Chapter Four

 

 

"You think the jump killed him, Mildred?"

 

"I do, Ryan. We know that all four of them were sickly. That's why they wanted the boy and all of us to freshen up their genes and revive their blood."

 

"And Melmoth got this far. Far enough to try and chill me. Then died."

 

"Looks that way. If Krysty hadn't come around when she did, he might've done it, too."

 

"Revenge from beyond the grave." Ryan looked down at the mutie creature. "Melting away like butter in a heat wave."

 

"Like they used to say up in the Yukon in the days of '49," Doc said. "We sell butter by the quart in summer and milk by the pound in winter."

 

"Hey, that's good," Dean said. "But what's a quart and what's a pound? I've never been good at all those difficult measurements. Rona never got around to teaching me."

 

The mention of the boy's mother brought her image to Ryan's mind. Remembering Sharona, Ryan wasn't that surprised that she never got around to teaching the boy much.

 

But she'd taught him plenty about survival, and in Deathlands that was worth more than all the history, geography, math and science put together.

 

Even so, everyone agreed, including Dean, that it was long past time for the lad to get himself a proper education. After all, he was to be part of the future, and the future needed every chance it could get.

 

It was just a question of finding the right place.

 

Good schools weren't all that common in Deathlands. In fact, schools of any kind were few and far between.

 

 

 

"SURE YOU FEEL all right, lover?"

 

Ryan nodded. His legs felt like wet string, and his throat was still crushed and painful. But he figured that this was likely to be about as good as he'd feel for a while. "Sure," he said. "Time to move."

 

Everyone drew their blasters, lining up behind Ryan, trying to avoid the small heap of festering liquid corruption that had once been Melmoth Cornelius.

 

"Triple red, people. Let's go."

 

He eased open the door of the gateway chamber.

 

 

 

THE ANTEROOM NEXT to the gateway was totally empty no furniture, nothing tacked to the plain white walls.

 

The door that led to the control section of the mat-trans complex was wide open. From where he stood, Ryan could see clear across the room to where the massive vanadium-steel sec door was solidly closed.

 

"Looks safe," he stated.

 

They stepped into the comp-controlled room, with its rows of desks and comp consoles. Everything looked perfectly normal. All but one of the ceiling lights glowed brightly, and all the monitor screens seemed to be functioning.

 

They all walked around, mesmerized by the dancing display of colored panels and whirling comp disks, the endless rows of buttons, switches, dials and knobs, the roaming sec cameras, mounted near, the ceiling, their red eyes glowing fitfully, sending their images through the hidden conduits up to a control room elsewhere in the redoubt. The room probably hadn't seen human life for nearly a hundred years.

 

"If only we knew what all this did," Ryan said. "Then we could mebbe control our own jumps. Know where we were going and get there safely."

 

Doc sat at one of the rotating stools, spinning himself slowly. "Sadly all of that went down forever into the dark when the missiles flew and the blitzkrieg raged. And I for one do not lament the passing of the Techno Age. Humanity was already doomed, before the final war began. The bombs merely speeded up the process of decay."

 

"Cynical old bastard, aren't you, Doc?" Mildred commented, her broad smile taking the sting from her words.

 

"You're a mere chit of a girl," he replied. "What are you? Not even 150 years old. Wait until you reach past the two-hundred mark, and you may find yourself becoming a trifle cynical, Doctor."

 

"Enough," Ryan said quietly. "We'll go and take a look outside the sec door. No sign of anyone getting into here."

 

"Can I do the door, Dad?"

 

"Sure. Usual rules, everyone. Get ready."

 

He took his own place at the center of the dull metal door, kneeling, the SIG-Sauer cocked in his right hand. The others fanned out behind him, taking cover behind the desks. Dean went to the green lever at the side that was in the down, or "closed," position.

 

"Go," Ryan told him.

 

The boy threw the lever up, triggering the complicated system of gears that lifted the hundred-ton door off the concrete floor. There was the faint whine of buried machinery, then the door started to move slowly upward.

 

As soon as it had reached four or five inches, Ryan gave a hand signal to his son. Dean immediately steadied the lever in the central position, checking the ascent.

 

Ryan hugged the floor, squinting through his good eye, seeing more or less what he'd expectedan expanse of bare corridor stretching out both ways, lighted by long fluorescent tubes in the arched ceiling, and more of the ubiquitous security cameras in the angle between ceiling and wall.

 

No sign of life.

 

"Up another six inches."

 

Again, there was nothing to see. Ryan sniffed, tasting clean fresh air. Normally the air in closed redoubts was stuffy, flat and stale, having been recirculated around and around for nearly a hundred years.

 

"Another foot."

 

Once again the sec door rumbled higher, until Dean checked it with the control lever. Ryan was able to see some distance in both directions, but the curvature of the passage limited his view to about fifty paces to the left and right.

 

"All the way," he ordered, getting off the floor and moving slightly to one side.

 

"Hey, that air smells great," Krysty said.

 

"Sure." Ryan glanced back at her. "But it has to mean that parts of the redoubt have been broken into. So we step extra careful."

 

 

 

THEY TRIED LEFT first of all.

