by James Axler
“Put your hands behind your back,” Ryan told Sprue.
“Aw, come on, now,” the fat man said as Krysty took aim at his hairy chest with one of his own Desert Eagles. He didn’t fight as Jak bound his wrists together, but his eyes were narrowed in fury.
“Feel better, now?” he asked Ryan.
J.B. flapped open the other bag, then jerked it over Sprue’s head from behind.
“This isn’t necessary!” the convoy master protested as J.B. tied the bag in place. “I’m on your side!”
“Now I feel better,” Ryan told Sprue.
Chapter Nine
Outside the parked Suburban, Mildred and J.B. stood beside the hooded prisoners. They watched as their companions walked off into the night, their backs lit by the glare of the wag’s high beams.
The max-volume strains of ZZ Top had muffled Junior’s shrill cries during the journey. The tape wasn’t playing now.
“Feed me, feed me,” the cannie moaned plaintively from under his grain bag. He couldn’t stand still. As he shuffled his feet, he bobbed his head up and down. “It hurts so bad. I think I’m dying. Pleeeeease feed me!”
“If you don’t shut that piece of shit up, blindfold or not, I’m going to find him and stomp him to death,” Sprue threatened.
“Better zip it right quick, Junior,” J.B. hissed, “or we’re gonna turn him loose.”
The cannie’s pleas dwindled to soft whimpers, but he continued to bob and dance in place.
They were very close to the canyon’s west rim. Mildred couldn’t see it, but she could sense it deep in her bowels—a vast, yawning void, blacker than black, a two-mile dead drop through the cool night air. It had taken four uncomfortable hours to make the hundred mile trip up by wag, much better than four uncomfortable days on foot. Without the caravan’s other wags to slow them, they had made good time, despite makeshift roads that had steadily deteriorated as they’d climbed closer to the summit ridge.
At the end of the high beams’ tunnel of light, Ryan and Krysty bent and began searching the knee-high outcrops while Jak and Doc stood guard with drawn weapons. The redoubt’s entry keypad was well concealed. If they hadn’t already marked its general location they never could have found it in the dark.
“Got it,” Ryan said as he opened the lid on the door lock’s keypad.
A few seconds later came a low, mechanical rumbling sound; Mildred could feel the powerful vibration through the soles of her boots. A wide section of bedrock ahead began to rise up, like the peak of a huge tent. The massive, double-vanadium steel doors of the Hells Canyon redoubt were framed by a basalt slab and angled roughly twenty degrees above the horizontal at their far end; their outer surface was camouflaged by a thin veneer of natural rock.
As the doors locked back with a resounding clank, the redoubt’s entry lights switched on, blasting up into the sky from the rectangular hole in the ground.
Mildred and J.B. pushed their prisoners toward the geyser of light. As they walked past the front of the wag, Mildred reached through the open driver’s window and turned off the headlights. They abandoned the Suburban with the keys in it. They had no more use for it.
The entrance revealed a wide ramp carved out of stone; it was grooved for added vehicle traction. Electric lights studded the high ceiling, casting a harsh glare over featureless walls. The ramp led down.
Mildred made Junior walk ahead of her. To control him she gripped the end of the rope still tied around his waist.
“Mind your feet,” J.B. told Sprue as they stepped over the down-angled threshold.
As the companions descended single-file, the scrape of their footfalls echoed off the smooth but un-polished walls and ceiling. Ryan paused at the keypad mounted on the left wall and tapped in the locking sequence.
Inside the ramp, the rumbling of machinery was much louder, the vibration much stronger. The doors overhead made a hollow clank as they slammed shut and the locking bars slipped closed.
The companions continued the descent in silence. Sensors concealed in the walls or floors triggered the banks of overhead lights, which kept winking on ahead of them, and winking out behind. They followed the ramp’s gentle bends, breathing stale air heavy with ancient dust.
Rounding a blind turn, they were confronted by a flashing, whirling, red beacon in the ceiling. Then a Klaxon shrieked a deafening warning. From speakers hidden in the walls came a string of brusque commands. The recording was more than a century old and completely unintelligible. The garbled words and the hisses and scratches cycled over and over for a full minute before they stopped.
