by James Axler
“I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”
Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.
He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.
The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”
Ryan recoiled as if the old man had transformed into a coiled diamondback. “Fireblast!”
Doc sat up with an almost audible creak of joints. “Indeed. One might think you had never seen a man in repose.”
“Doc, you was the deadest-looking article I ever hope to see,” the Armorer said with a chuckle. The old man stood, shot his cuffs and dusted off his frock coat.
“Lover.”
Ryan’s head snapped around. Krysty was sitting up. The color had returned to her cheeks. Before he or Mildred, who had at last gained her own feet, could move to assist her, she stood.
BARE FROM THE WAIST UP, Krysty Wroth had sat in the infirmary of the Rocky Mountain redoubt, teeth locked on Ryan’s scuffed old leather belt. Mildred Wyeth had a pair of channel-lock pliers from J.B.’s armorer’s kit clamped on the head of the crossbow quarrel. The coldheart missile had a barbed iron head that reached halfway down the shaft to make it hard for the recipient to tear it out of the wound. However, a crossbow quarrel had enormous penetrating power. The bolt had actually gone all the way through Krysty’s left shoulder to tent out the fabric of her jumpsuit with two inches of gory tip.
“Hold on, Krysty,” Mildred said. She pulled hard. Krysty closed her eyes, her fingers dug deep as talons into Ryan’s hand. She made no sound.
The quarrel came free with a sucking sound. Blood gushed out, flowing down into towels they’d discovered inside an old laundry storage bin and heaped around the redhead’s middle. Mildred had told the others they’d need to let the wound bleed freely for a short time to flush the channel. The benefit would offset the minor additional blood loss.
But even before she nodded to Ryan and J.B. to start pressing gauze compresses over the holes, entrance and exit, Mildred’s broad dark face was wrinkled in a gesture of disgust. Ryan frowned.
“The smell,” Mildred said, holding the grisly trophy away from her. “Not much question what it is.”
“Not gangrene, surely?” Doc Tanner asked.
“Way too soon. No, it’s feces, probably human. Those coldheart mothers didn’t miss a beat.”
“Want to guarantee nobody gets away from them,” J.B. said, sharing a grim look with Ryan. They were well familiar with that particular trick from their time with Trader, years before. Smearing a penetrating weapon, like a missile or a punji stick, with human feces all but guaranteed infection, deep-seated and virulent, in anyone unlucky enough to be punctured by it.
“There’s still alcohol and gauze left in the redoubt stores, and even some packets of antibiotic powder,” Mildred said. “I can make a lick and a promise at cleaning out the filth. I can make a pass at debriding the wound, cutting out the dead and tainted flesh with a scalpel, to minimize the infection. But one thing we don’t have is anesthetics.”
Krysty sat, pallid and swaying, with Ryan’s arm around her. “Do what you need to do, Mildred. I can take it.”
“Do you need to?” Ryan asked. “What about Krysty’s natural ability to heal?”
“It has its limits,” Mildred said, “like everything else. As a doctor and a friend, I can’t in conscience let it go without getting some of that crap out of there. I think we can pass on debriding, since that would add to the existing trauma, and nothing in my power is going to prevent infection totally. On the other hand, cleaning the wound channel will help keep the infection down while doing minimal extra damage. But…it’ll be rough.”
It was. Mildred had borrowed both a segmented screw-together aluminum cleaning rod from J.B.’s kit and the concept of another gun-cleaning implement, the pull-through bore scrubber. She used the rod to poke a string through the wound, back to front, and then used it to pull through some thicker cord braided first with alcohol-soaked gauze patches, then dry ones, and finally patches liberally coated in broad-spectrum antibiotic powder. Krysty had endured all in the same stoic silence with which she had taken Mildred’s pulling out the bolt. But by the end her eyes were tightly shut and Ryan had to hang on to her to prevent her toppling from the steel table as she passed out.
SHE’D STRUCK IT lucky one way, anyway: she’d been out for the jump. Now she was standing unassisted.
