Ryan pushed his right forearm against one of the doors. It didn’t budge. For the second try he put away his SIG-Sauer and pushed against the door with both arms. This time the door moved slightly.
“J.B. and Jak, one on either side of me,” Ryan said.
The Armorer and the albino took up positions to Ryan’s left and right and got ready to push on the door. The rest of the group readied their blasters.
“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two…”
On three they all pushed together. The door moved, and they could hear the metal hinges cracking, an understandable protest considering the hinges likely hadn’t moved in close to a century.
“Again,” Ryan urged.
Once more the three men pushed against the metal door. At last it began to move, allowing dirt, dust and daylight to spill down through the long crack that had opened up above them. They continued to push, but now Doc had joined them, giving just the little extra force they needed to get the door fully open.
The portal became lighter and lighter, then flopped over like a top hatch on a war wag. With the first door opened, they set to work on the second. It moved more easily than the first, and they soon found themselves standing at the edge of a long-abandoned farmer’s field, with nothing around them but knee-high grass, high stands of rocks and clumps of weeds covering acres of rolling land in every direction.
Ryan and the others took a look around. A stand of trees grew some fifty yards to their left, but mostly they saw only wide-open spaces. Farther on, perhaps a mile or two away, there were more wooded areas, and then more farmland.
“Any idea where we are now?” Krysty asked.
J.B. lowered his glasses. “Middle of nowhere’d be my guess.”
Ryan climbed up and out of the hole in the ground and onto the field. He immediately turned back to help lift out the others. In minutes they were all standing on firm ground.
“Close it up,” the one-eyed man ordered, putting a hand under the edge of one of the doors. With J.B.’s help, he lifted the door and let it fall. He hadn’t intended for it to make such a loud noise as it closed, but without anyone on the landing to ease the door into place, the noise couldn’t be helped. Jak and Doc lifted the second door and let it down on top of the first. It closed with a slightly smaller bang, but still one loud enough to attract attention.
With the doors closed, the exit to the gateway was nearly invisible. The ground was disturbed slightly, but after a few sweeps of their feet and hands, there was no evidence of anything unusual lying just beneath the surface of the field.
“Well, it’s definitely one-way,” J.B. said.
“Mebbe for escape,” Jak offered.
An escape hatch was definitely a possibility. That seemed to fit with the sparseness of the installation’s construction and outfitting. Anyone coming through this gateway was on a one-way trip, but why would such an installation be needed, and why here? Both questions, like all the others, Ryan knew, would be answered in time.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc thundered.
Ryan turned in time to see Doc’s feet being pulled out from under him by a strange mutie that had apparently crawled through the grass toward them. It was crouched low to the ground and seemed to move on all fours, like a spider. It was gnawing on Doc’s leg, trying to tear away the material of his pants in order to get at the pale white flesh that lay beneath.
Before the other members of the group could raise their weapons, Ryan had leveled his blaster and squeezed off a single shot that caught the mutie in the shoulder. The impact of the blast rolled the mutie away from Doc’s leg. As the one-eyed man prepared to get off a second shot at the mutie’s skull, a blaster roared on his right.
A neat black hole appeared in the middle of the mutant’s forehead, and a baseball-sized mass of gray matter and gore exploded out the back of the creature’s skull, taking its miserable life along with it.