Time Castaways (22 page)

“Not going to be easy getting there in broad daylight,” Krysty said, thoughtfully stroking her animated hair, the filaments coiling around her fingers. “That office building has a direct view of city hall.”

“Even then, we don’t even exactly know where the damn entrance to the redoubt is hidden,” Mildred added. “If it’s located under those heavy columns, or worse, the dome, we’ll need dozens of pipe bombs to blow our way inside.”

“No need for that,” Ryan said calmly, still intently studying the ruins. “We’ll use the sewer.”

The sewer? But before the physician could comment, a crunching explosion erupted from the ruins below.

In the middle of the fallen metropolis, smoke was expanding from the only remaining bridge, the flaming pieces tumbling down into a white-water river rushing to the lake. On the far side stood a large group of stickies, angrily waving their arms and most hooting like crazy.

Across the river stood the triumphant barons and a good thirty sec men. A few of them started to shoot ar
rows and blasters at the muties, but the two barons soon put a stop to that waste, and the small army turned to head deeper into the sprawling ruins.

“They head straight for cannies,” Jak said with a wide grin. “When meet, nobody gonna notice us slip into redoubt.”

“Sewer,” Ryan corrected him, compacting the Navy longeye. “All right, follow me.”

Easing out of the bushes, the one-eyed man started down the sloping side of the grassy hill with the others close behind.

Chapter Twenty

Moving swiftly down the side of the hill, the companions kept low as they skirted along the ruins. The pavement was long gone, scavenged by the cannies, so the companions kept to the streets. Potholes were everywhere, some of them deep enough to have small trees growing inside, and one held the fiberglass chassis of a car. Insects had consumed the rubber tires, but the rest of the vehicle seemed to be in fine shape, with a grinning skeleton behind the steering wheel wearing the tattered remains of a three-piece suit, a PDA poking from the breast pocket of his suitcoat.

Mildred snorted at the AAA sticker on the window, but said nothing. There was too much death here, and her normal defiance of the Grim Reaper was weakening. In her opinion, the sooner the companions left Michigan, the better.

The weed-filled outlines of where houses had once stood lined the broken streets, along with some charred holes that were always situated on a corner.

“Gas station,” J.B. said, recognizing the pattern of the explosion.

Cutting through a tangle of weeds and trees, Ryan found a small bridge going nowhere. Bypassing the
oddity, he could only guess it was something for the tourists. Maybe a playground, or miniature golf. In spite of his long association with Mildred and Doc, that was still a concept he found difficult to understand. Tourism. Truly, the past was a different world.

As the companions got closer to the city center, the destruction steadily lessened, and soon pieces of walls were standing around them, then a few telephone poles, and finally the huge mounds of broken masonry, pipes, cables, cars, mailboxes, billboards and skeletons. Mostly people and what looked like dogs, but the piles were uncountable, and the companions hurried past the unnerving remains of the former inhabitants.

Moving through a strip mall now covered with a thick growth of ivy and numerous apple trees, the companions paused as they heard raised voices in the distance. Then there came the boom of a black-powder blaster, followed by shouting voices and a crackle of blasterfire, mixed with screams and dull explosions.

“Sounds found each other,” Jak said in dark satisfaction.

“Indeed, my young friend,” Doc rumbled, shielding his face with a hand to look at the office building. “And may the sole winner of their conflict be the emperor worm!”

All conversation stopped as Ryan raised a clenched fist. Studying the ground, he began kicking at clumps of weeds until he was rewarded by a hard metallic sound. Drawing his panga, the man slashed away the plants to reveal a circular manhole cover.

Working together, it took three of them to move the
heavy iron disk. But underneath was a dark tunnel. As always, Ryan took the lead, carefully climbing down the rusty ladder with the SIG-Sauer in his hand.

As the sounds of battle faded away, he dropped the last few feet and landed in a crouch, his blaster sweeping for any targets. But there was nothing in sight, aside from a dark, brick-lined tunnel heading in opposite directions. The ceiling was slightly cracked, most likely from the nuke quakes that had reformed the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and countless pale roots dangled from the curved ceiling like jungle vines.

