by James Axler
Gesturing at Krysty, Ryan turned off his bike, and she did the same. A thick silence descended upon the companions, and there was only the panting of the horses and the rustle of the trees from the gentle breeze. Soft voices could be heard coming from the building, along with shouted orders, rattling chains and a dull boom.
“They’re barricading themselves in for a fight,” Ryan sagely guessed, rubbing his unshaven chin. “It’s going to be triple-hard to get inside now.”
“Not necessarily,” J.B. said slowly, turning to study the street behind them. “Big Joe knows traps, but how much does he know about predark cities?”
Slowly, Ryan nodded. “Okay, start searching under the roots. In a mountain town like this, there must be quite a lot of them around.”
Retreating a couple of blocks, the companions parked the motorcycles in the lee of a crumbling movie theater where they couldn’t possibly be seen from the museum. While J.B. removed the ignition keys, Jak, Mildred and Doc tethered their horses to the machines, then everybody began poking and prodding among the leafy vines covering the street until they were rewarded with a dull clang of metal. Cutting away the greenery, the companions exposed a rusty manhole cover.
Working together, Ryan and J.B. started to shift the heavy disk, and it squealed loudly in protest. Stopping instantly, they waited to make sure the coldhearts up on the hill hadn’t heard the brief noise, then they lubricated the edge of the manhole with oil taken from the motorcycle engines, and it moved aside easily. There was only darkness underneath.
Quickly, torches were made from the posts of a picket fence, the ends wrapped in lengths of knotted rope and soaked in juice from the gas tanks. Scraping a spare flint across the curb, Ryan set a torch on fire and dropped it down the hole. Tumbling freely, it fell for several yards before hitting the bottom. There was nothing in sight below but brick walls. The companions grinned. It was a storm drain, not a sewer. Bingo.
Climbing into the manhole, Ryan landed in a crouch, his .357 Magnum handblaster at the ready. When nothing reacted to his presence, the one-eyed man reclaimed the torch and looked about. Designed to handle the runoff water of the melting winter snow, the drain was huge, easily ten feet wide and just as high. The walls were smooth masonry, a few of the bricks having fallen out over the decades to reveal the undamaged concrete underneath. Walking a little ways, Ryan saw that the drain extended out of sight in either direction, the glow of the torch fading away to absolute blackness. There weren’t any signs that animals had ever been down here, and the air smelled clean, but stale, without any trace of seed pods, old bones or even rotting vegetation.
Softly whistling like a whip-poor-will, Ryan stood guard while the rest of the companions climbed down.
“I really hate to leave that open,” Krysty said, studying the circle of starry sky through the opening. “But I can’t figure out how to close it without at least one of us staying behind.”
“There is no way,” Ryan replied gruffly, starting along the drain, his blaster held at the ready, the torch held high to light his way.
Proceeding up the slope, the companions had to pause numerous times at unexpected intersections to guess which turns to take purely on gut instinct. But Ryan was operating on the theory that as long as they were heading uphill, that had to be the right direction.
Every sound the companions made echoed softly along the brick-lined passage, so conversation was kept to an absolute minimum. On a regular basis, they passed more manhole covers, along with slotted openings where the floodwater could pour into the drain, and occasionally they found some debris: a rusty shopping cart, a shoe and a car tire—the last vestiges of predark civilization preserved for posterity.
Reaching the base of a steep ramp, the companions tried to crawl up the drain on their hands and knees, but the drain was level again at the top. They dimly heard muted voices from above. Men shouting and cursing. They were very close.
Encountering another intersection, Ryan paused to add more juice to his flickering torch, then he studied the walls and ceiling. Trader once told him that many government buildings had direct access to storm drains for them to be used as emergency exits in times of civil unrest, which was old-speak for a riot, and for once, the man was glad of the paranoid thinking. Sometimes, the companions even found bomb shelters hidden beneath buildings, but Ryan didn’t think that would be the case for a museum. What he was hoping for was a manhole cover, but one that locked airtight like the hatch on a submarine. This was an old trick that Trader had taught Ryan to gain entry into locked buildings with steel grates over the windows.
