seems such a beautiful place.”
“It does.” He put his arm around her shoulders, feeling the sun-warmed material of her white shirt. “You don’t feel any stickies in the neighborhood, do you?”