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  “Something’s wrong here,” Krysty said with a scowl, a hand going to the blaster at her side. The woman seemed perfectly normal, but then she had always recovered faster than anybody else.

  “Yeah, I feel, too,” Jak said, a knife dropping into his palm from a sleeve as his other hand drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python. “Sound wrong.”

  “Then let us…” Doc began but broke into a ragged cough that drove the old man back to his knees. “Proceed…with care…” he whispered, using both hands to draw the huge LeMat and clumsily cock back the trigger.

  “Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan decided, feeling the strength returning to his body. “If we come back with a droid on our ass, I want a backup here.”

  “C-consider me…Balador on the…rainbow bridge…” Doc wheezed, then managed a smile. “None shall…pass.”

  “Crazy old coot,” Mildred snorted, then passed the man the canteen again. “Here, finish it off, the coffee will do you a world of good.”

  Nodding his gratitude, Doc holstered his weapon and accepted the canteen to start sipping at the contents with obvious pleasure. Slowly, some color began to return to his pale face.

  Turning away, Ryan saw that J.B. was already at the oval door hatch, checking for traps.

  “Clear,” he reported.

  “Okay, friends. Triple red.”

  Pulling out his SIG-Sauer, Ryan pressed down the lever that operated the oval door and it silently swung aside. Then with a snarl, the man instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.

  In the next room several big men in U.S. Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps, M-16 assault rifles slung across their backs.

  Chapter Four

  Ryan swung up his longblaster, but before he could fire, the sailors at the work stations began to sag, then shrivel, their bodies wasting away in moments until there was nothing left of them but some grinning skeletons in perfectly preserved uniforms.

  Giving a low whistle, Ryan waited until J.B. took a position behind him, his Uzi at the ready. Moving slowly forward, Ryan eased into the control room, his eye sweeping the interior for anything suspicious. But everything was as it was supposed to be, aside from the uniformed skeletons.

  While the air vents sucked away the swirling cloud of dust, Ryan studied the comp. He had no idea what the twinkling lights on the console meant, but after so many jumps, he could tell when they took on a new pattern, which always meant trouble. Thankfully, it was the standard sequence.

  Going to the opposite door, Ryan listened for any movement in the corridor. Hearing none, he tapped the standard code into the keypad. The door slid open and he sneaked a peek outside. Dozens of corpses wearing Navy uniforms were on the floor, each in the process of crumbling from the infusion of fresh air coming from the vents.

  Ryan then turned to find the rest of his companions already in the control room. Krysty and Jak were standing guard, while Mildred and J.B. checked the clothing and blasters.

  “This man…excuse me, this woman, was a lieutenant in Navy Intelligence,” Mildred said, fingering the rank insignia. “While this fellow was a corporal in the Navy SEALs and the other man was a pilot in the Navy Air Corps.”

  “If this isn’t a bastard ship, then we must be at a Navy base,” Ryan stated, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw. “Or at least, damn close to a base.” That was good news. The Navy always stored tons of extra supplies in their bases. With any luck, dinner would be beef stew, not gopher surprise—surprise, it’s gopher again.

  “These weapons are in fine shape,” J.B. noted, working the arming bolt on one of the M-16 assault rifles to cycle a round out the ejector port. “The springs in the clips are weak, but still functional, and aside from that these rapidfires should work without any trouble. There’s no rust at all on the brass from the dry air.”

  “Dead air,” Mildred corrected him. “I suspect that in this redoubt, when the sensors don’t detect anything alive inside, the computers flood the base with inert gas to retard any corrosion or chemical decompositions.”

  “Which is why the bodies were in such good shape until we activated the life support system,” Ryan guessed.

  “Quite so,” Doc rumbled from the other side of the oval door. “Apparently even the conqueror worm is humbled before the iron law of science.”

  “Amen to that,” Mildred said with a half smile.

  Bemused, Doc grunted in reply.

  “Any spare clips?” Krysty asked.

  “Plenty,” J.B. replied, opening an ammo pouch on the belt. “Five, no six. Mixed rounds, solid lead, HEAT and tumblers.”

