The firearms alone would have told their story, Kalashnikovs and M-16 rifles, the badges and rank markings on the uniforms merely confirming it.
Most of the leathery bodies showed bullet wounds, with broken ribs or fractured skulls, the uniforms often clotted with black patches of ancient blood. Two or three of them were still locked in the throes of hand-to-hand combat, their corpses tangled together, with rusting bayonets buried in dark brown bones.
J.B. looked around him. “Way I read this, the fighting was to the wire. Knives, eye to eye. Like the Ruskies were right on the edge of winning control of the base. Then I figure reinforcements arrived in the choppers and the tanks, and the surviving defenders were saved. But so much damage was done that they evacuated the place on the spot.”
“Leaving the dead?” Doc asked. “Surely they would have removed their own casualties!”
Ryan shook his head. “Not if skydark was right around the corner, Doc. Little we know about the last week before the nukings, and the months straight afterward, points to a bolt out of the blue. Followed by total chaos. Lightning from a clear sky. Ruskies attacking way out here must’ve been part of a desperate contingency plan. By the time this firefight took place, the odds are that Newyork and Moscow and all the other big cities were already cosmic dust and rad ash. No time to think about bodies.”
“No time to think, period,” Mildred added.
“Worth checking out the rest of the place?” Ryan asked.
“Why not?” J.B. looked along the corridor, past a half-dozen scattered corpses. “Could be they pulled out so fast they left stuff behind. Stuff we might be able to use.”
Chapter Sixteen
The only part of the entire base that hadn’t been destroyed during the fighting was a stores section at the rear end of the main building. It looked as though the skirmish hadn’t reached it, as the walls were free from shrapnel or bullet damage. And there were no corpses at the back.
“Supplies and Armament,” Dean read slowly, stumbling over the last word. “Means there’s blasters and food, doesn’t it, Dad? Could anything still be okay after all the years and the heat and the damp and all?”
Ryan looked at his son. “State of the blasters we’ve seen means there aren’t likely to be any left here still fireable. And I doubt there’s eatable food left after close on a hundred years. So don’t lift your hopes.”
Rain Flower was now so bold that she had attached herself to Jak, hanging on to his arm, staring nervously up into his face for a hint of a smile.
“We wait outside,” the teenager said to Ryan. “Get some fresh air. This place stinks of death.”
“Think I’ll join you,” Krysty told him. “Hate these predark tombs.”
The other five went on forward, pushing through the door that led to the last part of the base. The door was stiff, creaking on unoiled hinges, and the air inside tasted of long stillness and inexorable decay.
J.B. stopped in the doorway, peering into the dimly lit interior. “Five gets ten there isn’t going to be anything worth picking from here.”
“There seems to be a store of chemicals over on these shelves,” Doc called. “I rather suspect that they might have been used in mining or some other sort of industrial research.”
J.B. went over to join the old man, taking off his glasses and polishing them on his sleeve. “Yeah. Iron oxide. Barium peroxide powder. Could be right, Doc.” He stopped and repolished the lenses, his face suddenly alight with an unholy excitement. “Hey! Now let’s see if they’ve also got some Yeah, they do. And how’s about”
Ryan left him muttering to himself, going on to browse around the rest of the stores area. Ants had gotten into some of the boxes, crumbling them into dust, leaving the weapons inside exposed to the atmosphere.
Dean and Mildred wandered with him, staring at the lined shelves in the hope that they might somehow hold something worthwhile.
“No good,” Ryan said. “Waste of time. Let’s get outside with the others.”
Mildred agreed. “Thought there might possibly have been some sealed first-aid kits that could have given us something useful. Like you say, it was all too long ago.”