Whistling sharply, Ryan stood guard while the others joined him in the sewer. As Mildred pumped her old flashlight into operation, everybody else lit candles and the companions started off in the rough tunnel heading toward city hall. However, the roots hung so thickly that after only a short distance Ryan was forced to pull out his panga and start hacking a path. It would leave a clear trail for the others to follow, but there was no helping that at the moment.

Reaching an intersection of tunnels, J.B. checked his compass and they went in a new direction. Twice more they changed tunnels, then Ryan called for a halt. There was a side tunnel branching off the main passageway, but unlike all of the others, this one was sealed off with a steel gate and large padlock. Going to the lock, J.B. pulled out his probes and worked diligently for several minutes before he was rewarded with a click and the gate swung away, squealing loudly.

Moving to take the lead, Krysty abruptly stopped before crossing the threshold, her hair flexing wildly. Just
then, something moved in the flickering shadows and a large snake came toward the woman, rattling its tail and baring long fangs. The thing was a monster, almost a foot thick and more than twenty feet long.

As the companions raised their blasters, Liana bent and reached for the deadly killer, softly singing a wordless tune. The snake paused in confusion, then began to move in tempo to the telepath music. Ready to shoot, the others said nothing, afraid of breaking the spell. This was clearly not just a mutie; the snake was some bastard mixture of rattlesnake and cobra.

Smiling at the deadly killer as if it were a kitten, Liana tilted her head, and the snake finally slithered past the companions, moving down the tunnel and out of sight.

“A present for the barons in case they follow,” Liana said, rising to dust off her knees.

“Well done, girl.” Doc smiled, slapping her on the back. “Very well done, indeed.”

However, Ryan shrugged and felt a new worry grow inside his gut. Fireblast, what couldn’t this woman do if she ever learned how to master her special talents? Maybe she could figure out a way to order all of the stickies to go jump off a cliff. That sounded wonderful, a world without stickies. But then, what would stop her from learning how to sing to norms, making them her slaves? The one-eyed man did not think that was likely to happen, but had learned from bitter experience to always plan for the worst. Nine rounds out of ten, it came true. Liana could be the greatest blessing to ever grace the Deathlands, or the
harbinger of a brand-new type of hell on Earth. However, Mildred often used the phrase “innocent until proved guilty” and Ryan could find no fault with that line of thinking. He would do nothing for the moment. But at the first sign of her controlling one of them, he’d blow her head off on the spot, in spite of what it would do to Doc.

If anybody else noticed the conflicting emotions on his face, no comments were voiced out loud.

Moving along the side tunnel, Krysty noted that there were no stains in the concrete between the bricks from this ever being used. Better and better. So, this was either a brand-new tunnel when skydark hit, or it was a fake.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, Krysty smiled at the sight of a blank wall, the plaster smooth and undamaged. Plaster in a sewage tunnel?

Kicking the wall with a boot, she made several large pieces of plaster crack off to expose wooden planks underneath. Now, the rest of the companions joined her, ripping off the plaster with their bare hands, then hacking into the planks with their knives. Weakened with age, the boards soon splintered apart, and out poured a small avalanche of clean white pebbles. Shoving those aside, at last was revealed a seamless steel door. There was no keypad, lock or even a handle.

“Escape tunnel,” Jak explained as J.B. got to work again. “In case trapped in bomb shelter, barons could still get out this way.”

“So we’re going in backward,” Liana said slowly, chewing over the morsel of information.

“Back door never guarded as well as front,” the teenager stated as if it was a rule of the universe.

With a sigh, the steel door swung aside to show a toilet seat and small stall. Ryan actually gave a half-smile at that. The pencil pushers had hidden the escape route inside the lav. Smart.

Holstering the SIG-Sauer, Ryan dripped some wax on the end of the barrel of the Steyr, stuck in a lit candle, then extended it forward as far as he could reach. He could see the place was a single huge room with rows of cots, workbenches and shelves stacked with cartons marked with the symbol of the U.S. government.

“Jackpot,” he whispered, easing into the bomb shelter.

Spreading out, the companions set down a ring of candles to brighten the darkness.

Heading for the workbench, J.B. fumbled with some wires for a moment. The overhead lights flickered into life, then brightened to full strength. Two of them immediately blew, but the rest stayed shining brightly.

“Nuke batteries?” Jak asked hopefully.