  “Expecting trouble,” Jak stated, holstering his Colt Python. “Still might come. I take.”

  After adding a few precious drops of homogenized gun oil to the rapidfire, J.B. passed two of the rapidfires and ammo pouches to Jak and Krysty, then gave another to Mildred. With sure hands, the three companions checked the assault rifles for themselves. The action was a little slow, and the trigger kind of stiff, but aside from that the weapons were in fine shape and ready for battle.

  “Damn, barrel blocked,” Jak said, looking through the weapon at the ceiling lights. Shaking the assault rifle, he saw a slim roll of tightly wound paper fall onto the floor. Why hide cig? the albino teen wondered, then took a sniff. This wasn’t tobacco, but maryjane! Jak started to tuck the joint into a shirt pocket, but the pressure of his fingers made it crumble into loose leaves and ancient dust.

  “No loss. It would have tasted awful,” Mildred said with a knowing wink. “Wine and whiskey age well. Weed does not.”

  “And exactly how do you know that, madam?” Doc asked accusingly.

  “Ah…I had glaucoma in high school.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Dead air, or not, we still need to do a sweep of the base to make sure that we’re alone,” Ryan stated, entering the code to open the door, as it had automatically closed behind him. He entered the corridor again. As expected, the vents had finished their task and the clouds of desiccated human flesh were gone. Now, only loose clothing and skeletons dotted the entire length of the corridor. One figure lay blocking an open doorway, a petrified doughnut in his hand with a single bite taken.

  “These folks died fast,” Ryan stated, scowling at the grim sight. “Think it was some sort of plague?”

  “No disease I know kills this quickly,” Mildred said, hefting the assault rifle to try to find a comfortable position. “Not even the genetically created plagues.”

  “Rad leak?” Jak asked nervously.

  Both Ryan and J.B. checked the rad counters clipped to their lapels.

  “Clear,” J.B. announced. “Not even a trace of rad.”

  Mildred bit her lip. “My guess would be that a gas of some kind did this.”

  “Nerve gas took out an entire redoubt?” Doc asked, shocked. “Is that even theoretically possible, madam? I mean, with all of the automatic safeguards of a redoubt?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” J.B. added, pushing back his fedora to scratch his head.

  “Well, the gas must be long gone by now, or else we’d be facedown on the floor,” Krysty stated, the rapidfire balanced in her hands. “Where next, lover?”

  “Armory,” Ryan stated, heading for the stairs. “If this was done by nerve gas, that’s the most likely storage place. We better make sure that whatever leaked is completely empty.”

  “Before we, too, join the choir invisible,” Doc rumbled, glancing nervously at a wall vent.

  Nobody commented on that dire possibility as they followed Ryan along the corridor. The skeletons were everywhere, and the companions had to exercise care to not tromp on any of the bony hands. Every room they passed had more bones, some of them merely scattered piles, while others were lying neatly tucked into their beds, holding a clipboard or working at a comp or listening to music.

  Once, very long ago, the companions had found a redoubt with eerie sounds playing over the intercom. B
ut instead of a half-crazed survivor, it had proved to only be a music CD still trying to play reveille after a century. But this redoubt was disturbingly still. Quite literally, the quiet of a grave.

  In the ward room, five sailors in pants and T-shirts were sitting around a table, a game of poker in progress. Several more were on a sofa watching a TV monitor now showing only static. One fellow wearing glasses was reading a paperback novel, while another died on the toilet, a yellow newspaper lying nearby bearing the precise date of the nuclear doomsday.

  “Brass by ton,” Jak said happily, noting the countless array of sidearms worn by the skeletons. Most of the officers seemed to carrying 9 mm Glock blasters, but the guards were armed with Colt .45s, the regulation gunbelts holding a standard four spare clips. Those were the best; the Colt was a brutal little manstopper that could blow the head off a stickie at fifty yards.

  Unfortunately the stairs were choked with uniforms, or rather, loose piles of bones that were still tumbling down the steps now that the last vestiges of flesh holding them in place were gone. With no choice, the companions took the elevator to the armory level. Two of the cages were full of skeletons, but the third was empty.

