J.B. replaced his hat, tweaking it into place. “Probably had to do it during the last evac before skydark. Chaos must have reigned, and they had to put the code up to save time. Time must’ve been real tight with the nukes already up and flying.”
Ryan nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s go onto red again, friends. All right, Jak? Press it in.”
The teenager’s tongue slipped out to lick his pale lips as he concentrated on entering the correct code, making sure that each button was properly depressed.
“Moving,” he announced.
They could all hear the faint hum of distant machinery, a sonorous, deep sound, seeming to vibrate through the marrow of their bones. There was a light above the door showing the progress of the elevator.
The Armorer had his head on one side, listening to the noise. “Like it’s kind of high,” he said.
Ryan had been thinking the same. It was taking such a long time, the exit from the shaft had to be a good way off. But that again wasn’t unusual.
“Don’t like it.” Krysty had a taken a couple of steps away from the others, glancing back over her shoulder.
The indicator light showed that the cage was three-quarters of the way down.
“Bad feeling?” Ryan asked, his voice ragged in the sudden tension. “Someone coming?” He looked away down the brightly lit tunnel.
Krysty’s feelings were so often right that they could never, ever be ignored.
“Can’t tell you. Not like muties or…”
“Nearly here,” Jak called. “What we do, Ryan?”
Apart from Krysty, they were all gathered in a tight knot in front of the sec door.
There was a faint electronic sound, like a tiny bell, warning of the arrival of the elevator.
“Danger…close,” Krysty stammered.
The elevator door hissed open, and there was the deafening boom of a blaster.
Chapter Three
Ryan felt the hot breath of the lead shot as it sliced by, just over his head.
Krysty’s warning had come just in time. He had shouted out for everyone to get down on the floor a fraction of a second before the dull metal door opened. He took a moment to see that there was nobody in the rectangular cage and, in the same moment, he saw the gaping mouths of a pair of sawed-down scatterguns, jerry-rigged with what looked like fishing line and a crude arrangement of two-by-fours. The whole thing was set to shoot when the door opened.
“Crude but effective,” Ryan said as he stood, brushing cement dust off his pants.
“Twelve-gauges.” The Armorer crouched carefully outside the elevator, holding the door open with his left hand, peering at the smoking barrels of the booby trap.
Mildred was rubbing her left elbow where she’d gone down awkwardly. “Bitching bastards! Why they want to do that to fellow Americans?”
“Because, my dear Dr. Wyeth, the long dead assassins imagined that if anyone attempted to come this way, they would probably be of the Russian persuasion.”
The woman nodded. “Guess that you might be right…for once, Doc.”
He made her a low bow, the ferrule of his ebony swordstick scraping on the stone floor.
“Good job you felt the danger, lover,” Ryan said.
Krysty gave him a tremulous half smile, waving away the fumes from the quadruple shotgun. “Yeah. Just about have taken us off at the shoulders.”
“Reckon that it’s safe to use the elevator?” J.B. asked, staring into the empty cage, holding the Uzi at the ready in his right hand.
Ryan sniffed, rubbing the side of his nose with his index finger. “Fireblast! I don’t know.”
“After my experience at the hands of that madman in Puerto Rico, I am somewhat averse to making another jump quite so soon.” Doc ran a hand through his grizzled locks. “Mayhap we could take the ride to the top and then exercise especial care once we arrive up there.”
“Why not?” Ryan said.
He led the way into the elevator, bouncing up and down a couple of times to test the springiness of the main support cables, half expecting them to suddenly give way and plunge the cage the rest of the way to the bottom of the shaft.