If Doc couldn’t shake them out of their state, and he couldn’t remove them forcibly, then he knew he only had one course left. And that was to try to chill whatever it was that lived in the pool.
On the face of it, a much more daunting undertaking. The thing was vast and inconceivably powerful. Still, Doc knew he had to try.
As he racked his brain to come up with something, anything of use in that regard, the carny scout volunteered to sit in the chair.
The black man was all smiles as he let himself be strapped down. It was difficult to tell for certain, but he seemed to have a change of heart when the first blow landed and it didn’t kill him outright. Lying in the dirt, he wasn’t screaming words; he was just screaming. Doc had the feeling, though, that the shock had awakened him at the last instant, when it was already far too late to do anything about it.
Tanner turned away from the follow-up mayhem and stared at the low concrete blockhouse. The blows were still sounding behind him when he started to put the whole thing together.
He was fairly sure that for whatever reason, for pure science or to develop a new military weapon, predark whitecoats had created the pool and its ecosystem. And that they had done it from the ground up.
He asked himself why then had the laboratory been sited here, so far below the pool. Certainly, it made more sense to build the lab next to the system they were studying. That told Doc the whitecoats probably knew it was dangerous, and that they wanted to be a safe distance away. Which offered support for the bioweapon hypothesis. But that wasn’t the whole story.
He could see that the laboratory was connected to the pool through the pipes at the base of the slope. As there were no pipes in evidence at the lakeside, at least none that he had seen, they had to be in place under it. Which supported the idea that it wasn’t a naturally occurring body of water. The pool had been created. But that didn’t explain what the pipes were there for. Could the whitecoats have used them to sample the pool’s contents? Doc thought that unlikely. A pipe five feet across was overkill for taking samples. As he examined the base of the hillside, he noticed two other structures that seemed to be artificial. The rounded humps looked like culverts that had been buried by rock and dirtfall. They were twice as big as the blockhouse pipes.
What was all the underground plumbing for? Doc asked himself. Was it because the whitecoats knew even in the planning stages the potential danger of the pool? Was it because they wanted their fingers on the trigger of a fail-safe device that could deactivate or terminate the project?
From the position of the blockhouse and the pipe connections, Doc had a clue as to the function if not the exact construction of the device. It involved draining the lake above. Draining it suddenly and completely. The trouble was, they hadn’t designed it as a dead man’s switch. The nukecaust had taken them by surprise, as it had everyone else.
Doc grimaced. It was all supposition, of course.
As he started for the steps leading to the blockhouse entrance, the rousties pulled the body of the dead scout from the chair and pitched it into the cart. When he looked back he saw young Dean taking a seat in the death chair.
It stopped him cold in his tracks.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, and he broke into a run, not for the bunker, but for the boy. Doc threw himself between the numbed spectators, trying to reach Dean and drag him free before harm could be done.
Powerful hands roughly grabbed Doc by the arms and hurled him back. The crowd closed in more tightly around the chair, effectively blocking another attempt on his part.
Doc gripped the handle of his swordstick, but he didn’t draw the blade. He knew he could skewer more than a few of the bodies before him, but he could never chill enough of them to free Dean in time. And in the process, he would have had to mortally stab his friends, even Ryan, who appeared to be willing to stop him from rescuing the boy.