The other companions joined in the search, and soon Jak found another manhole cover. Passing his torch to Doc, Ryan cupped his hands, and J.B. put a moccasin into his palms to be hoisted upward. Listening carefully, he heard people talking and caught a whiff of something that smelled like smoked fish. Testing the cover with fingertip pressure, the man looked at the others and shook his head. Frowning, Ryan eased his friend back down and they continued the hunt.
Three more useless manhole covers were found, and Ryan was starting to think the plan wasn’t going to work, when Doc grunted softly and pointed upward. Set into the bricks was a fiberglass door, without a lock or hinges.
“No way,” J.B. whispered, rushing to the door. Running hands across the smooth material, a questing finger punched through a thin section, and the man grinned as he expertly peeled away the rest of the Mylar film covering a standard wheel-lock.
Experimentally, J.B. tested the lock, and it turned freely without any resistance. In a few moments there was a hard click, the fiberglass door swung away from the brick wall and out poured a small avalanche of white stones.
Forming a relay, the excited companions dug out the stack of stones, ferrying them neatly to a nearby pile, trying to make as little noise as possible. Soon, a small cubicle was revealed. Set into the concrete wall was a stainless-steel ladder leading directly to an airtight hatch with another wheel-lock, and an exposed hinge on the side.
Trying not to grin, J.B. checked the ladder for any traps, then climbed to the top and took an oily rag from a pocket to swab down the hinge and the spindle of the lock. Taking hold of the wheel, the man applied the tiniest bit of pressure clockwise to break any corrosion that might have built up over the decades, and let the engine oil seep in deeper. Then he gently turned the wheel counterclockwise. At first, nothing happened, then the wheel-lock began to move with a low grinding noise.
Instantly, the man stopped and listened intently, but there didn’t seem to be a reaction to the noise. Fervently wishing that he had a compass to check for proximity sensors, J.B. swabbed more oil on the hinge and spindle, then took a deep breath and threw his full weight against the wheel. The locking mechanism resisted for only a split second, then it spun freely and disengaged with a dull thud. Shifting the hatch upward a crack, J.B. stole a glance through the narrow opening. At first, the torchlight from below didn’t reveal much, but as his vision adjusted to the gloom, he could see the contents and arrangement of the small room. Jackpot!
Chapter Eight
Climbing through the opening, J.B. slowly stood and looked about the cramped area. It was difficult to see clearly. Something brushed against his face, and the man reached up to find a dangling string. Pulling on it gently, he heard a soft crack, and a greenish chemical light began to infuse the darkness, slowly brightening to full illumination.
There was a set of twelve bunks spanning a wall, each with a footlocker and privacy curtain. A chemical toilet sat in the corner, directly opposite a stack of glass water bottles that reached to the ceiling. An air-purification machine sat on top of a wooden table alongside a rad counter and a shortwave radio. There was a sealed cabinet right next to another door set into the concrete wall. He opened it to see a storage room, the shelves completely packed with hundreds of plastic-wrapped canned goods, clothing, tools, books, board games and medical supplies. At the far end was another door, sealed with another wheel-lock and lined with lea
d. J.B. could scarcely believe his eyes. There was no doubt about it, this was a bomb shelter, a predark bomb shelter! Fully stocked and apparently hidden right under Big Joe’s nose.
Going to the hatch, J.B. smiled down at Ryan, his tense features flickering in the firelight. “It’s a fallout shelter,” he said, then turned to go directly for the cabinet.
Using a thumb, J.B. eased up a corner of the sticky tape edging the metal door, then carefully peeled it away in one long strip. As Ryan climbed into the shelter, J.B. opened the cabinet to reveal stacks of U.S. Army ammunition tins marked .38 and 30.06, plus a row of Browning Automatic Rifles, perfectly preserved under a thick brown coating of cosmoline jelly. That startled the man. Cosmoline? he thought. Who used that anymore? The military weapons stored at the redoubts were sealed inside Mylar bags.
Just for a moment, J.B. wondered if this was a fake, some sort of an exhibit for the museum, then he remembered the chemical light in the ceiling. No museum would waste the effort to install something the patrons would never see or even know about. No, this was the real thing, just an incredibly old bomb shelter.
