James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero Read online

  "And this is now," Ryan completed. "Someone give me a hand so I can get up?"

  Krysty and Jak responded first, each of them stooping and helping Ryan to a more comfortable position, sitting with his back against one of the sky blue walls.

  "Thanks. Thought for a moment there that I was going to throw up my last meal. Whatever that was." He managed a thin smile. "Whenever that was."

  "In another country," Doc said sonorously. "And besides, the wench is dead."

  Ryan didn't feel like unraveling one of Doc's runic sayings right then, so he let it pass.

  "Anyone done a recce at all?" he asked.

  J.B. replied. "Not yet. Haven't even moved the door. Didn't want to open it or close it until you got back with us. Couldn't tell what might happen."

  Ryan nodded, wincing at the smothering pain that welled up from the back of his skull at the moment. "Safer." He looked across the chamber, seeing that the heavy door still stood a few inches open. It had been a close call, and a lesson for any future jumps that they might make. If the gateway door had been left open just a little bit wider, Ryan suspected that none of them would have survived the jump.

  Fighting to overcome a tsunami of nausea and vertigo, he heaved himself upright, closing his eye for a moment to check the mat-trans unit from rolling and rocking around.

  "You all right, lover?" Krysty asked, her steadying hand on his arm. "Take it easy."

  "Be fine."

  "Want door open all way?"

  Ryan nodded. "Might as well. Everyone get ready." Suddenly he realized he was still unarmed. "Can I have my blaster back, J.B.?"

  The heavy SIG-Sauer felt good in his hand. The Steyr SSG-70 was on the floor of the gateway, and he stooped to pick up the bolt-action rifle, slinging it across his shoulder.

  The albino teenager stood by the armaglass door, the Colt Python cocked and ready in his right hand, left hand on the door, he waited for Ryan to give the signal.

  "Yeah," the one-eyed man said.

  THE ANTEROOM WAS DIRTY, with piles of plaster and dust that seemed to have fallen from the cracked ceiling. There was a dartboard on one wall, the concrete pitted all around it by near misses. Three darts were still stuck in the board.

  "Twenty-six scored," Doc said quietly.

  "Looks like this place took a pounding." J.E pointed into the control room, where a third of the overhead strip lights had malfunctioned.

  There were long cracks in the corners, and more of the ceiling had come down, laying a film of white dust over the flickering dials of the control consoles.

  "Amazed it's still running and working." Ryan bolstered his blaster, seeing that the double sec doors into the section were firmly closed.

  "Buried deep." J.B. brushed a finger through the dirt. "Don't know what we're going to find up top. Could be that the rest of the redoubt's been wiped."

  Doc groaned. "May all of the Saints-who from their labors rest-preserve me from having to make yet another jump out of this place."

  "No hurry to decide." Mildred tapped one of the desk monitors that had been standing dull and silent. For a moment it flickered into a frenetic life, colored lights glowing and dancing, disks whirring, digital display changing faster than the eye could catch.

  Then it ceased to work. It simply stopped.

  "Sec cameras all dead," Jak said, pointing to the small electronic ob boxes placed in the high corners of the big room.

  "You feel anything, Krysty?"

  She shook her head. "Nothing of life, lover. Nothing of the living. Just see a sort of fog of ancient dust. Place has the feel of a very old tomb."

  Ryan hunched his shoulders protectively, remembering the dried-out corpses in the nameless ville of his nightmare.

  Dean had gone over to examine the doors, sniffing at them, like a hunting dog, trying to catch any kind of scent from beyond them. "Nothing," he said. "Just the same sort of dusty smell there is in here."

  Ryan joined his son, resting his hand on his shoulder while he carried out the same test. "Agreed."

  Krysty glanced across at that moment, seeing yet again how incredibly alike father and son were-the same sharp, narrow face, with the deep-set dark eyes, and the same mane of untidy, tumbling, curly black hair. Even in the eleven-year-old, there was the same air of coiled menace.

  "There's gum and candy wrappers on the floor," Mildred called. "Looks like this one was hit hard and early."

  "Did all get out?" Jak prowled about the underground bunker like a caged cat. "Go see?"

  "Soon," Ryan called.

  Doc had also been nosing around. He stopped in front of a comp screen that showed several lines of white type, set against a black background.

  "Do come and take a look at this," he said quietly. "Most extraordinary."

  They gathered around him, peering at the dust-filmed screen. Doc read out the message.

  "String of letters and numbers to start with. 'NORDEF albase. Top Urgent. Action triple soonest.' How I hate this journalese gobbledygook that soldiers and scientists love so much. Why can they not use normal speech?"

  "Rest is simple, Doc," J.B. said, leaning over the old man's shoulder.

