James Axler – Deathlands 35 – Skydark

“There’s nothing but open ground between us and the bunker,” Doc said. “We’ll never make it that way.”

“Let’s try it farther up,” J.B. suggested.

They put the bunker well behind them before they turned, following an erosion scar that led toward Willie ville. They crept to within 150 feet of the berm. As they advanced the last thirty feet, they saw something strange, right under their noses.

The dirt was suddenly a different color and texture.

J.B. brushed the surface earth aside. It was damp underneath. “Somebody’s been burrowing,” he said.

Ahead of them, at the head of the scar where it intersected the ridge, was a hole. It was less than three feet across and angled slightly down.

J.B. approached the entrance and peered in.

Mildred crawled up beside him and stared into the blackness. “What do you think?” she said.

“It’s recent work,” he told her. “From the look of it, it could be our stickies trying to sneak in under the berm.”

“They dug all this out overnight?” Mildred said. “They must be digging fools.”

“The inside of the tunnel has got some kind of adhesive smeared all over it,” J.B. said. “It’s set up like concrete. Man, that’s a neat trick. It means they don’t need to shore up the hole with wood or anything as they go. Speeds things, big time.”

“They might not be done with their digging,” Doc cautioned. “They could still be working somewhere inside.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” J.B. said.

WITH MURCHISSON behind him and sec men on either side, Ryan was marched out of the elevator and onto the twenty-fifth floor of the hotel. He didn’t kid himself. His chances for survival were looking grim. He’d been cut off from his friends and his weapons, and he was sorely outnumbered by guards with blasters. In the

back of his mind, he held out the hope that maybe he’d still get one chance to chill the baron.

A single full-force kick to the heart would do it

As if reading his mind, Murchisson stopped him before he was taken into Elijah’s presence. He bent and clamped a pair of leg restraints on Ryan’s ankles. “Behave yourself now,” the sec man warned.

Elijah’s penthouse was furnished in the same grotesque style as the dining-hall floor below. He had looted the other hotel suites for their “art” and decorator touches. Everything that the baron could get his hands on, he had crammed into the rooms, the halls, the corners. For him quantity was the hallmark of taste.

The sec men ushered Ryan through a wide but densely cluttered living room. The one-eyed warrior saw the G-12 case less rifles and other gear piled in a corner-J.B.’s beloved fedora was on top of the heap. The sliding doors to the balcony were open.

“Outside,” Murchisson ordered.

Ryan hobbled out onto the patio. The whole Elijah clan was there. The baron, his granddaughters/wives and his great-granddaughters/daughters sat on lawn chairs, enjoying the sun in matching straw hats. Some sec men and toadies were crouched at one end of the patio, doing something along the steel-pipe railing. Heavy sandbags and a huge coil of nylon rope sat at their feet

“Great day for a public chilling, huh?” Elijah said, standing and opening his arms to the blue sky. “Guess there aren’t going to be any stickles in the audience.

though. You sure struck out there, Cawdor. Mebbe you just dreamed you saw them?”

Ryan stared out over the broad vista. He knew he hadn’t dreamed them. He knew they could be hidden out there, easy; hell, they could even be looking up at him right now.

Elijah’s wives were whispering to one another, looking at Ryan and giggling into their hands.

“Sure seems a shame to waste a good-looking man like that, Poppadaddy,” Roonie-Two said. “Specially when he could die giving pleasure to some deserving girl.”

“Girls,” Poonie-Two corrected her.

“And I suppose you’ve got some particular girls in mind?” Elijah said.

All three blond heads nodded.

“Well, Cawdor, what do you say? Want to croak in the saddle?”

Ryan looked at the girls. They were showing off for him, sticking their tongues out, swishing their hips back and forth. It made him want to laugh. According to Baron Elijah, Roonie-Two, Poonie-Two and Toonie-Two were supposed to be the pinnacle of Deathlands’ pure-norm genetics. But they were so inbred that they couldn’t function, except as sex beasts and brood mares. Ryan decided that was just the kind of chain-jerking that the baron got off on nowadays.