Chapter Nine

 

 

 

It was just after 930 in the morning, and six out of the seven friends had arrived in the redoubt.

 

Krysty and Dean were helping Michael to recover from what had been a devastatingly unpleasant jump for him, supporting the teenager as he sat on the floor with his head between his knees. They knew that Mildred was somewhere ahead of them, but had no idea where she might be.

 

She had moved quickly away as soon as she realized that there was a matter transfer taking place, running until she reached the bottom of the elevator shaft.

 

J.B. was picking his way carefully along the main passage on the higher level, aware that there was at least one other person in the redoubt with him, but having no suspicion at all of who that might be.

 

The sickly meld of scents was an odd mixture of the familiar and the strange. There was the strong odor of a hospital, which he remembered having noticed in one redoubt at some other time and some other place. But there was also the unforgettable and overwhelming stench of death.

 

Set against these unseen factors was the fact that J.B. hadn't yet come across any sign of life in the redoubt.

 

 

 

RYAN FOUND THAT PROGRESS was becoming slower and slower. It wasn't that there was any visible threat to him, but his combat sense, honed for most of his life, screamed "danger" at him.

 

The corridor had forked two or three times, but Ryan stuck to the main core, walking up a gentle incline, the weird cocktail of smells growing stronger with every step.

 

Sec doors, all locked, stood on both sides at irregular intervals.

 

There was an open area directly ahead of him, with what looked like seven or eight passages. And Ryan thought he could also see another map, this time relatively undefiled.

 

He suddenly caught what sounded like the distant murmur of voices, sending him flat against the wall of the corridor alongside yet another closed door.

 

Which opened.

 

Two figures shambled out, both turning to their left, away from him. Less than a yard from them, Ryan could hardly believe that they hadn't spotted him.

 

He leveled the SIG-Sauer and considered blasting them down with a full-metal jacket through each spine. But he kept his finger still on the trigger, holding fire not from humanitarian concern, but from the probability that the explosions of the blaster would draw others to him.

 

The only thing that struck Ryan was that they were walking in a strange, slow way, as though they were slouching toward some distant Promised Land. Both carried something cradled in their arms, but he hadn't been able to see what it was.

 

They were male, he thought, with thinning, stringy hair pasted to narrow skulls. Both dressed in an assortment of ragged clothes. The one on the left wore what might once have been a uniform of dirty gray green, missing the left leg of the pants. The other had on what looked like a hospital robe that could once have been white, but wasn't anymore.

 

And smells floated around them like the miasma from a stinking swamp at midnight.

 

Ryan made the spot decision to follow them at a cautious distance.

 

As he eased past the open door he glanced inside and looked straight into the face of another of the redoubt's occupants.

 

 

 

J.B. HEARD A MUFFLED YELL, echoing down the corridor from somewhere ahead of him, and then a number of staggered shots close together.

 

"Dark night!" He knew the sound of Ryan Cawdor's SIG-Sauer P-226 as well as he knew his own heartbeat.

 

Without a moment's hesitation the slight figure began to sprint toward the noise of the shooting, slinging the Uzi over his shoulder and grabbing at the folding butt of the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scatter-gun.

 

Mildred, just stepping out of the elevator, also caught the distant rumble of gunfire.

 

Not knowing what it might portend, she hesitated, licking her dry lips.

 

And finally began to walk up the main passage.

 

 

 

IT WAS 939, and Krysty threw the lever to close the double sec doors on the control room. Dean and Michael were standing close behind her, looking nervously around the blind bend of the winding corridor to their right.

 

"Let's go and see what we can see," she suggested.

 

Back in the heart of the deserted mat-trans unit, the cherry-red chamber door was just swinging silently shut for the sixth and last time.

 

 

 

THE TORRENT OF nuclear missiles that defiled the earth during the brief holocaust did more than cull most human beings on the planet. It also slaughtered a vast percentage of all living things, animal and vegetable. Food chains were destroyed or distorted, and the fragile ecostructure was tilted and changed for the rest of eternity.

 

Landscapes were altered. Volcanoes, long extinct, found ferocious new life and the earthquakes raged, tilting tectonic plates that raised valleys and leveled mountains. There were lagoons where there had been deserts, and forests where there had been flat plains. Much of California slid into the Pacific, and cities fell and vanished.

 

After four generations, the underlying effects of the nuking were still running rampant. The first mutations had been more subtle, but the deviations from what had once been the norm grew ever more gross.

 

Plants, fish, birds and reptiles, everything that walked or crawled or burrowed or ran or swam or flew was altered.

 

Muties.

