James Axler - Deathlands 27 - Ground Zero Read online

  "Sure." The word was thrown over his shoulder, casual.

  Ryan called him back, holding him by the shoulder, fingers digging into the boy's flesh. "This is serious, Dean. One wrong move and we could all get to be dead. Now, do you understand what you have to do?"

  "Yeah, Dad," he replied, rubbing his shoulder, face flushed. "Sorry, but I did listen. Up three or four inches at a time. Hold it and check for the signal from you to go up a bit more."

  "Good." Ryan ruffled his hair. "Just wanted to make sure you weren't getting careless."

  "Want us back out of the way?" J.B. asked.

  "No need for us all to take a risk. Dean should be safe enough at the side of the door. Up to me to move fast if it looks like the rocks are coming down."

  For a moment Krysty opened her mouth to argue, then saw the tense expression on Ryan's face and closed it again.

  Leading the way across the open space, toward the back wall, she stood in the hooded entrance to another of the side tunnels, waiting there with her Smith & Wesson 640 pistol cocked and ready in her right hand.

  The rest of the group joined her, leaving father and son by the massive sec door.

  "Ready?" Ryan asked, his voice softened and muffled by the dead air of the redoubt.

  "Ready, Dad."

  "Start taking her up. Watch my hand. When I do this-" he made a cutting gesture with the edge of his palm, "-then you stop. Thumbs-up means go on again."

  "Got it."

  "Start."

  When the door was about eighteen inches in the air, Ryan signaled to his son to drop the green lever.

  "J.B., come take a look. See what you reckon."

  The Armorer joined Ryan, kneeling, adjusting the spectacles on the bridge of his narrow, bony nose, and squinted under the door.

  "Seem solid."

  "Partly concrete and partly bedrock. Could be the remains of the old redoubt."

  J.B. whistled tunelessly between his teeth. "Must have been one triple-nuke blast. Blow the top clean off. Take it up a bit farther?"

  Ryan gave the signal to Dean, who eased the sec door up until the bottom was about two and a half feet from the scarred concrete of the floor.

  "Hold it there." He crouched down, easing the rifle out of his way. Ryan could taste the air that Mildred had commented on, but he couldn't agree with her about it being fresh. It was damp, smelling of decay and wood smoke.

  "What you reckon, lover?" Krysty called.

  "Raining. I can tell you that. Running down the rockfall. Also-" he looked at his rad counter, "-there's a high yellow reading out there, shading into orange. Must've been a serious hot spot in the long winters."

  "Can we get out?" Dean had moved from his position by the control lever and was also staring at the tangled mass of concrete and stone.

  His father straightened. "Don't see why not. The couple in front of us must've made it. No sign of crushed bodies out there. Looks like the rocks fell clear of the door."

  The green lever was raised again, taking the sec door up to four and a half feet. "That'll do," Ryan said.

  "WASHINGTON," J.B. stated, squinting up into the late-afternoon drizzle, checking his tiny pocket sextant, its batteries-raided from a small techno armory years earlier-keeping it still functioning.

  "State or city?" Doc asked, pulling his frock coat across his shoulders against the gray, misty rain that was falling steadily, blanking out visibility above two hundred yards.

  "City."

  Krysty's hair was already wet, clinging to her scalp, but she turned away and looked at the great pile of tumbled lichen-stained stone that had once been the top floors of a major redoubt. "Figure that those rocks hid the entrance to the complex, and stopped it being invaded. If this used to be Washington, then I guess there's still likely to be a few people around."

  Doc shook his head. "I fear that there is likely to be but little remaining of that once great city. I have seen histories, copied from the verbal memories of the scant survivors, which claim that the nuclear holocaust actually began here in the seat of government, demiparadise. There can be little doubt that the whole metropolis was blown away in the first treacherous salvo of the Third-and last-World War."

  "True," the Armorer agreed. "All the years that Ryan and me rode with the Trader, I don't think we ever once came that close to this place. Supposed to be one big crater where the city used to be. Now they call it Washington Hole. Just shantytown gaudies and stuff like that."

  A little to their left, beyond the crumbling ruins of the redoubt, there towered a rain-shrouded mountain, looking to be close to five thousand feet high. Mildred stared up at it with bemused fascination. "I have to turn to you, Doc, much as I regret it."

  "How may I aid you, Dr. Wyeth?"

  "I visited Washington a couple of times, for presidential receptions for the Olympic team. I saw Lincoln and the White House and the Monument. They were pulling down the old Watergate Hotel." She looked at the others, seeing only blank faces. "Before your time, I suppose. And way after your time, Doc. Anyway, point is, I don't remember there being a bastard great mountain anywhere around. Right, Doc?"

  "Correct. Spot on. Ace on the line. Bull's-eye. Exactly right. Nothing much over four thousand feet, within five hundred miles of here, even all the way down the Blue Ridge west into Virginia. Mount Pleasant was just a few feet over that mark, to the north of Lynchburg."

  "Volcano." Jak coughed, rubbing at the bandage around his injured right calf.

