Ryan hunched his shoulders protectively, remembering the dried-out corpses in the nameless ville of his nightmare.
Dean had gone over to examine the doors, sniffing at them, like a hunting dog, trying to catch any kind of scent from beyond them. “Nothing,” he said. “Just the same sort of dusty smell there is in here.”
Ryan joined his son, resting his hand on his shoulder while he carried out the same test. “Agreed.”
Krysty glanced across at that moment, seeing yet again how incredibly alike father and son were-the same sharp, narrow face, with the deep-set dark eyes, and the same mane of untidy, tumbling, curly black hair. Even in the eleven-year-old, there was the same air of coiled menace.
“There’s gum and candy wrappers on the floor,” Mildred called. “Looks like this one was hit hard and early.”
“Did all get out?” Jak prowled about the underground bunker like a caged cat. “Go see?”
“Soon,” Ryan called.
Doc had also been nosing around. He stopped in front of a comp screen that showed several lines of white type, set against a black background.
“Do come and take a look at this,” he said quietly. “Most extraordinary.”
They gathered around him, peering at the dust-filmed screen. Doc read out the message.
“String of letters and numbers to start with. ‘NORDEF albase. Top Urgent. Action triple soonest.’ How I hate this journalese gobbledygook that soldiers and scientists love so much. Why can they not use normal speech?”
“Rest is simple, Doc,” J.B. said, leaning over the old man’s shoulder.
“Right. ‘Red angels in flight heading from NNE. Their ETA if not intercepted by Star Wars missiles is three hours and forty-two minutes. Personnel vectors A thru E immediate evacuation. All others seal all external and internal ports. Nuclear generators all activated. Prepare long closed-down wait. Action immediate. Not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.’ Then it gives that string of letters and numerals once more.”
“Be a kind of authorization code, Doc,” Mildred suggested. “Let them know it was genuine and not a gremlin somewhere in the machine.”
“Very probably. I remember that the whitecoats who ran Overproject Whisper were never happier than when their eager little snouts were immersed in manuals of electronic coding.”
“Read the rest, Doc,” Ryan said.
“But of course. Where was I? The code. ‘Repeat orders for vectors A thru E to evacuate soonest. Rest remain under Operation Snopak conditions.'” He paused. “Then all it says is ‘God bless you all and God bless America.’ That’s it.”
“Like message from grave,” Jak said quietly.
Mildred looked solemn. “That isn’t dated, but it must’ve been just before the last war broke out. The Russian missiles were triggered, and our retaliation would also have been under way. All too late for anyone to stop.” She shook her head. “Even if anyone had wanted to stop.”
Ryan turned back toward the massive vanadium-steel sec door. “So, did they do like they were told? The mat-trans section is usually buried deepest. If it’s got all these cracks and stuff, what kind of damage are we going to find up above? Guess we’d best go see.”
THEY TOOK the usual precautions. Dean operated the green lever at the side of the door, lifting it to set the powerful gearing system into action. There was the hiss of hydraulics and then the distant, muffled sound of the nuke-powered engine starting to raise the sec barrier.
The rest of them all stood away, blasters readied, while Ryan himself flattened on the floor, the movement tugging a little at the arrow wound in his back. “Hold it,” he said, when the bottom of the sec door was only three or four inches from the floor. “Anything?” J.R asked.
Ryan didn’t answer for several long seconds, studying what he could see under the door, trying to decide what it was. “Up another couple of inches, Dean,” he said finally, waiting for the door to lift higher. “That’ll do.”
“What is it, lover?”
“Couldn’t be sure whether it was just some discarded rags of clothing. It isn’t.”
THE SIGHT OF THE BODY revived the memory of Ryan’s nightmare. It was virtually certain that the man-facial hair confirmed the sex of the corpse-had died close to a hundred years earlier, probably within hours of skydark.