“Not quite,” the Armorer replied, clearly annoyed. “Car batteries.” He waved at the row of batteries and waiting bottles of acid. “Just pour some acid into the batteries, and after a few ticks, the lead plates start making current.”

“Old tech.” Jak scowled in disappointment.

“From before skydark,” J.B. agreed, tilting back his fedora. “Don’t add the acid, and the batteries last forever.”

“How long will they last now?” Krysty demanded.

J.B. shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. Couple of weeks, maybe more.”

Briefly checking the medical cabinet, Mildred muttered unhappily at the poor condition of the supplies. Mice had gotten inside and nibbled almost everything, puncturing the protective envelopes, and then abandoning the pungent chems. Broke the seals then left, allowing the medicine to slowly dry into the consistency of a brick. There were some hypodermic needles still in good shape, but that was all. Still, better than nothing.

Unexpectedly a soft breeze came from a wall vent, blowing out a cloud of bitter dust. But soon that was cycled away and the air began clean, tinged with a smell of chems. Then warmth began to pour from another vent and a radio crackled to life on a small table in the corner, then sputtered and died.

Going to a cardboard box on a shelf, Krysty quickly checked the expiration date listed on the canned goods. “Oh, for the love of Gaia, this is from 1950!” she exclaimed. “We’re not going find anything usable among this junk.”

“But hold, what have we here!” Doc exclaimed, opening a metal cabinet. Stacked neatly inside was a small arsenal of revolvers and shotguns.

Eagerly opening a box of .45 rounds, Doc extracted a cartridge and used his knife to separate the lead from the brass. Pouring out the contents, his hopes sank at the sight of the dull gray gunpowder. Applying the flame of his butane lighter to the stuff, it merely sizzled a little, but that was all.

“Dead as Descartes.” Doc sighed, brushing off the residue on his pants. “This ammunition must be from excess stores they had left over. The brass is loaded with actual gunpowder, not cordite, or that silvery stuff modern blasters use.”

“Nitro cellulose,” J.B. supplied. “Too bad. If the fools had used cordite, we might have found something still in working condition.”

“Forget it, we’re just here for the exit,” Ryan replied, walking toward the front of the bomb shelter. There was a slab of lead standing kitty-corner in the room, and sure enough, there was a large door set into the wall behind, truncating the corner. The inside of that was also thickly lined with lead.

Opening the door, Ryan found the way blocked by a large pile of skeletons, most of them with broken bones or bullet holes in their heads. On the floor was a dusty collection of blasters and knives. The damn fools fought one another to get inside, and so nobody had. What a bunch of feebs, he thought.

Pushing aside the dead, the companions moved into the basement of city hall. Rubble was everywhere, along with dozens more skeletons.

“You better be right about this, Doc,” Krysty said, trying not to step on the old bones.

“Right about what, my dear lady?” Doc asked, obviously confused. Then a wave of panic swept over the man. “Have…have I been here before?”

“She meant about the brass, ya old coot,” Mildred lied hastily.

As the worried face of the time traveler eased, Liana
looked hard at Krysty, and the redhead shrugged in response. Sooner, or later, she would have to learn about the lapses in his scrambled memory.

As the companions probed the darkness, every step raised a small cloud of dust, and soon they were forced to tie cloths around their mouths to be able to breathe. Searching for the least damaged section of the building, they soon located a corridor ending in the furnace room. Some of the bricks in the wall of the corridor had come loose over the decades and fallen away to reveal the armaglass slabs reinforcing the walls. The sight renewed their hope. The mat-trans units of the redoubts were made of armaglass.

Inside the furnace room, they separated for a recce and easily located a small keypad set into a concrete wall. Almost holding his breath, Ryan tapped the entry code for a redoubt into the alphanumeric pad. There was only a brief pause before a section of the concrete wall broke away from the rest and slid aside to reveal a long ferro-concrete corridor extending far out of sight.

Sluggishly at first, panels set along the ceiling flickered into life, illuminating the corridor for a hundred yards. But then, just as quickly, they died away, leaving it in total darkness.

“Never saw that happen before,” J.B. muttered.

“Yeah, I know,” Ryan answered with a grimace.

With no other choice in the matter, the companions entered the corridor and grimly started forward with a growing sense of unease.