“Think they were herons or something like that. Long legs and big wings.”
There was a smaller section farther back, past the store that held the containers of chemicals. A corroded shortwave radio was set on a tilting desk, with a corpse seated at it, slumped forward, earphones on his head over the earless skull. One bony hand was reaching for the controls.
Ryan pointed wordlessly at the small-caliber bullet hole through the back of the head and the splinters of dark brown bone that were scattered all over the desk.
“Took him from behind,” Krysty said. “Probably calling for help.”
Ryan moved across the room, the heels of his combat boots crunching among the shards of dusty broken glass that covered the floor.
“There’s that big tank I saw from yesterday,” he said. “Could be gasoline.”
“No use to the natives. Bet there’s not a wag within five hundred miles of here.”
“Still”
The tank was twenty feet long, cylindrical on top, twelve feet in circumference. It had once been painted a rich deep orange, but nearly a century of tropical humidity had reduced it to a watery yellow, the black-stenciled letter-and-number code now almost totally illegible.
Ryan and Krysty made their silent way out of the military catacomb, into the bright sunlight again. They paused, drinking in the fresh warm air, after the strange dank chill of the concrete buildings.
“Look.” Krysty’s word was hardly a whisper.
A magnificent jaguar, its glossy coat as black as midnight, stepped out of the wall of green on the eastern flank of the base, where the razor wire had fallen into total decay. Its great head turned and looked at the two human invaders of its domain, its golden eyes blank and unfathomable.
“What a fabulous animal,” Ryan breathed, hand on the butt of the SIG-Sauer. “See why the natives worship it, can’t you? Walking death.”
“Looks uneasy, lover.”
The jaguar kept looking over its shoulder, behind it, as though it were being pursued. The tip of its long tail was brushing back and forth over a carpet of dead leaves, and its sharp ears were pricked.
“Slavers,” Ryan said.
“Something bothering it,” Krysty agreed.
A crowd of gibbering monkeys appeared, swinging through the highest branches, chattering angrily at the jaguar and the man and woman below them.
But in moments they were gone, moving westward.
After a few seconds the big predator followed them, padding silently off and disappearing into the striped darkness of the forest.
Ryan shook his head. “Something going on,” he said. “Seems to be rattling the whole forest. Could be slavers, I guess. Keep on double red.”
He walked over to the yellow tank, squatting by a round handle, trying to turn it and failing.
“Want a hand, lover?”
“Yeah. Rusted shut for a hundred years. Get both hands on it and give it your best shot.”
“Want me to use the Gaia power?”
“No!” His eyes burned into her.
“All right, all right.”
“You know what it does to you, using that power. This isn’t the time or the place.”
“Fine.” Krysty held up both hands. “You want to do this yourself, Ryan?”
He stepped back, banging a fist hard on the side of the tank, which resounded with a sullen clanging noise. “Full of something, isn’t it?”
“Gasoline?”
He stopped and braced himself against the handle again. The muscles knotted in his forearms, chest and shoulders as he put all of his strength into it. “Moving,” he grunted.
“Hold it.” Krysty knelt and put a finger under the faucet where a thin trickle of oily liquid was seeping out. She touched it to her nose. “Yeah. Gas all right. Shame we don’t have the wags to use it.”
Ryan tightened the handle again, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Predark gasoline’s worth more than its weight in jack back in Deathlands,” he said. “Modern rough-processed stuffs nothing like as good. Doesn’t compare.”
“Think the slavers might have wags, lover?”
“I somehow doubt it. Terrain like this, the highways must be long gone and overgrown.”
“Guess so.”
“Trader would’ve loved finding this. Times he said that only himself and Gert Wolfram and the mutie they called the Magus were ever any good at finding the old gas.”