“Careful, there,” Ryan began, eyeing Krysty carefully in case she started to sway.
Krysty shook her head, smiling. Her hair continued to stir around her shoulders after the motion was done.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Well, not fine. I’m okay for the moment. The power of Gaia is strong right here and now. Can’t you feel it?”
“I can sure hear it,” Ryan said. The colossal groans and creaks and thuds reverberating in the very marrow of his bones could only originate within the Earth itself, he knew.
“The infection’s working in me,” Krysty said. “Gaia’s power will help me fight it, but I’ll need time.”
“Time, fair lady, is one commodity we might not be vouchsafed,” Doc said. “Judging from the prevalence of mephitic vapors, if we have not actually attained the infernal regions, we may have found ourselves in surroundings scarcely more salubrious.”
“From the smell of sulfur and the sound effects,” J.B. said, looking up and around the mat-trans chamber as if judging how likely it was to hold up, “I reckon we might just have jumped in the belly of a live smoky.” He shrugged. “Out of the frying pan—”
“But these redoubts were built to withstand nuclear explosions,” Mildred protested. “What can a volcanic eruption do to them?”
Doc shook his head, his face set in a look of bloodhound mournfulness. “Much, it is to be feared, dear lady. When I was the involuntary guest of the Totality Concept and Operation Chronos in your own charming time, I read studies to the effect that a single large eruption discharged the force of many, many multimegaton warheads. The illusion of safety afforded by our surroundings may be precisely that.”
“A live volcano? What imbecile would’ve decided to build a redoubt inside a volcano?” Mildred asked.
“It might not’ve been live back before skydark,” Ryan said. “Mebbe they reckoned on it staying dormant.”
“And how much do you trust whitecoat judgment?” J.B. asked. “They did such a swell job with the good Doc here.”
“Talk fills no empty bellies or water bottles,” Ryan said. “We better take a look-see, find out what’s actually going on.”
He glanced around the chamber with its flame-colored walls, now sinister and suggestive. Had the builders intended it as some kind of ironic commentary on their own arrogance in building their shelter in the gut of a volcano? Or was it a sign of their obliviousness?
He didn’t bother to shrug. Only bigger waste of time than reckoning men’s motives, he thought, was trying to reckon dead men’s motives.
“Let’s move,” he said. “Krysty keeps to the rear, with Mildred to guard her.” Ryan stepped forward and opened the door to the chamber.
Mildred nodded, her ZKR already in hand. Krysty, he noted with approval, hadn’t drawn her own weapon. Last thing anybody headed into potential danger—and the unknown was always dangerous—was somebody at his back with a blaster who wasn’t in complete control of himself. Or herself. Normally, Krysty pulled her weight and more without being asked. Now she did her part by keeping out of the way, because G
aia or not, she wasn’t fit to fight, and had sense to know and accept it.
He nodded to J.B., who with scattergun ready moved swiftly out the open door of the mat-trans chamber. He stepped left to clear the doorway. Ryan followed, holding his 9 mm SIG-Sauer in both hands, through the antechamber and right, to hunker down behind a control console. Each scanned half of the large room beyond, all senses stretched to greatest sensitivity, not just vision.
This room was pretty standard, if darker than usual. Black walls and ceiling seemed to soak up the dim white light that had come on automatically when the transfer completed. The room was circular, perhaps ten yards across. The only visible doors were closed.
Except for the groans and bangs of the Earth itself, shivering up through the floor and Ryan’s boots and the bones of his legs, the place gave off a pervasive feel of emptiness, of deadness.
“Clear,” J.B. said.
“Clear,” Ryan echoed.
Jak came out next as if shot from a coldheart crossbow, hitting the far wall with his big Python a dull metallic gleam in both hands, covering the room either side of the mat-trans. Doc came next, LeMat held out at full extent of one arm as if probing like an insect’s feeler.
Jak’s nose was twitching like a wild animal’s and his lip was curled. “Stinks,” he said. “But dead. Nobody here.”