  Mildred lifted a hand against the driving rain. "A volcano! In Washington, D.C.? My sweet Lord, but you're right. I can see the plume of steam and smoke from its top. An active volcano, here! Mercy me!"

  "Changes in climate. Changes in altitude." Doc stared into the sky, hands clasped together like a preacher at a river-crossing meeting. "Changes in pulchritude. Changes in attitude. Changes in latitude. Changes in lassitude. Where is the bone that Lassie chewed? Lassitude. Get it? Got it. Bought the T-shirt."

  "Doc," Ryan said.

  "Yes?"

  "Shut it."

  "Ah, right."

  "Rotten stink, Dad."

  Ryan sniffed. "Not so bad as back at our last stopping place, Dean."

  "Not so farting. But still.like sitting next to someone in a drinker who hasn't changed their clothes for about five years. Know what I mean?"

  Jak grinned. "Smells like home, Dean. Louisiana bayou sorta smell."

  Ryan also smiled. "That's it all right. Except to see Spanish moss drooping from all of the trees. Not that I can see any trees around here."

  J.B. busily wiped his glasses. "Guess that you can't just turn a million people into a land of watery, bloody steam without something unpleasant lingering on. Even a hundred years later."

  "So where's the city?" Dean put a muddy hand over his eyes in an exaggerated pose of exploration. "Or where the city used to be?"

  The Armorer shook his head. "Can't tell you, Dean. First off, my sextant isn't accurate to more than a few miles. Second off, I've never been around here long enough to know the region. And thirdly, it's pissing down so hard that the city could be around the next corner and we still wouldn't know."

  "Maybe we ought to go back inside the redoubt and stay dry," Mildred suggested. "Wait until the weather clears up before we explore."

  "A little rain never did anyone any harm." Doc snorted. "I never mistook you for a namby-pamby indoor woman, Dr. Wyeth. Worried by a little heavenly dew."

  "Heavenly dew! You silly old fool, it's coming down cats and dogs."

  Ryan interrupted the budding argument. "Never been one for going back on my own trail," he said. "Have to agree with Doc. We're all wet now, anyway, so why not keep going? Look of the light, evening can't be all that far off. Let's move on some and take a look around. Find somewhere nearby to camp out and start a fire. How's that sound?"

  Everyone nodded, Mildred last of all, her beads rattling damply.

  ONCE THEY WERE our of the lee of the mountain, the wind freshened, driving
away some of the light rain. It cleared visibility up to the better part of a mile, opening up the vista of what had once been the city of Washington, one time capital of the greatest and most powerful country that the world had ever known.

  The seven friends stood grouped together, staring down at the spectacle.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan whispered.

  Chapter Seven

  From battered, rusting street signs, they discovered that they were in a suburb to the southeast of the city that had been called Forest Heights, standing just outside what had once been the city limits.

  The newborn volcano wasn't the only change around Washington. There was the clearest evidence of massive quake activity, with ribboned, tilted highways and jutting chasms that furrowed the land. It was exceedingly doubtful that anyone who had lived in Forest Heights in the last blank days of civilization would have recognized the place now.

  But many of the buildings remained.

  Ryan had led them to a street of mainly Victorian frame houses, several of them rotted and tilted, leaning drunkenly against their neighbors. All of them lacked windows, but the companions found one house that seemed sturdy and, at least, still had most of its shingled roof intact. Dusk had come creeping in from over the Shens to the west, and they saw no sign of any human life.

  A single dog skulked across their path, halting in a brief show of defiance in the center of the road and baring its teeth. Ryan started to unsling the Steyr, but the animal lost its nerve and scuttled off into the tall evergreen bushes that smothered most of the front gardens.

  "Shame. Would have made good eating for tonight," Ryan said, replacing the rifle.

  THEY GOT A FIRE GOING in the hearth of the stripped living room, using dry kindling that Dean scavenged from under the rear porch of the house.

  Mildred found a battered pan and filled it from the brimming water butt, slicing up some of the vegetables that she discovered in the overgrown kitchen garden.

  Potatoes, carrots and onions, with a few sprigs of herbs to give it flavor, simmered away.

  The conversation turned naturally to what they'd seen while standing on the peak of Darien Avenue, looking down across the ravaged landscape.

  "Just a big, big hole," Dean said. "That lake to the west, like the worst volcano in the world had blown its head off. Must've been ten miles across."

  "Easy that," Jak agreed. "See why call it Washington Hole. Just 'Hole' for short."

  It had been a gigantic crater, torn from the earth by the nuke bombs and, later, missiles, that had ripped the heart from the capital, and been the trigger for the dark nights and long winters that followed.

  There had been no warning of the firestorm at ground zero that had literally blasted Washington into the cold dust of eternal space, slaughtering its inhabitants in the greatest megacull in history. There were precious few survivors after twenty-four hours. Then came the rad sickness with its poisoned claws.

  Within a two-week period, the survivors of that first attack were so few that they couldn't be measured statistically.

