THE ROOM WAS DARK and filled with old death. The sick, stale smell of it had rotted into the metallic bulwarks around it for decades. Mildred Wyeth wrinkled her nose in disgust as she forced herself to enter the room, evidently a research lab of some kind. Computer equipment littered the floor, some of it arranged in long lines where several operators had monitored whatever information they’d been working on, while other, independent stages were arranged in a horseshoe shape to oversee various sections of the area.
Skeletons were scattered across the steel floor. Many of them were dressed in faded and worn U.S. Air Force uniforms. Mats had been laid, consisting of sleeping bags, parachutes and tarps, whatever had been at hand. More tarps were hung from thin steel cable that traversed the huge room at various points, forming small pockets of privacy.
She’d been in worse places, she told herself. But not much worse.
Unlike Ryan and the others of the group, Mildred was relatively new to the hardscrabble existence of Deathlands. She’d been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, a week before Christmas in 1964, which would have put her at over 130 years old by the calendar. However, Mildred hadn’t lived by a conventional calendar.
Three days after Christmas in the year 2000, she’d been back in her hometown for a social visit with her family and to undergo abdominal surgery for a possible ovarian cyst. Her body hadn’t reacted well to the anesthetic, and she’d nearly died before the medical team was able to successfully put her on ice in a cryogenic chamber. Ironically cryogenics had been her field of study and interest, and she’d been trapped by it for a hundred years before Ryan and his band had discovered her and freed her. Apparently the cryonic process had reversed the ill-effects of the anesthetic.
She held the Czech-built .38-caliber ZKR 551 pistol with serious conviction as she moved through the roomthe woman had been a champion pistol shooter. Her ebony skin was dappled with gleaming beads of perspiration, and she’d used a red bandanna to keep the beaded plaits of her hair back out of her face. Her fatigues were already clammy with sweat.
“All dead. Some die rad. Some die gunshot. Some knife.”
“I see that, too.” Mildred didn’t turn to face Jak Lauren, who’d come up behind her like a ghost.
Besides moving like a ghost, he looked like one, too. He was true albino. His long white hair fell to his shoulders, framing a scarred white face with feral ruby eyes. Youthfulness remained in the harsh features, but innocence had been stripped away by a life that had never known anything but violence and death. He resembled a mottled shadow standing in the darkness behind her, dressed in camou-style clothing with iridescent patches of brown and gray.
At less than five and a half feet, and barely over a hundred pounds, bred and blooded in the Cajun country in Louisiana, Jak was a pure product of the Deathlands. Even though she was bigger than the albino teenager and was more cautious on the surface, Mildred felt safe with him. Jak was death on the move, with hair-trigger reflexes.
He stood relaxed, the .357 Magnum Colt Python hanging lazily at the end of his right arm while he played his torch around the deathscape. “They separate. Live own life. Shut others out.”
Mildred swept her own torch around, taking in the twisted remains of the people who’d lived and died in the computer nerve center. “They must have thought they had something worth protecting,” she said. “Especially if they believed they had to protect it from the others in this compound.”
Jak faded away, not making a noise as he moved out to recon again.
Bone and concrete bits crunched under Mildred’s feet. She could move quietly by most standards, but the cavernous hollow picked up even the smallest sounds. Still, she felt chagrined to realize the only noises that were being amplified were hers.
A small, skeletal foot caught Mildred’s attention. A chill shuddered through her as she brought the light back to it. Then she closed her mind off to the momentary weakness and walled it away.
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