“Reckon you’re right,” Ryan said. “But we make sure. Mildred, you and Krysty stay here and stay sharp. The rest of us will secure the place.”
THE REDOUBT WAS EMPTY, all right. Its automatic life-support systems seemed to function properly. As the four men moved with swift caution through the corridors and up and down stairs the stench of brimstone, which had infiltrated the vast subterranean structure over a century or more, was replaced by cooler, cleaner-smelling air scrubbed by the filters. “Cleaner-smelling” was a relative term; the redoubt was full of a musty smell no HVAC system could exorcise, of dust and mildew and disuse—and, faintly but unmistakably, of death. They found several corpses, shrunk and mummified in the dry sterilized air, bundled in ancient U.S. army uniforms. Unusual.
When the group came back to the gateway control room Ryan was alarmed to find Krysty lying apparently unconscious on a pallet composed of their coats and jackets. “She’s just resting,” Mildred said, moving away and lowering her voice so as not to disturb her patient. “Letting Gaia get a head start on healing her. They and me got a job of work ahead of us.” She studied the four. “Especially if we need to move right away.”
“You called the shot,” J.B. said. “Place is cleaned out pretty good. No food, no weps, no meds. There’s all the water we could want. We can get cleaned up and drink until our skins are swollen out like three-day-old deaders. But that’s all she wrote for resupply.”
Mildred sucked in her lower lip. The mountain retreat had been good to them. The abundance of game and natural food to gather had left them with a few days’ MREs and self-heats in all their packs. But all that really granted them was a little time to forage for more food in whatever terrain lay beyond the redoubt—and the erupting volcano.
“And to think,” Mildred said sourly, “right about now those bastard coldhearts are stuffing their faces with that nice juicy deer I gutted. Well, we can’t stay here, even if the roof doesn’t open up and pour lava on our heads.”
She looked around at the scouting party. “You guys must have some good news,” she said, “’cause you’re bouncing around like schoolkids who got to pee. So spill it. I’m not in a mood for games.”
J.B. looked to Ryan, who shrugged. “Well, we do have to get out of here,” the small man said, “but we don’t have to walk.”
“PRETTY, ISN’T SHE?” J.B. asked, words echoing in the vastness of the underground garage. “She’s a Hummer.”
“I know what a Hummer is, J.B.,” Mildred said. “A Humvee, too. It’s not like it’s the first one we ever found.”
“Got a nuke battery, so we don’t need to worry about fuel,” Ryan said. “It’s all there and good to go.”
“Wonder why they left it,” Mildred said.
Ryan shrugged. “I suspect everyone used the gateway. Who knows?”
Mildred eyed the circular hole in the vehicle’s roof. “Too bad they dismounted whatever the pintle gun was and took it with them.”
“But then, should danger rear its ugly head,” Doc said, “we simply rely on flight rather than fight.”
“We do both,” Ryan said, “if we need to. We can always shoot through the windows. Right now, let’s get cleaned up and get a good sleep. Whatever’s waiting outside, at least we can be rested, strong and squared-away to face it.”
* * *
Chapter Four
The giant fans of the redoubt’s HVAC system produced a slight overpressure. Air gusted outward as the great doors began to slide apart noiselessly—or at least with no noise that could be heard over the horrific bomb-blast concerto playing nonstop outside.
Night waited. But no stars. A roof of cloud or maybe smoke, lit by pulsing hell-glows of yellow and orange from below, from within by blue-white lightning novas.
As the doors opened wider, the air from outside eddied back in, stinging hot, bringing a swirl of gray ash soft as the finest fur. Ryan choked and gagged on the stink of sulfur and his eye watered. He staggered back, coughing.
After a moment he got the coughing fit under control and looked around at his friends. They were covering their mouths and noses with their hands to filter out the ash and dabbing at their eyes. “What’s the verdict, Mildred?” Ryan croaked.
