Leaving wet footprints on the apron, the companions walked outside and Ryan gave two short whistles. A single long whistle answered from around the corner, telling them Doc was fine, and Ryan whistled back, informing the old man they were also fine.
Drying off in the weak sunshine, the companions let the warehouse air out while they cleaned blasters. Nobody spoke for several minutes, thinking about how close they had come to death from the trap, and knowing that they were soon going to go right back inside and try again.
“Where there’s one trap,” J.B. said, wiping off the lenses of his glasses, “there’ll be more.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Ryan said. “We’ll each take turns opening the units, and at the first sign of any more gas, we leave fast.”
“Still need ammo,” Dean reminded him succinctly, exchanging the wet clip in his Browning for a dry mag from his jacket. The water from the sprinklers had been tainted with rust and scum that could cause a jam. Best to take no chances.
“We’ll get some,” his father replied. “If not here, then at police headquarters. There should be a SWAT room, and a vault full of blasters. The cops used to keep the vault locked to make sure nobody could get their mitts on the weapons. But that just means they were sealed safely away from the corrosive sea air of the island. Could be everything we need.”
“Only reason we’re here was because of the droids,” Krysty reminded him, fanning her shirt to make it dry faster.
Dean frowned. “The machines will be waiting for us there.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan agreed. “So we’ll go in through the roof. They won’t expect that.”
“Who the hell would?” J.B. said, walking back into the warehouse. Stopping at the fifty-five-gallon drum, he gathered the foam cups and stuffed them into his munitions bag. Those would help a lot if they had to firebomb the droids.
Leading the way, Ryan returned to the row of storage units, the smooth floor only damp in spots by now. The puddles had flowed into the drains and gone somewhere else.
“Stay here. Me first,” Jak said, reclaiming the dropped pry bar and walking past the open unit to the next door.
The teenager easily snapped the locking mechanism with the pry bar, then gave the door a shove and ran for the loading dock as the door slid aside. Silence ruled the warehouse, the vents remained quiet and no swirling clouds of yellow hissed into the corridor.
“Seems safe,” Mildred ventured, sniffing carefully.
They proceeded warily to the second unit until the companions glanced inside and found it as empty as the first. There were a few candy-bar wrappers on the floor, and faded inventory sheets attached to a clipboard hung from a nail on the wall. Nothing else.
Resolute, Ryan took the pry bar and went to the next unit only to find the same thing. It was starting to look as if the place might be empty, but there was only one way to know.
“Why was there such a strong smell of horseradish?” Krysty asked, accepting the pry bar and starting on the end unit of the row. “Mustard gas made from horseradish?”
“Don’t know for sure,” Mildred said, gesturing vaguely. “Could be. I know that VX gas is made from meat tenderizer. Read that in a newspaper.”
“They used to put nerve gas on food?” Dean asked in shock.
“Sort of,” Mildred said hesitantly. The complexities of the predark world were a bitch to explain sometimes. “In a powder form it’s harmless. Only deadly when it’s stabilized as a gas.”
With a loud crack, Krysty broke open the door and checked inside. “Empty,” she reported.
She passed the pry bar to Dean, who went to the next unit, muttering something under his breath about insane whitecoats.
An hour later, the last door was ripped open and the companions stared at yet another empty storage unit, scraps of wood and packing material floating in tiny puddles from the earlier deluge.
“Nothing again,” Dean said, marching into the room, brandishing the steel bat as if physically challenging the storage unit to produce supplies. There was a calendar on the wall showing the month of January 2000 and something, the final year blurry from the sprinklers. The days were checked off up to the twenty-first.