Ryan squeezed her shoulder. “Good to have you along, Mildred. Things you know. Likely nobody else in all Deathlands has your knowledge.”
“We staying here?”
“Awhile. Supper. One night.”
“Then?”
“Sleep light and walk careful.”
“One of Trader’s?”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah.”
Dean suddenly appeared in the doorway, his face flushed with excitement. “Come on, you two. Joaquin’s about to open the main doors.”
IT WAS LIKE an air lock, a small room set between the double sets of doors, the outer, looking almost as if they were made of sec steel, with massive bolts and triple locks. The inside doors, where Joaquin and the others waited, weren’t quite as impenetrable, but they were still solid, with steel bolts and a double sec lock.
“The place is built rather more like a fortress than a zoological collection,” Doc observed.
“Right.” J.B. looked around the anteroom. “Dark night! What are you trying to keep out of here, Joaquin?”
“Not trying to keep anyone out.”
“Then why.” The Armorer nodded. “Yeah. I get it. Not stopping anything from coming in here. The doors are to stop anything getting out.”
“Right.” He pushed them open.
The first thing Ryan noticed was the smell, a bitter, acrid stench. The second thing he noticed was the noise.
Chapter Twenty-One
The smell of the baron’s collection was vaguely familiar to Ryan. It was only afterward, in the calm of remembering, that it came to him.
There’d once been a time when he’d holed up on a ledge at the back of a large cave, not far from the wilderness of Canyon de Chelly, down on the Colorado Plateau. A combination of ill luck had left him ill clothed and unarmed, and he’d stayed up on the ledge for four days and nights, unable to come down for the family of mountain lions who regarded the cave as home. They couldn’t quite reach the ledge, no matter how they tried.
And by the Lord, they tried!
The smell of that cavern was graven in Ryan’s nose forever and a day-bitter, gripping the back of the throat, overlaid with a feral taint of fearsome hatred.
The noise wasn’t like anything that he’d ever heard before, not like anything that any of them had ever heard.
“By stone and water!” Emma exclaimed her golden eyes rolling in their sockets as she stumbled. She would have fallen to the damp stones if it hadn’t been for Jak’s lightning reflex in catching her.
“Affects some women like that,” Joaquin said. “Best take her out of here into the fresh air. It only gets worse. You need a hand, son?”
“No. Manage.”
He picked the woman up in his arms as though she weighed only feathers and carried her effortlessly out through the double set of doors.
“Strong little bastard, ain’t he? Can’t be much over a hundred pounds, skinny-dipped,” Joaquin said admiringly. “I never seen hair like his. Noticed that Baron Sharpe saw it, as well.”
“Let’s get on,” Krysty said, wrinkling her nose at the fetid air.
“Fine. Most people see this, they don’t like to talk much. Most of things in here sort of speak for themselves. Don’t need labels or nothing. But if you got questions.”
None of them had any.
RYAN’S MEMORY of that low, dimly lighted building was confused and blurred.
If you lived and traveled in Deathlands, then you were constantly aware of the rich variety of mutated life that the nukecaust and the long winters had left behind. But it was a bizarre and unsettling experience to see so many extreme genetic deviations all gathered in that single building.
One thing that crossed Ryan’s mind was the extreme danger that had to have been endured to capture some of the more lethal examples and safely cage them.
There was the scorpion, nearly a yard long, its barbed sting as long as a man’s finger. It sat crouched in a stone-filled container, lined with wired glass for security.
A colony of red ants was shown in an earth-filled cross-sectional tank, the smallest of which was two inches long.
Several snakes, the largest of them a mutie rattler, fully twelve feet in length, lay coiled in its cage, seeming asleep, the remains of several rabbits rotting near it. Krysty moved close, and it reared and struck at her with murderous ferocity, the blunt head striking the armored glass like a sledgehammer, leaving a slimy trail of milky poison eighteen inches long.