Or what they had to hide, Mildred thought. There was something that was nagging at the back of her mind about the corpses, and why they needed to be retrieved. She tried to steal a look at them as she walked beside the pole carried by Bodie and Rankine. But the chilled corpses were too distorted by the manner of their chilling, and the way in which they were hanging, for her to get a good look without somehow stopping the party and causing suspicion.
Doc wouldn’t be the only one with something to say to Ryan, she mused.
Her musings were cut short by their arrival at a hidden entrance to the ville of Raw.
“Pull up here, people,” Harvey commanded for the benefit of the companions.
The one-eyed warrior looked around. It seemed as though they had arrived on an old street corner that was marked by three derelict and overgrown buildings and a stand of mutated trees growing out of the rubble where once a fourth had stood. The creeper was thick beneath their feet, and he couldn’t see how they could get beneath it easily.
“Over here,” Downey said with a sly smile, moving to the small copse of trees. The companions followed him, to find that the silver-haired sec man was reaching into the bole of a tree. He contorted his face with effort, tugging at something within.
A section of ground to one side of the copse shuddered and began to move upward, hinged at one side so that it flipped over. Leading off from the opening was a flight of stone steps, roughly hewed from rock and concrete blocks that had been primitively mortared together.
“After you,” Downey said, indicating the opening.
Jak grinned admiringly. “Nice hide.”
Harvey grunted as he and Ryan led the way down. “Takes us down to an old basement, tunneled through to an old mail subway line. But it’s kept to a simple winch system so’s we can use it if we lose what power we have.”
“You’ve got power, fuel?” Ryan asked, wondering if this was part of the hidden stores of the Illuminated Ones.
“Some. We do some trading, sometimes. Most of our power is wood, oil from the plants for lamps and stuff. The creepers’re really good for that. Any real power is used by the tech people…” He trailed off, seemingly unwilling to continue, aware that he may already have said too much. He was spared any questions by a sec man appearing from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.
Ryan started at the sudden appearance, shifting the pole weight to one shoulder while his now free hand snaked down to the holstered SIG-Sauer.
“It’s okay, Cyclops, he’s one of mine,” Harvey stated laconically, feeling Ryan’s weight shift to his rear and guessing what the one-eyed warrior’s move would be.
“You got them back,” the sec man said in a flat voice, still hidden by shadow. He had a blaster in his hands that Ryan could tell was an Uzi from the shape and the way he was holding it. As he stepped out, Ryan could see that his eyes were blue, and his hair long and blond, framing a face that was lean with a hard, cold harshness.
Ryan marked him down as dangerous. He wasn’t an enemy yet, but caution was always a necessity.
“Chilled, but at least we can give them a decent send-off,” Harvey replied.
“Jenna will be way pissed,” the blond sec man said, shaking his head before stepping back into the shadows and letting the group pass with only a word of greeting to his fellow sec men, and a look of suspicion for the companions.
“Jenna?” Ryan asked as they proceeded down empty, winding tunnels dimly lit by oil lamps.
“Baron’s wife. Some say the real power. Now I wouldn’t be the one to spread that, Cyclops, but I would pay heed if it reached my ears.”
Ryan said nothing, not sure if the sec chief was giving him a warning or a threat.
The lights grew more regular and brighter as they progressed through the tunnels, which were obviously a serviceable entrance into the heart of Raw. As they walked along the rail tracks of the old mail line, they found that there were more and more signs of habitation: small shacks sprung up along the way, with a few small fires outside them and children running and playing. Children who, in the darkness up above, would have been sleeping. But here there was no day and night, only the perpetual half light of the lamps. In many ways, this was no different from if they had lived in the twilit forest up above.