Squeaking loudly, a battered sign for a gas station swung over a blackened pit that reached for half a block. At the bottom, rats splashed in a rain pool, eating something vaguely cat shaped. Wrecked vehicles were scattered everywhere crashed into trees, through store windows and piled into mounds of corroding metal.
“They set off the neutron bomb down here,” Ryan said, “to chill everybody on the island, but to not damage anything downtown.”
“Mebbe there’s a gateway there,” Krysty said, running stiff fingers through her flowing hair. “Not exactly good news.”
“Why not?” Jak asked bluntly.
“If there’s a gateway downtown, then why did the whitecoats travel a hundred miles to a different island to build another gateway and jump from there? Why not use the device here?”
“Because they couldn’t,” Ryan stated. “That’s the only possible answer. We just have to figure out why they couldn’t, and then fix the problem.”
“If we don’t?” Dean asked, pulling the bike over a curb and onto the sidewalk.
“Have to,” his father answered grimly.
Broken glass sparkled on top of the twisted car wrecks, and nobody spoke as the companions carefully walked the motorcycles down the debris-filled ramp. Ryan, Krysty and Doc each caught their long coats on sharp metal, and finally removed the garments to stuff them inside saddlebags. The day was warm, and there seemed little chance of acid rain. They would take the chance.
Reaching the ground, they uneasily surveyed the area. Potholes dominated the paved streets, weeds lined the cracked sidewalks and not a window was intact, windblown leaves piled high inside the stores and homes. In ancient days, this had been a nice section of town, but the residual rads from the nuked Navy base and the concussion of the neutron bomb had changed that. Clusters of tiny red eyes watched them pass by from the sewer drains, and fat crows sitting on a sagging roof shared something bloody and stretchy.
Suddenly, a humanoid figure moved past a broken window. Ryan caught only a glimpse of prehensile fangs and clawed hands before it was gone.
“We got company,” he said gruffly, drawing the SIG-Sauer. “In the ruins, one o’clock.”
“Droids,” J.B. said with certainty, squeezing off the pistol-grip safety of the Uzi so it was ready to fire. “The damn things followed us!”
“That was no machine,” Krysty answered, thumbing back the hammer of the Webley. “Something else.”
“Stickies?” Mildred asked, dumping the spent rounds from her ZKR revolver and quickly thumbing in fresh ones. This was the first chance she’d had to reload since the spider. The physician had tried doing it on the moving bike, and stopped after dropping a live round.
“Not unless this breed has a mouth and fangs,” the redhead said, listening to the sounds of the desolation around them. “It more resembled one of the People.”
“Shitfire.” Mildred frowned, closing the ZKR. Those blasted blood drinkers had been tough to chill. Of all the humanoid mutations encountered in the Deathlands, the New England vampires had been the most vicious, and the most devious.
“‘Iron bars and stone walls do not a prison make,'” Doc rumbled, checking the load in the LeMat. “But suffice, they shall, for a repository of destruction.”
“Let’s get our butts in the armory,” J.B. suggested.
“Jak, Dean, you’re on point,” Ryan ordered, and started across the street for the predark fortification. As the only companions without bikes to push, the teenager and the boy were the best choices for the job.
Showing barely a trace of a limp, Jak moved to the left with both of his blasters drawn. Dean went to the right, the Weatherby rifle appearing huge in his young hands.
As the group moved along the bumpy sidewalk, shadowy figures shifted positions in the decaying house, but none rushed the norms. Ryan hoped the muties knew what blasters could do, and were too afraid to risk an attack. Dangerously low on ammo, the companions couldn’t afford even a brief firefight.
If the National Guard armory was empty, he had no idea what they could do next. Returning to the pirate ville to steal weapons would be madness. This was their best, perhaps their only chance.