“Be more careful, you old coot,” Mildred chided.
“I will, madam.” Doc smiled, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. “Next time, I shall have you touch it for me.”
Once again, the motor tried to start and died.
“Homemade gateway, jerry-built power plant,” Ryan growled, studying the control panel on the turbine and flipping a cutoff switch. Several weakly glowing indicators faded away into darkness. “Hell, we’re lucky we ever made it here alive.”
Ambling to the console, Jak went to the fuel tank and sniffed. “Only gas?” he asked pointedly. “Or shine okay?”
Alcohol, now there was a good idea. Ryan rubbed his unshaven chin. Most wags ran on some sort of alcohol these days. Anybody could make that.
“Well?” Ryan asked.
“No, doesn’t have to be gas,” J.B. replied with a crooked grin. “Shine should do the job, too. This isn’t a car motor, but an emergency generator. Turbine, not pistons. Designed to run on just about anything fluid that burns.”
“We have this,” Mildred said, hauling a glass bottle into view from her med kit.
Ryan took the Molotov cocktail and shook it gently. The brownish fluid inside the bottle frothed slightly, but didn’t foam.
“Good. No soap mixed in,” he said.
“This’ll work fine,” J.B. said as he took the bottle, but then he frowned. “Just not enough. I’d guess that we need a full gallon to recharge the system. This is less than a quart. Nowhere near what we need.”
“But a good start,” Doc stated confidently. “We can make the rest. Eh, my dear Jak?”
“Sure. Shine no prob. But need time. Week to turn mash. Need copper pipe for distill. Sugar no prob. Jungle got lots fruit for sweetening.”
“It does not have to taste good.”
“Sweetening makes to turn faster.”
“Ah.”
“Anybody got a better plan?” Ryan asked the group at large. “Okay then, we build a still, make shine and jump out of here in a week. Mildred, what’s the food supply?”
“Three days, maybe four,” she said.
“Then we’ll need to go hunting,” he declared. “Let’s recce the local area and then make camp.”
Everybody dropped their backpacks with sighs of relief, then started from the building. The last one to leave, Mildred took the chair from the console and tipped it over, sliding it underneath the oval door, jamming it open. Unlike a redoubt, the gateway didn’t have a keypad lock, and she liked to make sure they always had a clear path of retreat.
Uzi cradled in his grip, J.B. stayed by the gateway as the anchor man, while the rest circled the building. As the companions moved off on patrol, Krysty went directly to the sagging fence and studied the junkyard. There was a hint of barbed wire on the posts, no more than rusted pieces of wire now. But there sure seemed to be a paved road under the piles of debris. Damage from a nuke quake? Made sense.
Starting along the perimeter in the opposite direction from the others, she could see the section of ground they were on was actually a small mesa, a column of ground thrust some ten feet or so straight up from the rest of the jungle. More nuke landscaping, but that was good news. It would be an easy climb down, but that ten feet would stop most nighttime predators. This was just about as fine a base camp as she had ever encountered. Even from this height, she could see a dozen different types of fruit hanging from the branches of the nearby trees, and the lush growth reached to the distant horizon. Very faintly Krysty caught the sounds of waves on a beach somewhere. Worst case, they could live for quite a while. As long as they found clean water.
Leading the others, Ryan strode into view from around the corner of the building and stopped upon seeing the redhead. They exchanged nods, announcing everything was fine.
Not for the first time, Ryan realized how amazingly beautiful Krysty was. Once he had found a stash of old porno mags from predark days, and none of those ancient beauties could hold a candle to the fiery redhead. Then he pushed that thought from his mind. They had work to do right now.