Nobody even bothered to comment on the snide remarks. All of their hopes had been pinned on finding something in storage. The last few redoubts had been emptied like this one.
“Hey, what’s this?” J.B. asked, peering behind a cabinet slightly angled away from the frosty wall. “Never found a second door before.”
Snapping his fingers, Ryan pointed about the room. The companions moved into defensive positions as the Deathlands warrior holstered his pistol and unslung his longblaster. They had once found sentinels hidden in the redoubts, armed robots designed to protect the military bases from exactly what the companions were doing.
“If its a tin can,” J.B. muttered, using their slang name for the machines while extending the wire stock of his Uzi and nestling it into his shoulder for greater stability, “aim for the mouth. Once it’s down, we can chill the machine easy.”
Holding the LeMat pistol firmly in one hand, Doc grabbed the hammer and pulled back until it clicked solidly in place. The big-bore blaster was deadly at close quarters. The soft lead miniball hit like a sledgehammer.
Ryan glanced at the others and held up three fingers. They nodded. He took a breath, counted to three and threw open the door, diving to the side.
Chapter Two
Everybody paused, braced for an attack as the door hit the wall with a crash. Only darkness was beyond. The light streaming in from their side illuminated only a small section of the concrete floor and several dark lumps of what could be anything.
Rummaging in her med kit, Mildred unearthed her old battered flashlight and squeezed the handle a few times to charge the battery inside the handle. The survivalist tool was a recent acquisition for her, a precious find, but was unfortunately already starting to show signs it was dying. It took more and more squeezing to get the light to work, and the weak beam was taking on a more pronounced yellowish tinge, marking the end of its service. The physician had a single spare bulb as a replacement, and then it was back to oil lanterns and candles.
She played the feeble beam about in the darkness, illuminating nothing. Then suddenly there was an audible crackle of electricity, and the room beyond exploded with light as banks of halogen bulbs in the ceiling came to brilliant life.
“Holy shit,” Jak said, lowering his .357 Python.
“Eureka,” Doc shouted happily. “The eagle has landed!”
The tiny room was full of gun cases and ammo boxes.
Piles and piles of them. Rows of lockers lined the back wall.
“Excellent. There has got to be food here,” Mildred said in delight, and she started forward, but then abruptly stopped.
Ryan nodded in approval as J.B. moved among the boxes and crates looking for booby traps, his expert hands touching nothing but caressing the air itself as if deciding where to lay the traps himself.
“Clear,” the Armorer announced after a while. “Come and get it.”
Shouldering his weapon, Cawdor whistled for Krysty and Dean to join them as the others converged on the supplies, ripping open boxes and cases in grim concentration.
“What was this?” Krysty asked, appearing in the open doorway behind them. “Somebody’s private stash?”
“Not know,” Jak stated, placing aside a box full of Claymore mines. “Dean, look for grens.”
The boy rushed forward. “On it!”
Sliding his Uzi out of the way, J.B. went straight to a wall locker and began to rearrange the boxes inside. He figured this had to have been the stash of a Navy SEAL or Green Beret team. There were military-style disposable garrotes, the kind that locked once you pulled them closed and couldn’t be opened or removed without a knife. Excellent stuff. He hadn’t seen its like in decades.
Under a pile of flak jackets was a flat box lined with screw-on acoustical silencers for U.S. Army Colt .45 pistols, but no pistols. However, there was an unlocked steel box the size of a shoebox packed with oily cloths and a good dozen Ruger .44 derringers. Very illegal blasters in predark days, and he wondered how the base commander got his hands on them. A squat red plastic box bearing the emblem of the Air Force contained a Veri-Pistol and some flares. Useless.