  "Right. 'Red angels in flight heading from NNE. Their ETA if not intercepted by Star Wars missiles is three hours and forty-two minutes. Personnel vectors A thru E immediate evacuation. All others seal all external and internal ports. Nuclear generators all activated. Prepare long closed-down wait. Action immediate. Not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.' Then it gives that string of letters and numerals once more."

  "Be a kind of authorization code, Doc," Mildred suggested. "Let them know it was genuine and not a gremlin somewhere in the machine."

  "Very probably. I remember that the whitecoats who ran Overproject Whisper were never happier than when their eager little snouts were immersed in manuals of electronic coding."

  "Read the rest, Doc," Ryan said.

  "But of course. Where was I? The code. 'Repeat orders for vectors A thru E to evacuate soonest. Rest remain under Operation Snopak conditions.'" He paused. "Then all it says is 'God bless you all and God bless America.' That's it."

  "Like message from grave," Jak said quietly.

  Mildred looked solemn. "That isn't dated, but it must've been just before the last war broke out. The Russian missiles were triggered, and our retaliation would also have been under way. All too late for anyone to stop." She shook her head. "Even if anyone had wanted to stop."

  Ryan turned back toward the massive vanadium-steel sec door. "So, did they do like they were told? The mat-trans section is usually buried deepest. If it's got all these cracks and stuff, what kind of damage are we going to find up above? Guess we'd best go see."

  THEY TOOK the usual precautions. Dean operated the green lever at the side of the door, lifting it to set the powerful gearing system into action. There was the hiss of hydraulics and then the distant, muffled sound of the nuke-powered engine starting to raise the sec barrier.

  The rest of them all stood away, blasters readied, while Ryan himself flattened on the floor, the movement tugging a little at the arrow wound in his back. "Hold it," he said, when the bottom of the sec door was only three or four inches from the floor. "Anything?" J.R asked.

  Ryan didn't answer for several long seconds, studying what he could see under the door, trying to decide what it was. "Up another couple of inches, Dean," he said finally, waiting for the door to lift higher. "That'll do."

  "What is it, lover?"

  "Couldn't be sure whether it was just some discarded rags of clothing. It isn't."

  THE SIGHT OF THE BODY revived the memory of Ryan's nightmare. It was virtually certain that the man-facial hair confirmed the sex of the corpse-had died close to a hundred years earlier, probably within hours of skydark.

  He was stretched out, no flesh remaining on the bones, his skin blackened by the passing of the ages. One arm was reaching toward the door, as if he'd been knocking for help. Or, perhaps, had tried to get back into the re
lative safety of the mat-trans unit at the last moment.

  "Master sergeant," Mildred commented, looking at the golden stripes on the faded, paper-thin cloth of the uniform.

  "Where there's one, there'll be others, as Trader used to say." J.B. caught Ryan's eye as he spoke, looking away again in slight embarrassment.

  Ryan nodded agreement. "Be amazed if we don't find more chills as we move along."

  THERE WERE A DOZEN in the first hundred yards of the passage, all in the same mummified condition.

  "Don't get it, Dad."

  "What, son?"

  "Looks like the jump rooms were safest in the redoubt. People dying out here. How come they didn't get back inside and have a better chance of safety?"

  Ryan thought about the question. "Damned if I know, Dean."

  "I believe that I can answer that one, my dear Cawdor." Doc stooped over Dean, like a buzzard over a ground squirrel. "I believe that the matter-transfer section of the redoubt would have been deliberately locked against anyone, because it probably represented the only sure way out of here. The authorities-senior officers and the rest of the beribboned imbeciles-wouldn't have wanted desertion on a massive scale. Not with a war to be fought." He gave a short barking laugh. "Some war, some fight. They feared the men and women under their command might've crammed in here and fled to all points north and south. East and west. So they took the obvious precaution and barred the door."

  "And they all died." Mildred sighed. "Such stupidity and such a dreadful waste."

  The physical state of the redoubt got worse. They climbed four sets of wide stairs, each time discovering more damage and more bodies.

  The deep cracks in the hugely thick concrete walls and vaulted ceilings were more obvious, and in two or three places whole sections of masonry had collapsed, spilling piles of dusty gray stone across the passages, exposing the rusting sections of fractured reinforcing metal.

  J.B. drew Ryan's attention to the small rad counters they each wore. "Orange."

  "None of the corpses show any obvious signs of being shot or wounded. Likely it was seepage from the nukes."

  The Armorer thought about it, looking around. They were in an open space with several alternate routes opening off, most of them blocked by sec doors. A dozen bodies lay near them, some stretched out, some huddled in a fetal position, knees drawn up to their sagging jaws.

  "Probably. But if the redoubt had been sealed, some of them might simply have gotten trapped in a closed section and starved to death."

  "Way the place has been pounded makes me wonder about what kind of hardware the Ruskies used. Doesn't look much like neutron bombing."

  The neutron missiles had been developed in the latter part of the twentieth century to take out all forms of life but leave buildings standing. The idea being that the winners could move in and take over the defeated country with as little logistical trouble as possible.

