Adrian realized with mounting panic that he’d been followed into the darkand now into the light. The sound of the overheated explosion had been catnip to his visitors. Stickies. Six of them.
He ducked, hiding. If the underground chamber was filled with freezies, the crazy muties would probably burn them, too.
Adrian laughed bitterly. At least he could console himself with the sad realization that no matter how bad it got before the end, at least he wouldn’t die alone.
“Wonder if you poor bastards start to drip and melt?” he asked aloud.
No answer was forthcoming.
THE EGGSHELL WHITE control-room door had opened into a much larger room filled with the missing comp banks and other hardware normally associated with a working mat-trans unit. Ryan’s keen eye raked over the room, looking for any signs of fire. The room appeared to be intact and unoccupied. All of the screens were flickering. No flashing red lights or warning systems had eruptedyet.
J.B. glanced down at the button radiation counter he wore on his lapel. “No indications of rad leakage in the area,” he reported.
Another door at the end of the room waited. Next to the door was a sec keypad to keep out the unwanted and unauthorized.
“Look alive, people,” Ryan said. “Appears the gateway has been uncompromised. We can still jump out of here, or we can take this door and see what’s causing the smoke.”
Doc was now on his feet. “I regret the lack of choices, my dear friend. I prefer two optionsthe lady or the tiger.”
J.B. laid an open palm against the door. “Doesn’t feel hot,” he said. “Whatever’s burning on the other side hasn’t gotten out of hand yet.”
“Guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look, would it?” Krysty said.
“Guess not,” Ryan replied, before reaching down and pressing the short sequence of numbers. However, instead of the door sliding up into the ceiling or into one of the walls, it merely gave a loud clicking sound.
“What was that?” Dean asked.
“Door unlocked,” Mildred said. “I’d been wondering if the redoubt codes would work here.”
Ryan pushed the door carefully, allowing it to swing open into the next room. Smoke billowed in from the burning walls and furniture inside the new room, which appeared to be a kind of waiting area or lounge. The haze in the air limited his visibility. Ryan brought up his blaster and readied it to fire, then took a single step inside.
A stickie, dressed in a dirty black pullover turtle-neck and jeans, staggered out of the smoke with both arms outstretched, in a mockery of a vaunted embrace.
They looked at each other, man and mutie, brothers through a distorted looking glass.
“Youyou’re a norm,” the stickie said slowly as the information began to sink into the wrinkled morass the mutant called a brain.
“And you’re chilled, asshole,” Ryan retorted before pulling the trigger of the SIG-Sauer.
Chapter Five
The single shot of the SIG-Sauer was explosively loud within the confines of the underground network of labs, so loud that Alton Adrian easily heard the shot from where he was hiding inside a silver steel entryway outside of the main cryogenics laboratory.
“Skrag! One of the muties must be packing heat,” he whispered to himself as a chill went down his spine and settled in the small of his back. A stickie with a blaster was triple-bad news. Weapons were hard enough to find in that part of Deathlands.
Blasters were hard to obtain and costly to maintain. Even with a blaster, finding ammunition was even harder unless you had the extra jack to pay top price. Most of the stickies Adrian had ever heard of or seen went for a more basic approach to offensethey used their own substantial strength and incredible mutant abilities to attack their foes bare-handed or with clubs.
Taking a deep breath, he warily slid out of the cool entryway and crawled on his hands and knees down the corridor. The smoke was thick there, and by staying low he could breathe easier and have better visibility.
He paused, wondering if he was indeed heading in the right direction, when more sounds of violence came crashing around the corner less than fifteen feet away from where he was crouched. Already he missed the cool of the room near the freezie chambers.