With a hard jounce, the wag hit the concrete floor again, and now there was nothing barring their way to the exit tunnel. Designed for much larger vehicles, the GMC 6X6 had plenty of room to traverse the zigzagging path of the antiradiation maze.
A dozen small cracks in the tunnel wall were brightly lit by the headlights of the vehicle, but none appeared deeper than a yard or so, and there was no sensation of a warm breeze. Actually, at this point, they would have welcomed it. Everybody was breathing hard as their lungs labored to draw in enough oxygen, and Krysty looked as if she were going to be ill at any moment.
Reaching the end of the access tunnel, spanning the wall before the 6X6 was a colossal black door large enough for a predark Army tank to roll through without hindrance. The two-and-one-half ton wag was a toy in comparison. Carefully, they looked it over for any warping or discolorization that would indicate a close nuke hit, but the dense metal was as smooth as satin without a mark.
Ryan braked to a halt, the companions staying alert while he slid out of the driver’s seat and J.B. went behind the wheel, covering him with the Uzi. Walking to the wall on an angle so that the headlights would illuminate his way, Ryan found an armored keypad set into the frame and tried the exit code, but nothing happened. Expecting that, he pried open a service hatch under the keypad and grabbed hold of the wheel. It took all of the man’s strength to get the mechanism working.
The wheel began to turn, gradually becoming looser, and the speed increased until there was a solid clunk. Releasing the wheel, Ryan pulled hard on the lever alongside and there was low ramble as the thick alloy door began to rise. A wave of heat washed into the redoubt, bringing a wealth of hot clean air. The companions breathed in deep, savoring the lack of smells even as wind blown sand hit the windshield of the wag with stinging force.
As Ryan took the passenger’s seat, J.B. hit the gas and drove toward the opening. Even as the vehicle reached the blast door, the opening rising door was noticeably slowing, the charge built by rotating the wheel barely enough to move the megatons of armored steel. As the wag drove through the opening, the blast door began to close and there was a screech of metal on metal as it caught the rear gate of the wag. The trapped vehicle was slowly being crashed. J.B. shifted gears and hit the gas, banking the steering wheel hard to angle the aft end free from the grasp of titanic blast door before any serious damage was done.
With a painful screech, the gate was torn free and the door slammed shut, crashing the piece of military steel flat against the jamb of the redoubt as if it were no more than cardboard.
In the silence of the warm night, fresh air washed over the companions and they drank it in gratefully. Lifting a nukelamp out the window, Ryan angled it about, but the powerful ray vanished into the distance of a featureless desert.
“What the…this is salt, not sand,” Krysty said, spitting and wiping her mouth. She strained to hear any sound of waves on the beach, but there was only the soft whisper of the hot wind and nothing else. It was as if they were on another planet.
“Damn, it is salt. Maybe we’re in Utah again,” Mildred guessed, taking a drink from her canteen. “Or maybe the Nevada salt flats.”
Still panning the brilliant beam about, Ryan narrowed his eye at that comment. Nevada, eh? There was a couple of redoubts there they might reach. Along with some old enemies.
“Could be anywhere,” J.B. said, slowing the wag while trying to decide in which direction to travel. His pocket compass said they were heading west, but without knowing where they were that meant less than nothing. And he couldn’t use the sextant until the sun rose or stars became visible.
“Keep going straight,” Ryan said, turning off the beam and placing the heavy device on the floorboards between his boots. “Often the front door of a redoubt points toward a predark city. Probably another of their safety features.”