Mildred and Doc pounded on the outside of the hull and yelled at him to cut it out
“J.B.,” Ryan said, “are you sure you know what you’re doing?
“I wasn’t” the Armorer admitted sheepishly, “but now I am.”
“Doc! Mildred!” Ryan called over his shoulder. “Get in here. We’re rolling!”
When they were safely inside and J.B. had dogged the turret hatch, Ryan shifted the APC into forward gear and pulled both steering-braking levers toward him. The Meteor’s tracks spun on the slick concrete, then caught hold.
“That looks like the only way out,” Ryan said, heading for an opening at the far end of the room. He braked to a spot at the entrance to a rectangular tunnel.
“Dark in there,” Jak commented, trying to squint ahead through the copilot’s ob slit.
Ryan searched the dash until he found the switch that controlled the halogen headlights. When he flicked them on, he could see that the tunnel sloped up and that it appeared to end in a solid wall after about fifty yards. He drove the Meteor into the passage anyway. About a third of the way along, the APC’s headlights illuminated a hard right turn, one of many tight switchbacks designed to deflect ground and air-burst radiation.
It was slow going to the exit because of all the turns.
The vanadium-steel doors had just swung into sight, reflecting the glare of the headlights at the end of a long, straight section of tunnel, when Jak nudged Ryan with an elbow, pointed at the control panel and said, “What mean?”
A single gauge light flashed on and off.
“Don’t know,”
They had traveled only a few more yards when the dash squealed a shrill warning and all the gauges started to blink. The Meteor bucked and chugged, then
died one hundred feet from the steel doors. It wouldn’t
restart.
“Fireblast!” Ryan swore as he set the brakes. “We’re going to have to walk, after all.”
Chapter Three
It was night and the weather was unsettled. Ryan and the others turned their backs to the wind that whipped across the barren mountaimop. A bank of storm clouds raced east, away from them. Chains of lightning flashed at the storm’s core, lighting up the ominous purple mass with bursts of sickly yellow. The ground at their feet still sizzled and popped as the weak acids from a recent chem rain percolated into the soil. Overhead, between the scattered, straggler clouds, the stars were bright and the bone white moon half-full.
Ryan, Mildred, Doc and Krysty fanned out and took up defensive positions around the doorway, guarding Jak’s back while he tapped the redoubt’s exit code into the keypad beside the double doors. The entrance closed with a hollow clang, and its internal bolts shot home.
Meanwhile, J.B. had his minisextant out and in the gauzy light was trying to figure out where they were.
“Well?” Ryan asked him softly.
“From the position of the moon, I’d say we’re somewhere east of the Shens, not far from the Lantic. Mebbe the Linas.”
“The lovely Carolinas,” Doc said. “That’s far from
the less than jolly England we’d just survived, and by the skin of our teeth. And it’s not all done with yet, I wager. But what a bittersweet trove of memories this part of the world brings to mind! Emily, Rachel, Jolyon and I had the pleasure of taking a brief holiday on the shore there one summer. So very long ago. I recall most clearly its distinctive, serene beauty, genteel folk and most gracious hospitality.”
“Well, now it’s just another rad-blasted hellhole,” Mildred said. “Smell the smoke?”
“How could I miss it?” the old man replied. “A stench to greet the nostrils of neophytes to hell.”
Ryan narrowed his gaze. Something else was in the wind, something more subtle: the scent of blood.
Human blood.
Though he knew it had to be an illusion, another flashback from the mat-trans nightmare, Ryan snorted to clear the rusty, metallic odor from the inside of his nose.
“Fires this way,” Jak said, heading into the wind. He climbed the mound of bare rock that framed one side of the ruin of a road.
Ryan and the others followed him to the crest, and from there they looked down over a wide valley. A dozen miles away, on the far side of the basin, a tight cluster of orange lights danced.