“Enough.”
“Sure. Take that slut’s part, Ryan. Look after your bawdy-house hooker.”
“I said enough, Okie. There’s eight of us here. Either we watch each other’s
backs or we can all be dead. It’s not a fuckin’ game, lady.”
“Mr. Cawdor!” shouted Doc, pointing with a tremulous finger down the corridor.
It was as he’d guessed. The passage was split into sections, each separated by
retractable armor-plated bulkheads. One of them was dropping from the ceiling
like an executioner’s ax, bisecting the corridor. Before any of them could move,
it settled solidly in place on the floor with a metallic clang.
“Bastard!” spat Ryan, spinning around to see precisely what he’d expected.
Twenty paces or so in front of them, another door was falling, inexorably
sealing them to an exitless part of the complex. And it looked as if the
bulkheads were made of some vanadium alloy that would resist their plastic
explosives and grenades.
“No bombs,” pleaded J.B., looking quickly around the group. “The concussion
could kill us.”
There was a dreadful moment of tension. Everyone in the party except Krysty and
Doc had often put their lives on the line. On the war wags, ambushes and traps
were part of everyday life. The best chance of escape was almost always in the
first paralyzing breaths. Everyone knew that.
Now all of them moved and turned like caged animals, fingers white on triggers,
eyes raking the walls and floor and ceiling for some hint of an escape route.
But the only marks that sullied the smooth whiteness were the pockmarks where
Okie had wasted the vid camera.
It was a frenetic ballet of nerves. Knowing that everyone was riding the knife
edge, Ryan called for calm. “Easy. Easy. Whoever it is, they’ve got us cold.”
A voice reverberated from a hidden speaker, so distorted that it was difficult
to tell whether it was male or female, young or old. But the message was clear.
“All dressed up to kill… but look who’s goin’ to die. Guns down, slow and easy.
Hands up on heads. You have ten seconds, then I let the gas in. It’ll kill you
in less’n half a minute.”
Ryan spotted another camera near the top of the bulkhead in front of them and
guessed the speaker was linked to it. Which, he realized, was a useless bit of
information.
“Quickly!” the voice barked, changing then, frighteningly, to a childish
whisper. “Do it. Game’s done. Ally, ally oxen free. Ally, ally oxen free.”
Ryan put his guns on the stone floor and placed his hands on his head. The
others followed.
Chapter Two
AFTER THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST of 2001, Russia ceased to exist. The U.S.S.R.
vanished overnight and, in sixty searing minutes, the purging flames of the
brief war that ended all wars destroyed every single Russian city and industrial
complex. Every armaments factory and missile base, every port and bridge, was
nuked. The destruction was total.
In places—particularly the farthest recesses of the north and east in the
devastated Kamchatka Peninsula, in Siberia and the parts of old Russia near
North America-—the nuclear winter lingered just as in other regions of the
globe, the leaden skies and bitter cold had reigned for a generation.
To survive in temperatures that rarely rose above five degrees required a brutal
adaptation. The trees of the taiga were destroyed; only a few stunted, mutated
pines were left in millions of acres. Most of the wildlife had succumbed as an
almost universal death spread across the North. What animal life survived became
mutated like the trees.
And the children of the people who survived, many of them were born mutated like
the animals.
The peasants in the Russian hamlet of Ozhbarchik knew little of living. What
they understood was how to barely exist. They understood how to maintain the
breath in their scrawny bodies on a diet of dried fish and the occasional lucky
find of the carcass of a small mammal that the wolves had abandoned. Beyond
that, there was watery milk from the village’s four rack-boned cows, and an
endless diet of potatoes, turnips and other root vegetables. One of the peasants
owned a few chickens, and once every few weeks found a tiny egg among the