Warily, Krysty popped up, blaster in hand. “Can we talk here?” she whispered.
“Lead-lined door,” J.B. replied, jerking a thumb. “They couldn’t hear us if we fired a bazooka.”
“Excellent!”
“But keep it low, anyway,” Ryan added in a growl.
Nodding, Krysty came out of the hatch, as Ryan went to a control panel on the wall and fiddled with some switches inside. There was an electrical snap, a brief whiff of ozone and fluorescent tubes in the ceiling strobed into sluggish life. Two of them immediately winked out again, but the rest stubbornly maintained a stark white illumination.
“Egad, this is a Civil Defense bomb shelter,” Doc rumbled, rising to his feet. There was a CD chart on the wall detailing how to test the outside air for radiation. “That’s from the Cold War era, correct? Circa 1950. I read about that during my captivity.”
“Something like that,” Ryan agreed, going to the gun cabinet and taking down an ammunition can. Breaking the seal, he let the inert gas hiss out, then popped the top. Inside were fifty pristine 30.06 long cartridges for a Browning.
“Think they’re still good?” Mildred asked hopefully, a hand resting on the .22 zipgun in her holster.
“After a hundred and fifty years? Your guess is as good as mine,” Ryan replied, putting the can back on a shelf. There was a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet. Opening it, Ryan found a dozen S&W .38 revolvers, the handblasters and gun belts packed solid in cosmoline, along with more U.S. Army cans of ammo.
“Blasters okay, once clean. Can reload brass,” Jak stated, closing the hatch in the floor. With a spin of the wheel, he locked it tight. “Not gonna be lot of help chilling Big Joe.”
“You got that right,” Krysty muttered, lifting a bulky grenade from a box full on a wall shelf. She had seen one of these before. It was a World War II model, what her mother had once called a pineapple, because the outside was covered with squares full of shrapnel. The oblong military explosive was a lot bigger than a modern-day sphere, easily weighed twice as much, and Krysty wouldn’t risk pulling the arming pin unless she was already aced and buried for a week. The chances of the antique grenade exploding in her hand ranged from good to goodbye.
Doing a fast recce of the shelter, Ryan saw that their stroke of good fortune had been reduced to merely finding a way into the fortified museum. Everything in the shelter was pretty much useless. The ancient cans of food had expired decades before skydark. The rice might be okay, as well as the jars of honey, but everything else he wouldn’t feed to a mutie. The medical supplies would probably ace a patient by now, although Mildred could use the scalpels, forceps and such as replacements for her lost med bag. Thankfully, steel didn’t age.
Unfortunately, the Browning rifles would take hours of painstaking work to clean, and even then there was no guarantee that the brass would still be good. The cabinet was packed with military ordnance, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could risk using. The companions would have to stick with what they had brought along. On second thought, Ryan stuffed a pineapple gren into a pocket. Just in case.
Going to the storage room, Ryan went to the lead door and pressed his ear against the cool metal to try to hear any movement on the other side. Not a sound could be heard. Suddenly, the fluorescent lights winked out, casting the storage room in total darkness. Then Ryan saw everything come back into focus from the dim green light of the chemical glow stick. As ever, J.B. had his six.
Waiting for the other companions to get behind him, Ryan gently rotated the wheel-lock, then cocked back the hammer on his Magnum blaster and slowly opened the heavy door.
The next room was dark, the air thick with the taste of ancient dust. Stepping out of the light, Ryan could see this was a repair shop of some kind, probably for the museum exhibits. The worktables and shelves were covered with assorted bits and pieces, all carefully labeled in tiny boxes and marked with the year. Piles of excelsior stuffing were thrown about, empty packing cases were toppled over, coils of rope lay on the linoleum floor like petrified snakes. Stepping into the room, Ryan raised tiny clouds with every step, and he could see there were no other tracks in sight. If the thieves had ever been in this room, it was many years ago.
