Going through the barracks, Ryan lead the way as they group checked the footlockers set before each bed. Often they found small luxury items the soldiers had left behind by accident, but such wasn’t the case this time. Every footlocker was empty; not even a scrap of paper had been left behind.
“Mebbe no troops ever here?” Jak asked, nudging a neatly folded blanket with the tire iron. The material collapsed at the touch, raising a small cloud of dust to cover the yellow sheets.
“Could be,” Ryan agreed. The barracks seemed to be more than merely empty, it felt totally deserted, as if no troops had ever been stationed there.
But then, where had the tons of supplies gone? Or had they also never been delivered? Perhaps this was only a partially built redoubt, caught unfinished by the war. The idea made a lot of sense and explained everything they had seen so far.
Making an inarticulate noise of displeasure, Krysty angrily pulled at the orange-soaked top of her jumpsuit. “This dried foam is becoming sticky,” she complained. “Our blasters are going to jam if we don’t get this crap off of us soon.”
“Showers should be over here,” J.B. said, leading the way with his nukelamp.
Bypassing the small private showers in the officers’ quarters, the companions instead chose one of the big shower rooms for the troops. Without working pumps, they knew that the water pressure would last only for a very brief time, so they would have to clean off quickly and all together.
Leaving the nukelamps safely outside the shower, the group gathered in the middle of the tiled room and turned on the faucets full force. There was a hiss of escaping air for a moment from the ancient pipes, then they were hit by a stinging spray still pleasantly warm. Frantically, they scrubbed the orange residue of the foam off their clothes and out of their hair and barely finished in time before the warm water turned cool, then cold and finally sputtered to a halt.
“Son of a bitch, that feels good.” Mildred sighed, shaking her beaded hair to dispel the excess water. With that action, there came a loud crack of glass and one of the nukelamps winked out.
Rushing over to the doorway, J.B. inspected the destruction without touching anything with his wet hands. “The bulb shattered when the water hit it,” he said in annoyance.
“Oh, John, I’m so sorry,” she stated.
“My fault,” he replied, cutting her off. “I should have realized that was going to happen and set these farther back. Damn, what a waste.”
“Still three,” Jak said, squeezing water from his long snowy hair. “Better than candles.”
“Well, that’s for damn sure. But nobody goes near the lamps until they stop dripping.”
“Wish we had some towels,” Dean added.
“Help yourself,” Ryan said, gesturing at a stack of thick military towels on a shelf. The fabric was coated with cobwebs.
The boy eyes the neatly folded pile of dust and mold dubiously. “You first,” he muttered.
“That reminds me of something an old acquaintance used to say about wishing,” J.B. said, reclaiming his glasses from a steel ledge designed to hold soap. “Put a wish in one hand, take a crap in the other and see which gets filled first.” The dripping wet companions shared a laugh at that.
“By gadfry, sir, pragmatic vulgarity,” Doc said, ringing his frock coat in both hands with surprising strength. “I think you may have created an entirely new form of philosophy there, my friend.”
“Okay, enough jawing,” Ryan said, squishing his boots on the tiled floor as he headed for the doorway. “We’ll dry faster walking than standing in these bastard puddles.”
Staying well clear of the hot lamps, the companions splashed from the shower and once in the locker room of the barracks took the opportunity to carefully check over their blasters. Washing off the foam had helped a great deal, but they disassembled the weapons on the hard benches to clean every part.
Rummaging about in his backpack, Jak unearthed a small plastic squeeze bottle of homogenized gun oil he had looted from the armory of Nova ville so many months ago. The precious lubricant was passed around and used liberally until every blaster was in smooth working condition once more.