  The drawback that none of the master tacticians in the Kremlin and the Pentagon had considered was that there wasn't a simple comp-programmed winner and loser, like there'd been in their billion-dollar war.

  There were only losers.

  THE REDOUBT WAS a bleakly depressing place, brimming with hopeless, pointless death.

  All the evidence pointed to an evacuation that had gone wrong and an attempt to safely seal the whole complex that had been a virtual failure.

  The only part of the whole rambling military base that had survived more or less unscathed was the mat-trans unit.

  Krysty was walking with Ryan as they approached yet another closed set of sec doors, the green control lever in the down position.

  "If these poor devils were trapped down here, why didn't they just open the doors to get out? If we can do it, then why couldn't they?"

  Ryan paused, turning to face her. "I wondered. Then I figured it out. When they were trying to seal the base, they must've used some master control to override the manual controls. Part of the main comp system must've been took out."

  "Taken out, lover."

  "Yeah. When the lines went down, the doors were set free. Might've taken a couple of weeks, but I think that's the most likely story."

  "Can I open this one, Dad?"

  "Sure. On red, people."

  "Are these precautions really essential, my dear fellow? Surely this charnel house contains nothing that could possibly threaten us? It is as safe as any pre-dark catafalque."

  "Mebbe, Doc. Mebbe not. Blasters out, everyone."

  Dean stood by the green lever, waiting for the nod from his father, who was crouching on the dusty, rubble-coated floor, ready to peer under the sec door for any sign of danger.

  "Six inches, son."

  The control had become very stiff, and the boy had to use all of his strength to shift it. But they eventually heard the usual grinding sound and the sec door shuddered, beginning to move slowly upward.

  "Stop it!" Ryan's voice held the crack of command. "And lower it. Quick!"

  Chapter Six

  The boy reacted quickly, reversing the lever, allowing the sec steel door to drop back to floor level with the faintest sound and a tiny puff of dust.

  "What is it?" J.B. asked, holding the heavy scattergun at the ready. "Someone out there?"

  "Something out there?" Krysty added. "What?"

  "Stone," Ryan replied. "Bottom of what looked like a seriously big pile of stones."

  "Blocking way out?"

  "Looks like it, Jak. Danger of lifting the door, and it'll all come pouring in here on top of us."

  "Detour?" Mildred suggested. "I was just looking forward to getting out of here into the fresh air and sunlight and- Hey, wait a minute. There was good clean air coming out under the door for the moment or two it was open."

  Ryan straightened, brushing dust from his pants, wincing at the tugging of the arrow wound. "That's true. There is. Was. Must mean the top layers of the redoubt were totally driven in and collapsed in the nuking."

  Jak was staring at the floor, near where Dean had been standing. "Tracks," he said.

  "Where? Those are mine." Dean couched. "Real small. Like someone my age or size. But not my boots."

  "Not any of ours," Ryan agreed. "Jak, can you follow them back inside? I haven't seen them anywhere else."

  "I thought I saw them near the gateway," J.B. said quietly. "But the dust wasn't so thick as it is here, and I wasn't sure. They went away left in the opposite direction to the way we took."

  "Two," Jak said, his red eyes glowing in the overhead lights. Only about one in eight of the long neon strip lights were now working, the situation deteriorating the higher up they got through the complex.

  "Anything about them?"

  The albino shook his head at Ryan's question, the errant hair a halo of white light. "Men not children. Tired. Feet dragging. Funny clothes."

  "How's that?" Ryan asked.

  "Long dust coats? Something like women's dresses. Dragging and leaving marks."

  "Women, Jak?"

  "Mebbe, Krysty. Can't tell."

  He was following the faint marks as he spoke, working his slow way backward, cutting off toward one of the narrow side passages, cutting away from the route that they'd followed from the mat-trans unit.

  Ryan called out to stop him. "No point in going any further, Jak. From what J.B. said, it looks like they somehow got out of the gateway. Came all the way up here by some different path. Must be that."

  "You believe that the strangers had made use of the gateway for a jump?" Doc shook his head. "I suppose that anything in Deathlands is possible."

  "And it looks like they got out through this sec door," said Dean, on his hands and knees, head low, like an eager puppy. "There's some fresh dust overlaying their trail."

  "Well spotted, son." Ryan had joined the boy, nodding. "You're right."

  "So, if they got out." Mildred allowed the sentence to drift away.

  "So can we." J. B. Dix finished it for her. "Worth a try. You reckon, Ryan?"

 
"Alternative is to wander around the redoubt for hours-mebbe days-trying to find another, better way out of here. If someone else risked this door, then so can we. Dean?"

  "Yeah, Dad?"

  "This time I want you to take it up no more than three or four inches at a time. Stop it. Check for the word from me. Then repeat that. Slow and careful. Understand?"