by James Axler
"Nightcreeps," J.B. growled. "Shoes on the floor, blasters under their pillows. These boys were caught by surprise."
"Mostly," Krysty corrected him. "Remember that guy in the hallway."
"Same tattoos," Dean announced, letting a blanket drop back into place. "These were part of the same group."
"Heads up," Ryan said, easing open a closet with the tip of his rifle. Instantly, there was a twang and out shot an arrow. It streaked across the room to slam into the dead man in the bunk. The corpse jerked at the impact, and the Navy SEAL knife in his withered hand dropped to the floor.
"And it seems as if a few knew something was happening," Dean said, "but most didn't."
"The leaders?" Mildred suggested, eyeing the knife without interest. She already had a Green Beret blade.
Grunting assent, Ryan briefly inspected the contents of the closet. Hanging neatly on racks were blue and gold military uniforms, the creases as sharp as razors, the buttons gleaming with polish. "These are Air Force dress uniforms."
Cradling her S&W .38 on a crooked elbow, Krysty furrowed her brow. "But the last couple of rooms held green Army fatigues."
"A combined military base?"
"Never heard of that before, but why not?"
Ryan made no reply, keeping his own counsel.
"Strange there are no women," Dean said.
"Maybe the leaders did the killing," Mildred replied. "It's happened before."
A metallic noise from the hallway made everybody drop behind furniture, and they waited quietly until two sharp short whistles sounded. Leveling his longblaster at the partially closed door, Ryan whistled once long and low. A few seconds later, his call was repeated exactly. They relaxed and stood as J.B., Jak and Doc entered the room.
"Anything? Ryan asked, shouldering the rifle.
"We found the fifth level burned to the walls," J.B. stated. "The sort of damage done by bathtub Molotov cocktails. Very crude stuff, gasoline and soapflakes. The sixth held the armory and storage. That was full of corpses and more traps. I had to cope with two on the stairwell, a trip wire at the door, a gren attached to a light switch and a crossbow hidden in the-"
"Closet?"
"Crapper. You had some of the same, eh?"
Ryan nodded grimly.
"Kitchen was also clean," Doc said, pulling close a chair and checking underneath it before sitting. "There was not so much as a potato peel or eggshell in the larder. Even the cooking oil in the fryers was gone."
"Probably used it in the Molotovs," Ryan stated. Studying the predark books on a wall shelf, Mildred said absentmindedly, "Peanut's the best." She pulled out a volume, only to put it right back. Damn, only operation manuals full of abort codes. Nothing interesting.
"Any salt?" Krysty asked, resting a boot on an overturned ammo box, its sides streaked with blood.
The elderly man patted a lumpy pocket in his frock coat. "And some spices."
"Mint?" Mildred asked eagerly.
"A pinch."
"Excellent." She looked at Ryan. "Means we won't be losing lunch on the next mat-trans jump."
Removing his wire-rimmed glasses and polishing them on the end of his shirt, J.B. studied the room. "Nightcreeps, eh? What did they think was so bastard precious down here?"
"Redoubt itself," Jak suggested.
"Something's wrong," Ryan announced. "Let's check the top level. That's where we should find our answer."
"Roger."
"Check."
"Sounds good."
"Yes, sir."
"Doc found the second elevator," J.B. said, following his old friend. "It's in the south end. But I can't recommend using it. Too many traps around."
"Take no chances," Ryan said, working the bolt action on the Steyr. "Shoot anything that moves. I'm on point, J.B. at the rear. Let's go."
The friends proceeded carefully upward. The door on the next level proved to be closed and locked, but with brilliant light seeping from underneath the jamb. After listening for a while, J.B. did his usual magic and the door opened with a minimum of fuss. Inside was a standard military changing room with most of the wall lockers standing ajar. They usually would have done a quick search. Many times they'd found amazing and often useful things that others left behind for no apparent reason.
