Ryan’s reply was drowned by the boom of the field gun. This time the gunners had
overcompensated and the massive ball, pitching low and bouncing, narrowly missed
the far end of the great door.
“Next time they’ll get it right, Ryan,” said J.B.
He stopped at the sonorous grating that came from the top and bottom of the huge
gateway into the Redoubt. For a second of frozen time nothing happened, then a
dark slit appeared at the right edge, near where Doc was still pulling a lever
inside the panel.
“Inside!” yelled Ryan, as soon as the crack was wide enough for them to slip
through.
Henn went first, then Finnegan, struggling to squeeze into the darkness. Okie
and Krysty were next. Hun waved at Ryan to go, but he gestured angrily with the
stubby barrel of his gun and she ran in.
“Now us, Doc. You done real good.”
As soon as the old man released the control, the door stopped its movement.
Behind them Ryan was aware of angry screams and shouts as the Indians saw their
prey disappearing into the mountain. Doc vanished through the gap and Ryan
followed him in, pausing to look back. He was shocked to see how many attackers
there were now. Better than a hundred men, all racing toward them. He gave a
quick burst that sent six or seven tumbling like disjointed dolls, blood
bursting into the cold air and smoking on the ground from the scattered corpses.
“You can close it up, Doc, right?”
The yellowed eyes turned incuriously to him, veiled as though beeswax lay across
them, and Ryan glimpsed the closeness of Doc’s insanity. But the threads held
together a while longer.
“Indeed. There’s the panel.”
“How come them bastard mongrels didn’t get this open?” asked Krysty.
“Code, my dear titian girl. A simple three five two to enter and a two five
three to shut her up tight again. Like so.” He waved his hand like a magician
pulling off a particularly clever trick, although this particular audience did
not know what a magician was.
Doc’s answer raised a whole mass of questions, but now was not the time. Ryan,
with the door grinding tight shut behind him, had a chance to take in their
surroundings. Of all the Stockpiles he had seen, this one was the largest and
the strangest. Others had been what the name suggested: places where enormous,
even staggering, quantities of food and supplies were stored. Like mighty
warehouses, packed with… who knew what?
But this was different.
Dim lights came into hesitant flickering life and Ryan figured they had tripped
some kind of beam, still active, perhaps of uranium, that switched on the
electrics of the place.
Sometimes you found corpses. Mummified and dried, like the husks of cocoons
after the butterfly’s gone. The air tasted familiar to him from breaking into
similar establishments, sealed for a century. Dry and flat, with a hint of iron.
“There another way out of here, Doc?” asked J.B., reloading the Steyr.
“No.” There came a cackle of laughter that often signaled one of Doc’s period of
craziness. “Not like you mean, Mr. Dix. Oh, dear me, no.”
“This ain’t like no Stockpile I ever seen,” muttered Hunaker, glancing around at
the huge curved roof. The room was in fact an immense tunnel, the ribbed metal
ceiling like a cylinder above them that curved away into a dense mass of largely
empty shelving.
“That, ma’am, is because it is not a Stockpile. Oh, there were many of those,
most still hidden beneath swamps or earth slips or hot spots. But this is a
Redoubt. There are many of these also, but I do not believe many have ever been
discovered. They would appear valueless to those who do not know.” He shook his
head, the stringy hair bobbing about his scrawny shoulders. “And those who did
know are so long gone.”
“Make sense, Doc. We’re trapped in here. If that’s the only door and those sons
of bitches are waiting for us… then how do we get out? Are there food and arms
in here?”
“No. Perhaps some water, but it will be brackish and foul. Perhaps some eater