 

Most visible as you traveled through Deathlands were the humanoid muties.

 

Ryan had seen most of them, fought and killed plenty of them.

 

But he'd never come across anything quite like the creature that stood within the room, staring blankly back at him.

 

It was the eyes that drew his attention first.

 

The first impression was that they were melting in their watery sockets, that they'd been removed and boiled, then carelessly replaced. The pupils were almost invisible, and the whites were a muddy pink. And there seemed to be no spark of life within them.

 

Ryan had once stared at the closest range into the dead eyes of a great white shark, but they had teemed with turbulent energy compared to these dull, blank orbs.

 

The skin of the face was puckered and soft, like a peach kept in a bowl of water. It was pitted with open sores like one of the worst rad-sick cases. The mouth was half-open in surprise, showing only the stumps of a few crooked teeth, set among gums so rotten they were almost black.

 

Ryan took all of this in, also absorbing the fact that the mutie had a drooping mustache but was wearing a woman's flowered dress. There was no sign of a blaster, just a thin-bladed, bone-hilted knife stuck into the belt.

 

There was one other thing that slowed Ryan's usual lightning reactions.

 

The mutie was holding a human leg, severed neatly below the knee, the flesh snow-white. In the center of the calf a ragged half-moon had been bitten out.

 

"Hey" The voice was deep, like a lowing steer. The hands, with filthy, jagged nails, dropped the leg and began to fumble for the knife.

 

But it was all done in ultraslow motion, as if the mutie were trapped underwater. Ryan was aware, out of the corner of his eye, that the other two muties had begun to react to the bewildered cry. As they started to turn, he realized that one was actually in the act of biting a chunk from a woman's severed breast, while the other was hugging an armful of unidentifiable meat, the glint of bone showing amid the bloodless flesh.

 

Ryan had once seen a vid that showed trick photographyfilms speeded up, with blowers blooming and dying in half a minute and a bullet bursting a water-filled balloon; an elephant dying and then being devoured by millions of maggots. A huge jigsaw puzzle completed in a flash.

 

The pieces of this puzzle all came together at once in his mind.

 

The smell.

 

The drained human flesh.

 

Not a hospital.

 

"A morgue," he whispered, putting a 9 mm round through the throat of the nearest of the ghouls. Switching his aim, he chilled the other two. One of the bullets burst the severed breast apart, splattering skin and gristle into the mutie's face. Another hit it in the chest, sending it into a clumsy, staggering dance along the corridor, slapping the wall with its bloodied hand, leaving crimson smears on the concrete.

 

Two more rounds kicked the last of the ghouls into an untidy heap on the opposite side of the passage, rolling on its ruined face, bare feet kicking in the last spasms of death.

 

The handblaster's boom would carry for miles through the vaulted sections of the redoubt.

 

Ryan shook his head and sighed. "Shit!" He quickly reloaded the SIG-Sauer, listening to try to hear if there were any more muties coming his way.

 

He could hear feet moving, combat boots clattering on stone, heading toward him.

 

But it didn't sound like an army of muties. More like a single sec man. Ryan eased back into the side corridor, stepping carefully over the corpse, his own boots slipping in the sticky lake of spilled blood from the torn throat.

 

Whoever came along would see the bodies, but they might figure the killer had moved on. And then Ryan could backshoot him from cover. Best and safest way of doing the job.

 

 

 

J.B. RAN AS QUIETLY as he could toward the shooting, though he was aware of the steel tips on heel and toe of his boots clattering and echoing ahead and around him. Part of him knew that he was going to be too late.

 

One way or another.

 

Ryan would have won the brief firefightand the Armorer hadn't caught the sound of any other blasteror he would already be chilled.

 

He saw the bodies, one of them still scraping his bare feet on the stone in the insensate residual movements of the nearly dead, lying bloodily about thirty yards ahead of him.

 

Ryan heard the running feet stop and readied himself with the SIG-Sauer.

 

J.B. edged closer, alert for any threat. The powerful shotgun was braced at his hip, finger relaxed on the trigger.

 

He noticed the door on the left, slightly ajar. He moved away quietly to the opposite side of the corridor, giving himself a better angle.

 

Ryan sensed the intruder, very close. All of his attention was focused on the main passage, making the instant decision to take the initiative. Other enemies might be closing in, and time wasted was time lost.

 

He kicked the door open, finger whitening, checking the movement at the last splinter of frozen time as he recognized the crouched figure of J. B. Dix.

 

"I nearly" Ryan began. But J.B. hadn't stopped, swinging the gaping muzzle of the Smith amp; Wesson toward him and firing. Ryan felt the blast of heat and noise.