But the search would wait. The ceiling lights were abnormally bright, brutally illuminating the scene before them in monstrous clarity. A single wooden chair sat in the middle of the room, and sitting limply in it was a girl of no more than ten or twelve years. Her head was tilted, her blond hair streaked with red blood, and lying on the floor beside her was a smoking blaster.
Chapter Three
The seven friends advanced into the room, moving slowly as if mired in molasses. They had seen death hundreds of times, but that didn't make finding a dead child any easier.
"Jak, J.B.," Ryan said, jerking his rifle in different directions. The two men moved off to disappear around the standing rows of lockers. They reappeared a second later at the other end of the room, and gave the clear signal.
Dropping her med kit, Mildred knelt beside the girl and took a limp hand in her own. She pressed on the thumbnail and watched the results. "Dead no more than minutes," she announced. "Skin is warm, blood is viscous and lividity isn't present."
"Minutes?"
"Still smoking," Jak said, pointing to the blaster on the floor. Shifting his rifle, Ryan lifted the pistol. "Barrel is warm," he said, cracking the cylinder. It contained six cartridges of assorted makes, one spent shell. "We just missed her."
Holstering her .38 pistol. Krysty cursed bitterly. "That must have been the odd noise we heard before. A gunshot muffled by the floors between us."
"Makes sense."
"Just skin and bones," Doc rumbled, leaning against a closed locker.
"Check her numbers," Ryan suggested.
The physician brushed aside the bloody hair covering the neck. "Yes, her elevens are showing."
Everybody knew what that meant. They saw a lot of it in the nukelands of America. When a person got close to death by starvation, the twin tendons at the back of the neck would begin to stand out prominently. It was the sure sign that death was only days, maybe hours, away.
"There was no food in the kitchen, or in storage," Mildred said. "No food anywhere that we've seen."
Her hair tightened fiercely about her face as Krysty frowned. "Which means the only thing left to consume was-"
"The dead men." Ryan scowled. "That's a choice few of us can make."
"Rather die," Jak spit, setting his jaw. "Near did once."
"Yeah," the Armorer agreed. "A slug in the head sounds mighty good compared to long pig."
"To consume the flesh of another human," Doc said in his rumbling voice, "is a journey into bestiality that most of us simply cannot take, even if our own lives are forfeit."
"Hot pipe!" Dean said loudly, almost startling himself with the fervor of his cry. He moved his shoulders, making his bulky backpack rustle. "And here we are with a freaking ton of MREs only a floor away. Enough food for an army!"
"Life is timing," Ryan stated, resting a hand on his son's shoulder. "A minute too soon is as bad as a second too late. Remember that."
Bowing her head, Krysty began to say a short prayer to guide the child's spirit into the world beyond this. The others were respectfully quiet, but stayed alert during the brief ceremony. When Krysty was done, Doc made the Christian sign of the cross and muttered something in Latin.
"One girl, twenty or so men," Mildred mused thoughtfully. "The leader's child? A ransom victim?"
"Or the recreation officer," Ryan said. "Mercies who kill their own usually don't waste time with fancy stunts like kidnapping."
"Not a willing one," Krysty snapped. She lifted the girl's stiffening arm. "See the chain marks on the wrist?"
"That's why she didn't make a run for the door," Doc growled, "The coldhearts were bedamned slavers."
A former slave himself. Jak said, "Good they d
ead."
Mildred stood and shuddered as if emerging from a river of ice. "The girl might have thought we were the others coming back."
"To claim their prize."
"Yes. To either rape her again, or..."
"Eat her?"
"Mebbe both."
"Sweet Jesus."
"So she was what they were fighting over."
"No," Ryan said abruptly, "she wasn't. The prize was much more important than her." He turned to face the second door across the room. "And we'll find it on the other side of that door." Krysty glanced at the closed portal. "How do you know?"
"Just a hunch. I think I know what this base is." Rifle resting on his hip, Ryan loosened the SIG Sauer pistol in his belt and removed a gren from his pocket. Carefully, he removed the tape holding the spoon in place and put the primed bomb into his coat.
