“Where’s Dad?”
“I don’t know, Dean.”
“He here?”
She really hadn’t thought about that possibility. After the last jump and the horrific experience of finding that she and the boy were all alone, it hadn’t occurred to her that Ryanor any of the others could be here.
“No way of knowing.”
“He might come, though? Or he might have gotten here before we did?”
Krysty shook her head doubtfully. “We don’t know how many redoubts like this were built, Dean.”
“Before skydark?”
“Yeah. I’ve lost count of the ones I’ve visited. Couple of dozen, easily. And loads more must have been destroyed by the nuking.”
“But they’re mostly well hid. They reckoned they was a hot pipe to survive.”
“Were.”
“What?”
Krysty managed a smile. “Like father, like son, Dean. You should say ‘they were’ and not ‘they was.’ That’s all. But, yeah, it’s true. They picked mainly isolated places for the redoubts and buried them deep. I suppose it’s a remote statistical chance that Ryan or one of the others might have ended up in the same one as we have.”
“Let’s go look.”
The clock showed 0914.
“Hey, wait up. Don’t touch that control lever. Not yet.”
Dean started to run up and down the aisles of desks, punching his fist in the air, brimming with excitement at the chance of being reunited with his father.
“Cool it down,” Krysty called. “Odds are dozens to one. No, they could be hundreds to one.” She noticed that the curly haired boy had skidded to a halt, retracing his steps and stopping in front of one of the screens. “What is it?”
“Hundreds to one?”
She caught the note in his voice. “What’s there, Dean? Is that a message from Ryan?”
“No. But come and look.”
“My name is Mildred Winonia Wyeth and” The message ended abruptly a few lines later, like someone had crept up behind Mildred and plunged a knife through her heart.
But somehow Krysty didn’t get the feeling that anything bad had happened to their friend. Just that she’d been interrupted while leaving word to anyone coming along later.
“How long ago?” Dean asked.
“Can’t tell.” She looked at the keyboard, wondering if it could magically give a clue about the time that the message had been typed.
“If Mildred got through here” Dean allowed the hopeful sentence to trail away.
“Then mebbe mebbe Ryan could also be in this redoubt.” Another thought came to her. “Or, he might still be making a jump here.”
Behind Krysty, the cherry-red chamber door whispered shut and a voice began to broadcast the warning that a matter transfer was taking place.
She drew the Smith amp; Wesson 640, conscious that the boy had pulled out his Browning Hi-Power.
They waited together.
Chapter Nine
It was just after 930 in the morning, and six out of the seven friends had arrived in the redoubt.
Krysty and Dean were helping Michael to recover from what had been a devastatingly unpleasant jump for him, supporting the teenager as he sat on the floor with his head between his knees. They knew that Mildred was somewhere ahead of them, but had no idea where she might be.
She had moved quickly away as soon as she realized that there was a matter transfer taking place, running until she reached the bottom of the elevator shaft.
J.B. was picking his way carefully along the main passage on the higher level, aware that there was at least one other person in the redoubt with him, but having no suspicion at all of who that might be.
The sickly meld of scents was an odd mixture of the familiar and the strange. There was the strong odor of a hospital, which he remembered having noticed in one redoubt at some other time and some other place. But there was also the unforgettable and overwhelming stench of death.
Set against these unseen factors was the fact that J.B. hadn’t yet come across any sign of life in the redoubt.
RYAN FOUND THAT PROGRESS was becoming slower and slower. It wasn’t that there was any visible threat to him, but his combat sense, honed for most of his life, screamed “danger” at him.