“This time I want you to take it up no more than three or four inches at a time. Stop it. Check for the word from me. Then repeat that. Slow and careful. Understand?”
“Sure.” The word was thrown over his shoulder, casual.
Ryan called him back, holding him by the shoulder, fingers digging into the boy’s flesh. “This is serious, Dean. One wrong move and we could all get to be dead. Now, do you understand what you have to do?”
“Yeah, Dad,” he replied, rubbing his shoulder, face flushed. “Sorry, but I did listen. Up three or four inches at a time. Hold it and check for the signal from you to go up a bit more.”
“Good.” Ryan ruffled his hair. “Just wanted to make sure you weren’t getting careless.”
“Want us back out of the way?” J.B. asked.
“No need for us all to take a risk. Dean should be safe enough at the side of the door. Up to me to move fast if it looks like the rocks are coming down.”
For a moment Krysty opened her mouth to argue, then saw the tense expression on Ryan’s face and closed it again.
Leading the way across the open space, toward the back wall, she stood in the hooded entrance to another of the side tunnels, waiting there with her Smith & Wesson 640 pistol cocked and ready in her right hand.
The rest of the group joined her, leaving father and son by the massive sec door.
“Ready?” Ryan asked, his voice softened and muffled by the dead air of the redoubt.
“Ready, Dad.”
“Start taking her up. Watch my hand. When I do this-” he made a cutting gesture with the edge of his palm, “-then you stop. Thumbs-up means go on again.”
“Got it.”
“Start.”
When the door was about eighteen inches in the air, Ryan signaled to his son to drop the green lever.
“J.B., come take a look. See what you reckon.”
The Armorer joined Ryan, kneeling, adjusting the spectacles on the bridge of his narrow, bony nose, and squinted under the door.
“Seem solid.”
“Partly concrete and partly bedrock. Could be the remains of the old redoubt.”
J.B. whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Must have been one triple-nuke blast. Blow the top clean off. Take it up a bit farther?”
Ryan gave the signal to Dean, who eased the sec door up until the bottom was about two and a half feet from the scarred concrete of the floor.
“Hold it there.” He crouched down, easing the rifle out of his way. Ryan could taste the air that Mildred had commented on, but he couldn’t agree with her about it being fresh. It was damp, smelling of decay and wood smoke.
“What you reckon, lover?” Krysty called.
“Raining. I can tell you that. Running down the rockfall. Also-” he looked at his rad counter, “-there’s a high yellow reading out there, shading into orange. Must’ve been a serious hot spot in the long winters.”
“Can we get out?” Dean had moved from his position by the control lever and was also staring at the tangled mass of concrete and stone.
His father straightened. “Don’t see why not. The couple in front of us must’ve made it. No sign of crushed bodies out there. Looks like the rocks fell clear of the door.”
The green lever was raised again, taking the sec door up to four and a half feet. “That’ll do,” Ryan said.
“WASHINGTON,” J.B. stated, squinting up into the late-afternoon drizzle, checking his tiny pocket sextant, its batteries-raided from a small techno armory years earlier-keeping it still functioning.
“State or city?” Doc asked, pulling his frock coat across his shoulders against the gray, misty rain that was falling steadily, blanking out visibility above two hundred yards.
“City.”
Krysty’s hair was already wet, clinging to her scalp, but she turned away and looked at the great pile of tumbled lichen-stained stone that had once been the top floors of a major redoubt. “Figure that those rocks hid the entrance to the complex, and stopped it being invaded. If this used to be Washington, then I guess there’s still likely to be a few people around.”