DEAN REACHED our to press the Start button on Shield of Freedom.
Chapter Eight
Ryan felt the force of the blast before he heard the familiar muffled crump. It ruffled its hot fingers through his hair, tightening the skin across his cheekbones, sucking some of the air from the corridor.
There hadn’t even been time to shout a warning. Though the open area of the redoubt was relatively restricted, the games room was still some distance away from the small study-bedroom.
He had been the fastest to react to the passage in the diary of the long-dead woman. His mind seized instantly on the potential horror of the news of the planned booby trap, a potential that he guessed, in that heart-stopping moment, might well have been realized.
Two implode grens, in a confined space.
Ryan had seen the results of that kind of detonation, and he could already visualize what they would find in the remains of the room.
There would be a single pile of mangled flesh, stripped clear off shards of raw bone.
The muffled crump seemed to fill his ears, and he saw smoke and debris scattered across the corridor just in front of him. There were cries from behind him but he ignored them. “Dean! Jak!”
“Over here, Dad!”
The boy’s voice was strong, though shock and fear had given it a high, thin ragged edge. Ryan slowed from a powering run, peering through the haze, his boots crunching over splinters of broken glass. “Here.”
Now he saw them. Dean was on his hands and knees, one arm around Jak. The albino had blood smeared across his forehead, but he was obviously conscious, steadying himself against the wall of the corridor.
“Implodes,” Jak said, coughing in the dust. “Wired up to one of the games machines.”
“We know,” Ryan replied.
Dean, deafened by the grenades, looked puzzled, shaking his head. Ryan noticed a trickle of blood was inching from the boy’s left ear.
But Jak heard him. “How you know?”
Krysty and the others were grouped around Ryan. The air stank with chemical fumes from the explosion, and they could all hear the faint crackle of flames from one of the wrecked machines inside the games room.
“Just been reading a sort of diary left over from predark. Woman who worked here. Mildred was telling us all it said when she came on a reference to them sabotaging one of the games. Ready to catch Ruskies if they invaded. That was the fear, just before skydark.”
“It was called Shield of Freedom,” J.B. said. “They wired up grens to it.”
“I was just going to start playing a game called Shield of Freedom, Dad,” Dean said, standing up unsteadily, accepting a hand from his father. His voice was unnaturally loud, showing that his hearing was still badly hit by the booby trap.
“How did you know, Jak?” Trader asked. “You never heard us shouting a warning. Bombs went off too quickly. How come they didn’t hit you?”
Jak was also on his feet, shrugging off an offer of assistance from Abe. “Was sitting down while Dean played. Could see back of machine. Saw two scarlet-and-blue grens. Wired up. Knew were implodes. Grabbed boy and out in corridor, around corner. Just in time.”
Dean was watching Jak’s lips, fascinated. “I can’t hear him,” he announced to the group in general. “Is he saying he spotted the bombs while he was sitting down? Never saw anyone move so fast in all my life. If it hadn’t been for Jak, I wouldn’t have had any life left, would I?” Tears trembled in his dark brimming eyes as the effects of the shock started to get to him. “He dragged me around the corner, away from the worst of the blast.”
Ryan clasped the hand of the albino. “Thanks, Jak. Owe you one.”
Jak grinned. “Owe you plenty, Ryan.”
Mildred looked concernedly at Dean, then spoke to his father. “I know someone who might just about fall down if he isn’t got back to where he can rest and have something hot and sweet to drink.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “Fact is, Mildred, I reckon we could all follow that idea.”