“Redoubt, eh?” Sprue said from under his hood.
They had never hoped to fool the convoy master about that, but they could keep him guessing as to where it was and what it contained.
“Keep your legs moving, fat man,” J.B. told him.
Two hundred feet farther on, the corridor was blocked by staggered, hardened, concrete barriers. No way could they have threaded the Suburban through the narrow gaps in the ramp’s dragon’s teeth. And the antitank defenses were too heavy to move aside with-out the aid of a bulldozer.
Beyond the barriers, the ramp was bracketed by deserted guard posts. The hardened, bunker-like positions had firing ports for small arms and shoulder-fired rockets, which was an unusual feature for a redoubt. Beyond the guard posts, the ramp widened and the floor flattened out, turning into an enormous dead-end room. The doors to a huge elevator dominated one wall.
Krysty pressed a button and after a moment something clunked and whirred. The doors rolled apart, revealing a cavernous elevator car that was big enough to hold two 6x6s parked side by side with room to spare.
The companions entered the car with their blindfolded prisoners. Ryan touched the control panel and the doors rolled shut. With a sudden lurch, the elevator started down. The descent was a precipitous, stomach-dropping dead fall.
“What the fuck!” Sprue exclaimed in shock, bracing his back against the wall, spreading his legs to keep his balance.
The smell of burning oil and arcing electrics filled the air.
“Don’t worry, Sprue,” J.B. said. “We’re all in the same boat, just like you said.”
Junior didn’t react to the sudden drop or its seemingly endless continuation.
Maybe his oozie-infected brain couldn’t process the sensory overload, Mildred thought. Or mebbe his hunger had finally and totally shortcircuited his fear.
Their rapid descent covered the equivalent of one hundred floors, roughly fifteen hundred feet. When the car finally jolted to a stop and the doors opened, they crossed another wide dead-end hallway and entered a mirror-image elevator. The distance between the top of the canyon and the redoubt at its bottom was too great for one shaft to span. The trip had to be made in stages. It took several elevators to reach the canyon floor, and there were two more below ground level.
The strategic advantages of the setup were enormous—nukeblast protection, fallout protection, concealment, inaccessibility. The elevator system was vital in case the mat-trans unit failed. An entrance at the canyon bottom would have meant a nine-mile, vertical climb in or out, with no way to move matériel or wags up from that depth. If the amount of rock that had been excavated was staggering, the deepest canyon in the world was the perfect place to spread it. Mildred couldn’t hazard a guess at the cost of such a project. Or how it had been hidden from taxpayers. It was clear that vast sums had been diverted without the public’s knowledge or consent.
When they finally entered the redoubt proper, the hallways were no longer dead ends; they spread laterally, branching out into mazes of interconnected corridors. The usual hallmarks of looting were absent. There was no trashing of the fixtures. No litter. No residue of cook fires. No graffiti. Yet the place was stripped of the expected cornucopia of predark goodies. Food. Clothing. Weapons. Ammo. Fuel. Scattered about were broad, low-ceilinged rooms jammed with cramped, partitioned-off work stations, each equipped with a desk and computer monitor. The c
ubicles had never been occupied. There were no personal items hanging from the bulletin boards, no unfinished work left lying on the desktops.
As the companions walked past the redoubt’s control center, Mildred glanced in. On the other side of double glass walls, tall banks of CPUs erratically chit-tered and occasionally blinked in a dust- and humidity-free, temperature-controlled environment. The computers were on, running minimum upkeep programs for more than a century, waiting patiently for their full potential to be fulfilled.
Like ville folks, scratching out a minimalist existence, cowering from a hostile world behind man-made barriers. They had blind faith that sometime, somehow things would get better, this despite overwhelming evidence that Providence was at best indifferent, at worst malevolent.
The companions stopped their own roaming only when they had a desire to explore, or needed to recover from stints of combat or the stresses of mat-trans travel, but soon enough, the itch to move on took hold of one and all. It was a fact that no place in the hell-scape was safe, not long term. Upheaval was constant. New dangers evolved before their very eyes. The spreading cannie plague was a prime example.