“Just smells bad,” came the physician’s muffled voice. “If that was hydrogen sulfide we were breathing, we’d be in our death throes already with our lungs full of sulfuric acid.”
Ryan looked back outside. The brightest and most persistent glow seemed to come from his left. He guessed the main vent was off that way. Relief: they weren’t staring down the hellbore muzzle of the mountain, at any rate.
Then a handful of blazing light balls like giant meteors arced across his vision to spatter the slopes below and to his right with brief pulses of yellow fire, just to keep him from getting cocky. But the doors themselves were clear and the ground outside seemed unobstructed by rockslide or lava flow.
“Looks like we got us a road outta here, anyway,” the Armorer muttered from behind. Ryan nodded.
Doc stretched out an arm, long finger pointing. “By Jove! Look there!”
By the underlighting of the clouds they could tell they were looking out over a bowl-shaped valley many miles wide. Way, way off lay a sheet of something like black glass, with a jagged trail of crimson stretching out across it—a lake, it seemed, reflecting the fire plume of the erupting vent. Out in the middle of that black glass sheet, reflecting in it, was visible a scatter of faint lights.
“A ville,” Ryan said.
“Villes,” Jak said.
“He’s right,” J.B. agreed. There were at least half a dozen other small clumps of lights scattered across the valley, shimmering slightly in the ground effect.
“Pretty dense habitation, comparatively speaking,” Mildred said. She hovered protectively near Krysty, who stood on her own power but seemed at least halfway in a trance, from the infection that had taken root in her shoulder despite Mildred’s best efforts—just as Mildred had predicted—or from the forces of Gaia surging so mightily around them, or both. “There’s food here. And safety.”
“How you reckon that?” J.B. asked.
“Number of villes. Way they’re spread out, rather than all clumped up together in one big defensive perimeter. You wouldn’t get that kind of population in that kind of distribution without at least comparative peace.”
The Armorer grunted noncommittally. “Likely you’re right. But still, mebbe you aren’t. No guarantees in this life.”
“Things change,” Jak said.
“Tell me something new,” Ryan said with a winter smile.
GETTING TO THE CENTERS of habitation proved to be
more than difficult.
With the Hummer’s independently suspended tires bouncing over lava rocks head-size or better and his partners, including the sorely injured Krysty, bouncing around in the cab like badly stowed luggage, Ryan wondered if he would even be able to drive them off the fire mountain. It would have been vicious enough going in the dark with nothing but the jagged terrain to cope with.
The mountain was spewing. Away off to their left fountains of fire arced red across the sky. The one thing to be thankful for was that their path, such as it was, led steadily away from the eruption.
A scarlet glow shone on the hood in front of him. He leaned forward, eye straining up, trying to figure out where it came from. Suddenly a fang of rock not thirty yards to their left seemed to explode in a yellow flash. The wag rocked. The cab filled with voices crying out in surprised alarm. Impacts thunked off the Hummer’s steel and Kevlar carapace like hail. J.B., standing upright with his Uzi in lieu of the missing mount-gun, ducked into the cab with a yelp as a handful of glowing yellow embers spattered across the hood.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “What the fuck was that?”
“Bomb,” Doc said. Since the coldhearts had chased them off their idyllic mountain camp into the redoubt, he had been totally lucid, showing no sign of the madness that sometimes overtook him. Somewhat to Ryan’s surprise, he remained entirely calm in the face of whatever had just happened.
“You’re kidding, Doc,” Mildred said, hunching down in back, looking up and out, trying to fathom what had happened. “Somebody’s attacking?”
“Only the gods in their wrath,” Doc replied blithely. He rode in the back seat with Jak, who sat clutching one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives like a talisman in both hands. Mildred was in the aft cargo compartment tending to Krysty, who lay on a mat laid on top of their baggage, such as it was. “That was a lava bomb. A bubble, if you will, of molten rock, filled with lethal gas. If one lands too close to us we are undone, to say nothing of what should eventuate were one to strike us directly.”