  “This is rather unnerving,” Mildred said, watching a sec camera in the corner of the ceiling steadily move back and forth. The people were all aced, but the machines continued to function on whatever was their last setting.

  “Be a lot worse if somebody had activated a sec hunter droid before collapsing,” J.B. countered, pulling out a pipe bomb and tucking it into his belt for fast access.

  Without comment, Ryan reached up and yanked out the power cord of the vidcam, the red indicator fading to black.

  “How many of those do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked pointedly, gesturing at the explosive charge with the barrel of his LeMat.

  “Just the one.”

  “Then pray, make it count, my friend.”

  “That was the plan, Doc.”

  Reaching the fifth level, Ryan and the others found the main hallway clear of bodies. But that was only to be expected. Combat personnel didn’t lounge around the armory for fun.

  Located at the end of the hall was a massive armored door, a truncated cone of layered steel and titanium that not even a laser could burn through. Luckily, the formidable barrier was ajar, a skeleton lying across the threshold, holding a clipboard of ancient papers, a CD player clipped to his belt.

  “Hmm, he had good taste in music,” Mildred said, reading the title through the clear plastic.

  “Beethoven?” Doc asked curiously.

  “Billy Joel.”

  The companions stepped over the bones and into the armory.

  “Good God!” Mildred gasped.

  Turning fast, Ryan had his blaster out and ready, but then he blinked in surprise and slowly smiled. Jackpot.

  Many of the armories the companions found were completely bare, not even a scrap of paper remaining behind. Sometimes they found a few loose rounds under a shelf, or a single live gren left behind when the base personnel departed before or after skydark, heading for, well, wherever they had gone a hundred years earlier. None of the companions had ever discovered where all of the people had gone, or even had a plausible theory. But this armory seemed to never have been touched. It was completely full, literally stocked to the rafters.

  The companions couldn’t speak for a minute at the miraculous sight of dozens of pallets filling the room, the wall shelves jammed full of supplies. There were also endless racks of M-16 assault rifles, M-203 combination assault rifles, 40 mm gren launchers, M-60 machine guns, even bulky .50-machine guns too heavy for a person to carry, much less fire and remain standing. There were entire rows of plastic drums marked as containing ammunition, and pallet after pallet of sturdy plastic boxes that the companions knew contained grens, and even LAW rocket launchers. It was the military might of the predark world spread out in front of their astonished eyes like a holiday feast.

  “Nuke me, this redoubt was never emptied after skydark!” J.B. cried happily. “The people must have died just before the evacuation order came.”

  “Fully stocked redoubt,” Jak muttered. “More than we dream finding!” For the normally laconic teenager, that was an extraordinarily long speech.

  “Thank you, Gaia,” Krysty whispered.

  “Not even that deep storage locker in New Mex had this much ordnance,” Mildred agreed, already looking around for any medical supplies. Sometimes, field packs were stored in the armory along with the weaponry.

  “All right, fill your pockets, but nothing more,” Ryan ordered brusquely, resting the stock of the Steyr on a hip. “Krysty and I will stand guard. Don’t weigh yourself down for the rest of the sweep. We can come back later and take what we want.”

  Instantly the rest of the companions separated, walking swiftly through the stocks and piles, checking the numbers on the countless sealed containers and mentally translating those into descriptions. Boots, combat, size ten, for use of. Milk, powdered, vitamin fortified, for daily consumption. HazMat suits, Level 10, hazardous materials: antinuclear, antibacteriological, antichemical.

  Going to a wall cabinet, Mildred pulled it open to find a stack of boxes full of MRE food packs. Grinning widely, she went to a nearby pallet and grabbed a nylon duffel bag, then returned to start packing the shiny Mylar envelopes. There was beef stew, veal parmesan, meat loaf and mac and cheese. Pausing for only a second, the woman removed the smoked gopher from her backpack and unceremoniously deposited it into a waste chute.