Two other doors were in sight, a double set chained closed and a plain wooden door. Ryan and J.B. headed that way, watching where they stepped to avoid tripping over anything. Passing a cluttered worktable, Mildred spotted a magnifying glass and happily tucked it into a pocket for J.B., while Doc pocketed a butane lighter, and Jak snared a bowie knife resting in a partially assembled deerskin sheath.
As Krysty closed the lead door to the bomb shelter, the room was cast into darkness, but the eyesight of the companions soon adjusted. They could clearly see a sliver of light coming from underneath the wooden door.
Dropping to the floor, Ryan peeked under the door and saw a pair of U.S. Army boots only a yard away. Then he caught the distinct aroma of Mary Jane. A guard was smoking on duty. Perfect. Standing again, Ryan motioned for the others to hide behind the packing cases, then he softly scratched at the door. When nothing happened, he tried again.
Muttering curses, the coldheart on the other side of the door tromped closer, fumbled with the handle for a second, then yanked it open. Grabbing the man by the throat, Ryan squeezed brutally hard while dragging him into the darkness and shutting the door. Caught by surprise, the coldheart tried to get loose for a second before going for the blaster on his hip. But it was too late; the holster was empty.
“Mine now,” J.B. said softly, painfully shoving the two barrels of the sawed-off shotgun into the man’s side.
Glaring hatred, the coldheart said nothing.
“Tell us what we want to know, and you can live,” Ryan whispered, maintaining an iron hold. “Shout for help, and you’re on the last train west. Savvy?”
Turning red in the face, the coldheart nodded agreement.
“How many sec men does Big Joe have?” Ryan demanded. “What kind of blasters do they carry? Are there any reinforcements? Dogs or trained muties, anything like that?”
The questions seemed to surprise the man, but before he could answer, the door unexpectedly opened again, and there stood another armed coldheart. Gasping at the sight of the companions with their prisoner, he went for his blaster. In a blur, Mildred raised her crossbow and fired. The arrow slammed the newcomer in the chest, going in so deep the point came out his back.
Gushing blood, the dying coldheart staggered away. Now, Doc fired, his arrow taking the man in the throat, sealing forever any chance of a cry for help. Still clawing for the wheelgun tucked into his belt, the coldheart shuddered, and the weapon thunderously discharged, blowing off his own foot.
As the dying man toppled over, Ryan snarled in rage, then ruthlessly broke the neck of the struggling prisoner just as the coldheart pulled a knife out of his sleeve. Tossing aside the l
imp corpse, Ryan drew his handblaster and walked into the light, grimly followed by the other companions.
Fireblast! Ryan thought. There went their only chance to make this a nightcreep, fast and silent. Now, they would have to clear out the building the hard way, a straight firefight against an unknown number of coldhearts armed with a nuke-load of different blasters.
The sound of running came from down a hallway. “What the fuck happened?” a coldheart asked, coming into view. He was carrying a Civil War musket, the bayonet almost the same length as the longblaster.
In response, Ryan shot the man in the face, the copper-jacketed .357 Magnum round punching a hole in his forehead to come out the back of his head in a grisly explosion of bones, brains and blood. As the coldheart fell, his longblaster fired, the .68 miniball slamming into the wall and cracking a cinder block into pieces.
Suddenly, a gong began to clang, and people started shouting from a host of different directions. Doors slammed shut, and there was a lot of running.
“They’re here!” somebody shouted from the floor above. “Bar the door! Don’t let that bastard inside again!”
“He is inside, ya feeb!” another man answered. “Protect Big Joe! Chill any outlanders ya see!”
“Bonemen!” somebody bellowed as a war cry.
“Once more into the fray, dear friends,” Doc muttered, taking the smoking Colt and gun belt from the dead body. At first glance, the old man approved of the blaster. The Old West six-shooter was a single-action, just like the LeMat, except that it took regular ammo.
“Stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred replied, glancing at the musket, then turning away as J.B. took the ammunition pouch off the oozing corpse.
“You keep saying that, madam, but always neglect to tell me where it should be stuffed,” Doc rumbled in his deep bass, slinging the gun belt over a shoulder. Cracking the cylinder, the man removed the spent round to shove in a live brass.
Opening her mouth to speak, Mildred decided better and concentrated on nocking an arrow into the crossbow.