But that didn’t fully explain their wanderlust.
Using the floor maps mounted to the walls under Plexiglas shields, the companions retraced their steps of two days ago. They entered a much smaller, human-size elevator and continued down. The lower they went, the hotter it got. The redoubt’s cooling system was not operational. They were so deep that the air temperature was driven by the planet’s core.
“Where are we going?” Sprue said from under his hood.
“To hell, Sprue,” J.B. said. “We’re almost halfway there.”
As the floor indicator lights winked on and off, the numbers dropping rapidly, they heard a horn from below. A constantly cycling bleat.
A warning.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Mildred said.
“It wasn’t going off when we left,” Krysty said.
“Careful, now,” Ryan told the others. “Watch yourselves.”
The car abruptly stopped on the selected floor, and the companions raised their weapons, ready to engage whatever danger lay ahead.
The enemy was liquid.
When the elevator doors slid apart, a low wave of brownish water rushed in, surging over their boot tops.
“Dark night!” J.B. said, lowering his pump gun.
The hallway in front of them was awash; the water level almost a foot deep. They exited the car and fanned out, sloshing through it. The corridor’s fluorescent lights flickered and snapped.
The Snake River ran through Hells Canyon, but that was nearly half a mile above them, so it wasn’t the source of the flooding. It was more likely the water had flowed in from underground aquifers.
“The levels below us are probably submerged,” Ryan said. “Pumps down there must’ve failed.”
“Mebbe we screwed something up when we arrived,” J.B. suggested. “Mebbe the power drain…?” J.B. caught himself before he said too much.
“We’d better hurry,” Mildred said. “It looks like the water level is still rising.”
Slogging ahead, the companions pushed their blindfolded prisoners. They followed the strobe-lit corridor for fifty yards, then turned through a security gate that connected to the mat-trans area. The low steady hum of nuke engines was very reassuring. Hopefully they still had power for the jump.
In the mat-trans anteroom they found the water hadn’t risen above the bulkhead door’s foot-high jamb, but it was close.
One by one they climbed inside, slopping brown water onto the raised metallic plates of the chamber floor. Then Ryan pulled the door shut tight after them.
Mildred felt the sudden increase in pressure on her eardrums. The door was both air and watertight.
“Better have a seat, quick-like,” Ryan told Sprue.
As Ryan hurried to sit beside Krysty, the convoy master sagged to the floor. A faint mist began to form around the ceiling and the wall and floor plates began to glow. There was a distinct ozone smell in the air.
“What’s happening?” Sprue asked in alarm.
No one answered.
Finally, Ryan spoke up. “You’re going to be fine. We’re in a safe place. We’re all going to take a little nap. Been a long night. Need some rest.”
The mist thickened into a dense fog that expanded in volume, swirling down from the ceiling in sinuous coils.
Worried that the starving Junior might wake up before the others, somehow get his hood off and try to eat someone, Mildred forced him to lay belly-down and headfirst in a far corner of the chamber. She quickly tied her wrist to his waist so he couldn’t move without dragging her along.
Then the floor fell away and oblivion swallowed her whole.
Chapter Ten
“Dear friends, I’d like to propose a toast,” Doc said, pushing back from the rough-hewn table, then raising his tankard to the soot-blackened ceiling beams. “To our beloved Mildred, who by God’s grace has safely passed this awful trial…”
The other companions rose to their feet. “To Mildred!” they shouted, hoisting brimming pewter mugs.
Mildred basked in the double glow of the gaudy house’s roaring fire and the warmth of treasured friendships.
Cured.
Never was there a sweeter word.
“Speech!” J.B. demanded. “Speech!”
Krysty, Jak, Doc and Ryan merrily took up the cry, thunking their tankards on the tabletop in ragged rhythm. A great array of food had been laid out for the victory celebration, so much that a sideboard had been added to hold the considerable overflow. Roasted meats. Game and fruit pies. Mounds of freshly baked loaves and rows of frosted cakes. Small wooden casks of brandy and a barrel of foaming ale.