  The other extraordinary element of the sight was that the winding, warm, brown Potomac had vanished. Its bed scoured out and destroyed, it now formed a huge, lazy lake, miles wide from north to south, covering most of the blasted ruins of the city as well as virtually all of Arlington and Alexandria.

  "That looked like one of the biggest shantytown camps I ever saw," J.B. said. "Around the edge of the crater. Couldn't see much for the cooking smoke, but there must've been hundreds of shacks there."

  "Many of the old cities have their squat camps, don't they?" Krysty said.

  Ryan leaned forward and sniffed at the vegetable stew. "Smells good. The cities? Yeah. But I've been to the ruins of Newyork, Norleans, Chicago. Point is that they were all wrecked, but all of them still had lots of buildings left, even if most were destroyed. We all remember what it was like drifting past the scrapers of Newyork. The dead streets and the ghoulies haunting the rad-blighted emptiness. You get squatters in all those places. But I never saw a town that was gone. Like it had never been. Just gone. Gone."

  "Scares me." Mildred was sitting close to J.B., and she reached out and took his hand.

  "Tiene el miedo muchos ojos," Doc said. "Fear has many eyes."

  There was a long silence, broken only by the gentle bubbling of the water in the pan.

  Jak broke the stillness. "Wonder what happened two men from redoubt?"

  "Who cares?" Dean got up and peered out of one of the broken double doors that opened into the back garden. "Nearly dark. And it's raining again."

  "What do you mean, 'again'?" Mildred said crossly. "I haven't noticed it stop raining ever since we left that nice dry, warm redoubt."

  "Sourness in a maiden is as welcome as a persimmon in a bowl of cream," Doc stated solemnly.

  "Did you just make that up?" Mildred snapped.

  "Possibly. Very possibly."

  "Attempted humor bangs on the lips of a senile old man as clinging shit on the ass of a dead goat," she riposted.

  He applauded gently, making her grin, despite her ill-temper. "Well said, ma'am. Devilish well said."

  "Meal's nearly ready," Krysty announced.

  "Sounds good and smells good," Ryan said.'

  THE FIRE WAS DYING.

  Ryan and J.B. had discussed the need for posting anyone on watch, eventually deciding that it wasn't necessary as there was no sign of any recent human habitation. The only thing they agreed was that they'd all move onto the top story for the night.

  "I'll sleep out at the top of the stairs," the Armorer said. "I wake easy."

  "So do I."

  Jak had just joined them. "I sleep lightest," he said. "I'll sleep on the landing."

  The two older men looked at each other. There was no point in arguing. They both knew that the albino teenager was telling the simple truth, and this wasn't some sort of game, where honor and pride were involved.

  This was simply living and dying.

  "Fine," Ryan said. "Good."

  THE WIND FROM THE NORTH was stronger. Later it veered more toward the east, bringing the salt scent from Chesapeake Bay and heavier rain that thrummed on the roof, splattering through the broken glass of the bedroom windows.

  The group had split up to sleep, as they often did. Jak took his chosen place at the top of the wide staircase. Doc and Dean shared the larger front room, with J.B. and Mildred in the middle. Ryan and Krysty chose the back room, much the most cramped of the available accommodation.

  They bundled together, waiting until the rest of the house was quiet before beginning to make love. It was a hasty joining, less than satisfactory, and they had to move twice because of the spreading pool of rain that was inching across the floor toward them.

  For about twenty minutes there was a sharp chem storm, with vivid stripes of purple-silver lightning, and thunder that seemed to shake the foundations of the old building.

  Then they stopped moving as they both heard Dean picking his way barefooted across the landing, and a muttered conversation as he woke Jak.

  "Must want a leak," Krysty whispered, keeping still, her stomach muscles fluttering and tightening around Ryan's powerful erection.

  "Could just have done it out the window."

  "Probably worried about all the splinters of broken glass. Boy doesn't want to risk doing himself a permanent injury. Think he's gone."

  "Yeah, but then he'll come back."

  "Want to call the whole thing off, lover?" she asked, feeling him begin to shrink inside her.

  "No. Just wait."

  "Then fill the time in with some kissing and touching. Starting just. down. there."

  AFTER THEY HAD BOTH finally climaxed, Ryan dozed for some time, waking against a particularly loud roll of thunder.

  Krysty was lying on her back, head turned slightly to the left, snoring slightly, the errant beams of moonlight through the filtering clouds creating a glow around her mane of scarlet hair. The blanket had slipped down to j
ust below her breasts, and Ryan lowered his head and gently touched his mouth to both erect nipples, pulling the blanket up to cover her.

  "Thanks, lover," she whispered, miming a kiss through sleepy lips.

  Ryan smiled in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the night. There was a dog. no, a pack of dogs, howling as they hunted their dreams together, far off, and the wind brushing through the sycamores that clustered at the back of the house. The rain seemed, temporarily, to have stopped.

  The fire had guttered downstairs, but he could still catch the strong, bitter taint of its smote. For a moment it crossed his mind to wonder how far that scent might carry on the scurrying wind, if there were any two-legged hunters on the prowl through the suburbs.