 

Most of the redoubts that they'd visited had been built to a similar pattern. Generally the matter-transfer section of the military complex was situated in the deepest part, as far away from the main entrance as possible.

 

It was no surprise to find that the passage, having wound to the left for about ninety yards, came to an abrupt halt in a wall of solid reinforced concrete. There had been no doors, elevators or cross corridors in that short length of the passage, and not a sign of anything living having penetrated that far.

 

"Back that way," Ryan directed, leading his friends along to the right.

 

 

 

THERE WERE TWO TURNOFFS, both blocked by sealed sec doors, each with coded panels to one side, with the full range of letters and numbers.

 

"Can't we have a go?" Dean asked eagerly. "Could easy hit the right combination."

 

Doc patted him benevolently on the shoulder. "I fear not, young fellow. Even if it's only a six-digit or -letter code, we could spend our entire lives here trying one combination every ten seconds and still not stumble upon the right mix."

 

"You sure about that, Doc?"

 

"Of course. Did I not spend some good time mastering Boolean algebra?"

 

"Numerical progressions and coding has nothing to do with Boolean algebra," Mildred said.

 

"Has it not? Ah, me, has it not?" Ryan noticed that Doc's pale blue eyes were twinkling, as they often did when he was teasing Mildred.

 

They continued along the passage, the watching lenses of the cameras following their steady progress.

 

"There doesn't seem to be any current of air," the Armorer commented.

 

"Doesn't need to be. If some part of the redoubt's been opened up, mebbe way above our heads on a higher floor, then that air would be utilized by the nuke-conditioning plant and pushed around to all parts." Ryan looked behind and ahead. "This is one of the best redoubts we've ever been in. Nearly all of the lights are working, as well as the cameras. Looks like it wasn't damaged at all during skydark."

 

"No cracks in walls," Jak observed. "Or ceiling."

 

That was also unusual. Most of the top-secret redoubts had suffered some sort of damage during the brief World Combat. Much of it was secondary, caused by the quakes and eruptions that the United States endured as the land was pounded by unimaginable nuclear forces.

 

"No sign of animals getting in." Mildred looked carefully at the high arched ceiling. "Not even a spider or a fly down in this part."

 

"Glad there's no vermin," Ryan said. "Don't mind most creatures, but I can't say I take to rats. Seen some real mutie bastard rats over the years."

 

"Remember that place in the Carolinas?" J.B. asked. "Where that fat baron with a residual third eye slopping around in the middle of his forehead caught us?"

 

Ryan nodded grimly. "Won't ever forget him. Baron Kagan. Tricked us to try and get at Trader. Holed us up in a cage set between the tidewater marks. Chained our hands to the walls. Cages got flooded every single tide turn. Water came right on up to our chins."

 

J.B. laughed at the recollection. "Wouldn't have been so bad in there if it hadn't been for all the blind eels and the giant rats."

 

"Eels weren't so hard. Learned from experience to open our mouths and stand real still. They got curious and stuck their heads in and you could bite them off, clean as whistling. The rats were tougher."

 

"Tell us, Dad," Dean said, almost jumping up and down with excitement.

 

"Big as cats. They somehow sensed that we were pretty well helpless. Particularly when the water was high, and they could swim at us and avoid our kicks."

 

J.B. carried on the story. "The little devils went for our ears, using their claws to climb onto our heads, pulling themselves up on our hair. What they were after most was our eyes. Very tasty that would've been."

 

"That's disgusting, John," Mildred said, pulling a face. "Disgusting."

 

"It would've been," Ryan replied. "But we found a way of dealing with them. We had to, or we'd have been blinded and the rats would easily have stripped all the flesh off our faces. No problem for them."

 

"So, what did you do, Dad? Bite off their heads, like with those eels?"

 

"Too big. And much too strong and active. Let a rat's head inside your mouth, Dean, and it'd be Brother Rat doing all of the biting and eating. No, we had to try and get a good grip on them with our teeth, and then take a breath and drop our heads into the filthy water."

 

"Drown them!" Jak exclaimed with immense satisfaction. "Hot pipe!"

 

"Wasn't simple." J.B. shook his head at the memory. "Hard to hold your breath when you had a huge mutie rodent wriggling and scratching and trying to take off half your face."

 

"But we made it." Ryan grinned. "Left the corpses floating so that their friends could come and feast. Made them less interested in us."

 

"Next evening Trader tracked us down and blew the cages apart. Baron Kagan regretted that he'd chosen to go against Trader and the war wags."

 

"What did he do?" Dean asked.

 

"Look, we're wasting time standing around here and jawing," Ryan said. "We should be moving on."

 

"Oh, Dad"

 

J.B. answered the boy. "Trader stripped Kagan and staked him out. Got an iron bowl and strapped it around the baron's belly and balls. But first he put a couple of the biggest rats under it. Started a fire and laid some of the red-hot embers on top of the iron bowl."

 

"Wow! Triple ace on the line," the boy breathed. "Trader was the hardest."

 

"Had to teach the lesson that his people couldn't be touched without someone paying a big blood price."

 

"And the rats ate down into the baron to get away from the heat." Dean grinned. "Real good story."

 

Ryan nodded. "And now I think it's time that we moved on from here."