  Eagerly, Doc went in search of trade goods. Among the thousand and one things stored in the redoubts, the predark government had considered the fact that some sort of crude civilization might arise from the nuclear ashes of America all by itself, so the base personnel would need trinkets to trade with the survivors outside. The companions had found such things before and they were always tremendously useful, such as unbreakable pocket combs, Swiss Army knives, Bowie knives, plastic mirrors, pots and pans, rain ponchos, fishing hooks and, of course, lots of weapons. Mostly battle axes, shields and swords. The Pentagon had clearly expected civilization to fall all the way down to true barbarism, but sometimes there were also black-powder weapons, which was what Doc wanted. Especially the tiny copper nipples full of fulminating mercury that the Civil War–era .44 LeMat used as primers. He never had enough of those.

  Unfortunately, Doc was unable to find any such items on this initial pass, and consoled himself with a Webley .44 revolver and a cardboard box containing fifty live rounds.

  Meanwhile J.B. was having trouble restraining himself from taking everything in sight, and was snagging only a few choice items, several sticks of TNT and a box of detonator caps, a small coil of primacord, a fistful of waterproof timing pencils and items for pipe bombs. Then the man paused at the sight of a wall safe. A safe inside a vault?

  Mentally crossing his fingers, J.B. went to work on the combination lock and soon it yielded with a soft click. Turning the handle, J.B. opened the door and stopped breathing. A portable lockbox filled the safe, and he removed it as gingerly as if defusing a land mine. Placing it on the floor, J.B. used his knife to trick the lock, then lifted the lid. There nestled in the soft, gray foam, were six implo grens, the most powerful predark weapon invented by the human race. It worked just like a regular gren: pull the safety pin, release the arming lever and throw. But instead of an explosion, the gren created a gravity whirlpool, an implosion that could condense an Abrams tank to the size of an orange in less than a microsecond. With these at their command, the companions no longer had to worry about sec hunter droids, or much of anything else, for that matter.

  Quickly rummaging in his munitions bag, J.B. found some duct tape and securely attached the arming lever of each gren before transferring it to his bag. The weight was considerable, but the man had never seen this many implo grens.

  Affectionately patting the leather bag, J.B. proudly started back to find Ryan when he saw something twinkle out of
the corner of his sight. Twinkle? Oh shit.

  Frantically grabbing for an implo gren, J.B. sniffed hard for any trace of ozone, but the air in the armory was warm and flat, sterilized and purified until it was completely without any taste or flavor.

  With the gren clenched tight in a fist, J.B. crept around a pallet stacked high with plastic boxes containing M-4 rifles, to stop dead in his tracks. There was a small alcove directly ahead of the man, thick metal bars sealing it off from the rest of the armory. Set into the metal was an alphanumeric keypad similar to the type used to open the redoubt’s door, and behind the bars were a dozen crystalline containers, inside of which was a swirling white cloud filled with sparkling lights. The sight almost made him drop the gren.

  “Cerberus clouds,” J.B. whispered, the soft words somehow sounding louder than thunder.

  Backing away slowly, J.B. tried not to breathe, the terrible sight of the inhuman slayers filling his world. Just for a second, the man looked at the implo gren in his hand, then realized in cold reality that if the charge didn’t chill all of the clouds at once, he and the rest of the companions would be in for the fight of their lives.

  When their old boss the Trader had first discovered the existence of the redoubts, the entranceway had been guarded by a cloud that bit, and chilled. Over time, the companions learned the inhuman guardian of some of the redoubts was called a Cerberus cloud, and aside from an implo gren, the friends knew the things were virtually indestructible. The clouds were sentient, or at least they acted that way, but if it was only a software program running into their vaporous minds, or if they were truly alive, who knew? Certainly no one alive in Deathlands. What was known for a fact was that they ruthlessly aced unauthorized personnel inside a redoubt.

  Going back around the pallet full of M-4 rifles, J.B. never took his sight off the crystal jars while he softly whistled like a nightingale. Immediately everybody else in the armory stopped talking, and soon the others were alongside the man, their weapons primed for combat.