Mildred got up, her cup and her gratitude running over, her dark face flushed from the heat, the alcohol and the amazing surfeit of delicacies. “I could never have gotten through this ordeal without your help and support,” she said, her voice thick with emotion as she looked from face to beaming face. “As long as I live I’ll never forget what you all have done for me. You saved me from the most horrible fate imaginable. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, one and all.”
Then they drained their tankards dry.
“But how do you really feel?” J.B. asked, grinning as he wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“I feel wonderful. Still a little hungry, though.”
“Go on, then, get to it,” Ryan urged her. “There’s plenty of seconds for everyone.”
Mildred picked up her emptied plate, but when she turned toward the sideboard, she stopped cold. She blinked several times, as if unwilling or unable to believe her own eyes. Then the ceramic dish clattered to the floor and shattered, followed by her knife and fork.
Upon the sideboard, Krysty Wroth was laid out nude. She rested on the six-foot-long platter like a white trout, sliced open from throat to groin, her body cavity cavernously gutted. Her pale limbs and fiery hair were decorated with green and yellow apples and clusters of fat purple grapes. Mildred stared in horror at her own bright reflection in the tipped-back lid of the enormous silver salver. Blood dripped from her mouth, chin and fingers. Blood not her own. Gray pendulums of snot swayed from her nostrils.
She whirled around, looking to the others for help, for an explanation. They were of no help, and the explanation they had to give was not the least bit comforting. Ryan, Doc, J.B. and Jak were dead, too. Half eaten where they sat, red, raw bones showing through torn layers of muscle.
Infinitely worse, she could still taste them.
And they tasted delicious.
Mildred doubled over at the waist and a torrent of vomit erupted from her throat.
The cannibalism was a jump dream; the vomit was real.
Mildred regained consciousness on her knees, her head spinning as she puked bitter bile on the mat-trans chamber’s floor.
HARLAN SPRUE STOOD over his captors who lay
sprawled over the floor of the small chamber, still sleeping soundly. The convoy master had awakened before them. The bonds around his wrists had loosened slightly, just enough for him to wriggle free. He bent over the leggy redhead and retrieved his matching Desert Eagles from the pockets of her shaggy coat. After checking that the magazines were full, he slid them into their snug shoulder holsters.
Looking around, he recalled that before he’d blacked out Cawdor had told him they were having a nap. The small room wasn’t a sleeping chamber. There were no beds or cots or even piles of rags to lay on.
His first impulse upon waking and seeing his adversaries helpless had been to chill them all, but he hadn’t done it. As a trader, he understood the value of crew. He still needed them. Sprue had no such compunctions about the cannie. He would have shot the bastard, but he didn’t want to rouse his new friends just yet. He could have quietly throttled Junior with the discarded rope, but the black woman had tied herself to him, and he couldn’t do the job without moving and possibly waking her.
Sprue carefully collected all of the companions’ blasters. Then he unlocked and opened the chamber door and carried the armload of weapons outside.
The air was still scorchingly hot; it was time to explore.
The convoy master knew roughly where they were in relation to the predark highway. He reckoned the wag had turned northeast, then south, then northeast again. The steepest and slowest part of the journey had been the last couple of hours. It had taken several descents to reach the ground floor of what had to be one of the largest and deepest-sited redoubts ever built. Only one location close by fit the particulars. And that was somewhere near the bottom of Hells Canyon. By his estimate, they were eight or ten miles down from the summit ridge.
Why in radblazes had they brought him here? he thought. To hunker down and escape the cannies? Cawdor and company didn’t seem like the hunkering down and escaping kind, and the one-eyed man had briefly mentioned Louisiana and had asked him about a “queen” of the cannies. Never said why he was so interested. Sprue hadn’t gotten the story about their cannie prisoner, either. Mebbe they had their own caravan of wags stashed away here, fully stocked with fuel, ammo and food. Mebbe they were planning on taking a little road trip to the South. For what reason, the fat man had no clue.
