“Nope. Yours?” Dean asked, holding out a battered hat.
With a cry of delight, J.B. took the fedora and straightened the brim into something presentable again. Easing it onto his head, he adjusted the angle and grinned. “Better,” he stated. “A man just can’t think straight with his brain exposed.”
Reaching the end of the passage, the companions found the huge vanadium steel doors of the exit. The material was unmarked, but it had been designed to withstand the atomic fireball of a nuke blast. Their footprints led from the massive slab, the floor cluttered with spent brass, a few scattered leaves and dried splotches of green blood.
“Triple red,” Ryan ordered, shifting the blaster to his left hand and using the right to tap an access code on the keypad on the wall.
The others spread out so as to not offer a group target. The companions had left something very hard to chill outside, and if the Kite hadn’t done the job, the bastard might still be waiting for them to emerge. Slowly, the portal rumbled aside. Instantly, a black hurricane roared into the tunnel, the companions staggering backward from the furious assault. The raging storm filled the corridor with streaming waves of some kind of dark material that stuck to their clothes and skin. Within seconds, it became impossible to see one another, much less what was outside the redoubt. “Retreat to the garage!” Ryan shouted over the storm, an arm held in front of his mouth as protection as he strove to key in the code that would close the door.
Stumbling to the walls, they blindly followed the zigzagging passageway back into the redoubt. The fierce winds pounded them every step of the way, gusts knocking them against the walls and often to the dirty floor. Battered and bruised, the companions were forced to grab one another’s clothing for support. As a group, they shuffled hastily away from the thundering onslaught of bitter tasting flakes.
Charging from the howling tunnel, the companions moved out of the way of the incoming cloud and took cover behind whatever was available, waiting for the outer door to close. The black cloud, resembling car exhaust, poured into the redoubt, covering everything from the grease pit to the rafters with a thick layer of soot. Ryan couldn’t hear above the whistling wind, but as the exterior door finally closed, the storm abruptly died, whirlwinds of ash dancing across the thickly coated floor.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc shouted, then lowered his voice to a normal volume. “And what, pray tell, was that?”
Curiously, Mildred picked a flake off her encrusted shirt and watched it crumble in her palm. “This is all that remains of this part of Tennessee,” she guessed, wiping her hand on her pants. “Should have realized this would be waiting for us outside. After so many days of being cooked by the Kite, the land has literally been burnt into ash.”
Blue eyes staring from a blackened face, Dean blinked in wonder. “So the trees, the bushes, the grass”
“Gone. All gone.”
“Well, shit,” Jak said, giving the word two syllables. The albino felt as if he had just escaped from the grave. The ash was inside his fatigues and already starting to work its way into his shorts and boots. He snorted to clear his nose and gagged on the aftertastefried dirt. Then he realized that’s exactly what it was.
Stomping her cowboy boots, Krysty wildly shook her head, trying to assist her struggling hair to straighten out the tangles from the rough winds. Ash sprinkled to the floor, forming a small cloud around the dirty woman.
“Gaia! That was worse than any Deathlands sandstorm!” Krysty complained, beating at her clothes. “We’re not going to get a single yard out of the redoubt without masks of some kind. We’d choke to death in minutes.”
“Also need ropes to keep us together,” Ryan added. Wiping his blaster clean, the man hawked and spit. Gray phlegm hit the floor. “We can make masks out of bed sheets. That’s easy enough, but pointless. There’s not going to be any animals out there to hunt for food. What the Kite didn’t kill, this ash would soon suffocate to death.”