"I'm on point," he said.
"Maybe we should just leave," Mildred suggested.
"No. What's on the other side could be more valuable to us than it was to the coldhearts."
"Why?"
"Because we can use it." Easing open the door, he waited a moment for a reaction, then slipped through, J.B. at his heels, Krysty close behind.
Dean waited for the others to get a bit ahead of him before following. Then on an impulse, he hurried back, retrieved the Ruger from the floor and tucked it into his belt. Whet he planned to do with the weapon, Dean had no idea. But he felt angered over the girl's death, and was determined to find somebody or something to blame it on and get revenge.
The next room proved to be the top floor of the redoubt, a single cavernous expanse stretching off for hundreds of yards ahead of them. Broken military machines of a dozen different sizes and shapes dotted the floor in rows upon rows. It was the motor pool. Dean's hopes soared at the sight. His father had told him how many were the times they found working APCs or Hummers, some even with caches of stored fuel and ammo. None of the vehicles ever lasted long, but while they did the team rode in style and safety.
Dodging past a row of vehicles he had once heard. Mildred refer to as jeeps, Dean slowed and scowled. The rest of the garage resembled a junkyard, with most of the machines in various stages of being totally disassembled: engines taken out, wheels off, axles bare of brakes and bearings, armor sheeting removed entirely, doom gone, weapon mounts empty.
"Fuel pump!" Jak called, and Dean hurried in that direction. The rest of the group was clustered around a stainless-steel pair of pumps set near the massive ruin of an APC. Dean watched as J.B. worked the priming controls and Jak held a hose hopefully over a bucket. Only vapor belched out.
"Did you prime the pump?" Dean asked.
"This type doesn't need it," Ryan said dourly. "No, the storage tanks have already been drained. Too bad."
"Any sign of that fancy condensed fuel?" Doc asked hopefully.
"Wish to hell I knew what it was," Mildred grumped. "It doesn't have the odor of regular gas or leave a spectrum pattern on water like any normal petroleum product. Yet regular combustion engines rim on it for hundreds of miles a gallon. It's something brand-new."
"Not that there's anything here to fuel," Krysty said bluntly, glancing around. "The place is a machine graveyard. Nothing but bits and pieces remaining."
Turning off the wheezing pump, J.B. removed his fedora and scratched his head. "Which makes no sense. Why rip apart every machine? Were they searching for a special part?"
"Mebbe they had no idea what they were doing," Dean suggested.
"Doesn't appear so," Ryan said, walking over to a tracked vehicle. The hood was completely gone, the engine compartment exposed to the bare overhead lights. "I spotted it as we passed. See? The engine's been removed, but the nuts on the mounting bolts were screwed back on. A trained mechanic Does that so as not to lose a nut, not looters."
"Probably taking p>arts from one to fix another," Krysty observed. "If so, then there could easily be a Hummer intact somewhere in a corner."
Raking fingers through his hair, Ryan exhaled slowly. "Highly doubtful, but we'll check."
"I saw a big canvas lump over there," Dean said, motioning behind them. "Really huge. Could be anything."
"Show us," Ryan said.
Dodging debris on the floor with the agility of youth, Dean retraced his steps. The neat rows of vehicles became a jumbled array, and finally a barricade of metal parked end to end. Clambering over the impromptu wall, Dean disappeared from view.
The others moved quickly, but with far more care, and found an opening in the ring of steel. Here there was a clear section of floor, and partially covered with a large canvas was the biggest tank any of them had ever seen. A tank of unknown design, but apparently in absolutely perfect condition.
"By the Three Kennedys!" Doc whispered.
J.B. swallowed hard. "The mother lode."
The drapes of canvas covered only the front end of the vehicle, the body stretching over twenty yards in length and twice the height of a man.
"Chassis must be from a cargo truck," Ryan said.
"Twice my height," Jak said, a hand reaching into the air.
"Can it fit out the door?" Mildred asked. "I've never seen anything this large that moved under its own power."
