“My kingdom for a bag of nails,” Doc muttered. Then he spied the workbench and headed that way.
“Mebbe we can use busted glass from the windshields,” J.B. suggested, thumbing fresh cartridges into the shotgun. “Used to work keeping out the rats back in Colorado.”
“Sounds good,” Ryan grunted, turning away from the droid.
Spent brass falling to the floor in a musical rain, Mildred reloaded her target pistol and snapped the cylinder shut. Tucking the blaster away, she yanked a hubcap off a civilian wag to hold it at arm’s length inside a civilian vehicle.
Still on its hood, Jak smashed the windshield with the butt of his Colt and the glass shattered into a million pieces, overfilling the hubcap. In disgust, Mildred stared at the pile of tiny, sparkling green cubes.
“Safety glass,” she snorted, pouring out the hubcap. “Couldn’t cut yourself on the stuff if you tried.”
“Use headlights,” Jak suggested, then frowned. “No, not enough. What else use?”
“Hell, I don’t know!”
Checking the gauges at a fuel pump, J.B. turned and shook his head at the others. The reservoir was completely dry, only a faint exhalation of escaping gas came from the nozzle.
“Went dry over the century,” he told them, returning the nozzle to its indented rack. So much for a firewall to stop the bugs!
Taking the keys from the ignition, Dean opened the trunk of the car and carried over a spare tire, sliding it into the crack on top of the piece of the droid, then he rushed away to rummage for another. Busting open a dusty soda machine, Krysty started throwing in glass pop bottles, the glass shattering at the rear of the crack. But there were only a few, the rest made of plastic or aluminum cans.
Carrying over a corroded bumper from a Cadillac, Ryan added it to the pile, shoving the chrome plated metal as far back as he could. Not much, but a start.
Leaving the workbench, Doc went to a nearby closet and yanked open the door. “By the Three Kennedys!” he cried, hauling a twenty-gallon container into view. “Gasoline! Hundreds of containers!”
But Ryan could see the military identification number on the side of the cans and knew what the man had found was a lot more valuable than gas, or shine—it was condensed fuel. Unlike other flammable liquids, the stuff simply didn’t evaporate worth a damn, yet worked equally well in civilian engines and military diesels. What the hell it was made of he had no fragging idea, not even Mildred could take a guess, but the stuff did the job and that was all that really mattered.
“This is what the droid was set to guard,” Ryan grunted, as he hurried closer. “Juice enough for a fleet of wags! Okay, start hauling them out. We can block the crack with a fire bowl, use a hubcap as a basin and some rope as wick. Two or three should do the job.”
“Nothing like fire,” Jak said, then grimly added, “Except stickies.”
“Then mebbe we can get one of these wags working and leave,” J.B. added. “The farther we get from this hellhole, the better!”
“I’ll find some rope,” Dean said, running to the workbench on the far wall.
“Check the Hummers,” Ryan suggested. “They always carry spare tackle.”
“On it!”
“I’ll find more bottles for Molotovs,” Krysty said. “Maybe there’s some of those foam coffee cups in the kitchen.”
“Jak, go with her,” Ryan ordered brusquely. “Nobody goes anywhere alone until we are far from these tripcursed things!”
The albino teenager grunted in agreement and joined the woman at the stairs to disappear into the bowels of the redoubt.
Meanwhile, the remaining companions started for the closet to assist in clearing out the fuel cans. Four of the containers were already in a line on the garage floor, and as Doc turned back for another load, he spit a curse in Latin and pulled out his LeMat to shoot from the hip. Something screamed like a child inside the closet and blood sprayed onto the floor.
“There’s another crack!” Doc shouted, backing away from the room of volatile fuel. He was holding the trigger down on his single action weapon, a raised palm hovering above the hammer to fan the black powder cannon into action, but he withheld shooting. The bugs were crawling over the cans of fuel! One ricochet and that entire area of the redoubt could be engulfed in a firestorm of burning fuel.