The corridor wound on. Ryan’s guess was that it was going to come a full 360 degrees. Every now and then they passed beneath what were obviously defensive barriers, locked away in the ceiling. And every thirty or forty paces they walked under the cold gaze of small vid cameras, set in the angle between wall and curved roof.
“Nobody?” called J. B. Dix from the rear.
“Not a smell or sight of ’em,” Ryan replied.
“There’s nobody,” said Krysty Wroth, voice utterly decisive.
“Sure?”
“Sure, lover,” she said.
In the century after the nuclear apocalypse many parts of what had been the United States were disastrously contaminated by all forms of nuclear poison. Chem clouds, bitter winter, acid rain and lethal doses of radiation had all combined to produce a multitude of genetic mutations. Muties came in all shapes, sizes and forms.
In many cases their names gave clues as to what they were like and how they acted.
Stickies had strangely developed hands and feet that enabled them to grip almost any surface. They were hard to kill.
Sensers were able to see into the future, mainly in a very limited and often inaccurate way.
Doomies could only feel when some disaster was going to happen. They could rarely be specific, but their premonitions were generally correct.
Crazies were well, crazies were plain crazy.
Krysty was a kind of mutie. Ryan had found it difficult to handle when he first became aware of it. After they’d first made love. She had mixed talents. Her long hair was slightly sentient and seemed to move of its own volition. She could often sense trouble, in the way that a doomseer could. Also, she had unusually keen sight and hearing.
But her greatest attribute was generally hidden. Her late mother, Sonja, had always drilled into the girl the key phrase Strive for Life. She had come from a settlement called Harmony, which had a reputation as a sanctuary, as peaceful hamlets were called. Krysty had been taught there by her mother, and by two good men, her uncle Tyas McNann and his friend Peter Maritza. They had taught her to respect the Earth Mother, Gaia, as she was called, after the Greek goddess of the earth.
Though it exhausted her, Krysty was capable of disciplining her mind and body to such an extent that she could unleash a terrifying physical strength.
It wasn’t just humans that bred muties.
In his thirty or so years, Ryan had encountered just about every kind of genetic perversion that a diseased mind could imagine. Fish and fowl. Insects from the locked rooms of a dying nightmare. Animals and snakes and birds. All distorted into obscene parodies of their original forms.
Ryan believed that this odd circular redoubt was devoid of life. Krysty just confirmed his suspicions. The air tasted clean and untouched. Once you’d smelled death, you never forgot it. Not ever.
It was only about three minutes later that they reached what looked like the main doors. The corridor opened to a room about ten paces square. The walls showed faint shadow-shapes, squares and rectangles, where pictures or notices had been hung. But the entire complex was clear. Whoever had been there when Armageddon came had done a good cleaning. Nothing remained, not even dust. It was all hermetically sealed, waiting for human beings to return.
“There’s no control panel,” said Finn. “Not like the others.”
The walls around the doors were smooth and clean, lacking any kind of opening mechanism. Ryan looked to Doc for help.
“I confess I’m baffled. The individual design of some of the gateways was outside the scope of the Cerberus people.”
“Blast it. Got some grens.” As usual, J. B. Dix was direct in his thinking.
“I suggest caution, Mr. Dix,” replied Doc. “Some of these main entry ports are highly sophisticated. If we were to fail to blow it open, then we might find we had permanently closed the building’s only exit.”
“So? What do we do?” asked Ryan. “Feels warmer here than anywhere.”
“Got to bring fresh air in every now and then. Been going for a hundred years, give or take. So some outside air and humidity leaks in. I am of the opinion that the controls for this might be in some hidden master unit.”