Ryan coughed. “Mebbe you could finish this story later, Doc, when we settle for the night. Sounds like it’s going to go on for a while.”
Doc shook his head. Mopping at his smeared vest with the blue swallow’s-eye kerchief that he always carried with him. “No, my dear Ryan. I am nearly done.”
“Really?” J.B. said, disbelievingly.
“Oh, indeed yes. The dream was that I found myself on the upper landing, which was where the maids’ quarters had once been. It was thick with dust, and slates were gone from the roof, showing the leaden sky. Birds had nested up there, and the floor was covered in feathers and the brittle bones of dead pigeons. I stood at the end wall, turned and saw that my way back to the stairs was blocked by this silent army of cats, gazing at me with an infinite menace.”
He closed his eyes and sat quiet. After a few moments of stillness, Krysty nudged him with the silvered toe of her boot. “And?” she prompted. “What happened then?”
“I woke up, dear lady. That was what was so strange about the dream. It just stopped dead like a brougham breaking an axle and losing its rear wheels. I may never recover from Jamaisvous’s damnable manipulations, and I believe I was fortunate to avoid the depths of an all-consuming nightmare.”
“That’s it, Doc?” Dean asked. “It just stops? That’s not much of a dream.”
“I can tell you it prickled the short hairs at my nape, dear boy.”
Ryan moved to stand by the door. “Now we’ve finished with dream telling, I reckon we might do well to get going. See what sort of a redoubt we’ve ended up in.”
Everyone got ready for moving to condition red, without Ryan even having to remind them. Blasters were drawn and checked quickly, cocked and held firm.
The one-eyed man put his left hand onto the cold metal of the handle of the armaglass door, looking around at his companions. “Here we go,” he said quietly.
“Do it, lover,” Krysty said with a smile.
“Got any kind of feeling?”
She hesitated a moment, using her inherited mutie powers, trying to locate any imminent danger to them. “No. Nothing close by here.”
Ryan opened the door of the mat-trans chamber.
Chapter Two
At first the air seemed to have the familiar stale, flat taste to it.
The redoubts were generally vast military complexes, built during the intense second cold war that dominated life in the period immediately before the horrors of skydark and the following long winters. Many were hastily erected in wilderness areas, often using swathes of national parks, causing great bitterness from liberals and conservationists. A number of bloody confrontations had erupted between the National Guard and outraged citizens.
The total number of redoubts was unknown. Some were scattered throughout the world, and a few in the old United States were on a much more modest scale, concealed in isolated houses.
As Ryan led the way out of the gateway, he wondered what kind of place they’d find. The fact that everything was still functioning meant that the master reactor control was still working: keeping the place secure; checking the lights and air quality; operating a tight and sometimes lethal security system; working as it had been designed to do around a hundred years earlier.
But some of the redoubts had been infiltrated, and moving into a strange complex was always fraught with danger. There were usually on condition red for much of the time.
He found himself in a small, square room, about a dozen feet across. Most of the redoubts that he’d visited had been abandoned and stripped bare, but some had obviously been deserted in the prenuke panic the last few hours before the missiles darkened the skies and the United States became Deathlands. In the past they’d found arms, food and beds.
Sometimes people.
Muties.
“Seems safe, lover,” Krysty said, following close on his heels.
J.B. sniffed the air. “Not too bad. Smelled a lot worse.”
The room was painted in a light cream color, with a matte finish. It was totally empty, except for a small rectangular plastic-topped table against the side wall, with four tubular steel legs. There was a single narrow shelf on the opposite flank, but that, too, was empty.