"Unless they were total fools, it'll fit," Ryan replied.
"Eighteen wheels," J.B. said, inspecting the wheel well. "Taken off a Hummer. Only needs six to operate."
"Spares," Ryan decided. "Or a diversion for somebody shooting at them."
"Certainly lowers the odds of a sniper choosing the correct tire to blow."
"She should be able to traverse the worst of the Deathlands."
Keeping a watch on the shadows under the ring of vehicles, the friends walked around their incredible find. The rear doom were louvered, the angled slots perfect for shooting at pursuing vehicles. The dull body armor was of an odd dung-colored material that resembled smooth concrete.
"Antiradar composites taken off stealth helicopter," Mildred guessed. "Probably got some reactive armor plating sandwiched between the outside and the steel sheets inside."
"No way of knowing, short of taking the vehicle apart"
"Even the windows are covered with iron bars to keep anything too big from crashing into the hardened glass."
"Somebody expected this to see serious combat."
Dean carefully climbed on the fender, the wide band of spiked 'steel resembling a porcupine belt. "It's got a missile pod on the roof. No, there's two!"
J.B. ran his hands over a grooved slot on the hull, which entirely ringed the vehicle. "This is to mount Claymore mines and blow away attackers who get too close. We don't have any mines, but I can put something there. Wads of plastique packed with nails and broken glass should do the trick."
"Mebbe it isn't finished," Krysty said. "Let's get this canvas completely off. Somebody gave me a hand." They all joined in to assist her. "Ready, pull!"
The sheet came down in rustling folds, exposing the slanted nose of the war machine. The prow was armed with a set of 75 mm recoilless rifles. Ryan thankfully spotted the vents to allow the blowback gas to leave the interior of the vehicle and not cook the crew after a single shot. There were side-mounted Remington .50-caliber machine guns, and two aft-mounted Vulcan 40 mm cannons, set on swivels for traversing.
"Shit," Jak drawled, making the word two long syllables.
Doc agreed with a dumb nod.
"It's going to be as loud as hell inside when we use those 75 mm rifles," Mildred commented. "Especially both at once."
"If there's any shells for them,' LB. stated. Along the aft part of the hull were racks for motorcycles, but no bikes. Presumably the coldhearts knew where to find some, but that knowledge was lost forever.
"Needs name," Jak said. "Death wagon."
"May I suggest Leviathan," Doc countered. "It is much more appropriate."
Jak snorted. "Got no balls. Death wagon."
"Leviathan," Ryan decided, then relented. "Vote on it."
Le
viathan won.
Inspecting underneath, Jak found some Claymore mines mounted on the belly near the exit hatch. Ryan decided to leave them there. It was a good idea to have your escape route mined in case of possible lurkers.
"Almost makes Trader's war wag look like an oxcart."
"It's the biggest find we've made since the redoubts themselves. It must have taken them months, mebbe longer to build this."
"It's why they fought. With this chariot, they could have ruled an empire."
"And after it was done, the question of who got to be the boss became disputed."
"Makes sense."
"The idiots," Mildred snapped. "Sitting on a gold mine and they whizzed in the water."
"Mixed metaphors," Doc said, smiling, "but I agree wholeheartedly."
"Well, it's ours now," Dean stated, beaming. Then his elation faded. "If we can get in."
J.B. looked contemptuous. "With me and Ryan here, in the middle of a machine shop? Please."
"Doors locked," Jak said, rattling a recessed handle.
"Not for long." Smugly, J.B. went to work with his picks and probes. A few minutes passed.
"Well?" Ryan asked impatiently.
"It's unlocked, but not opening," J.B. said through gritted teeth.
"Bolted from the inside?"
"No, just stuck for some reason. Mebbe jammed. Somebody give me a hand, will you?"
Shouldering their weapons, Dean and Jak went to the tool table then joined the Armorer. Dean slid a long screwdriver between the door and the hull, while Jak forced the end of a pry bar into the opposite side of the portal.
"Wish I had leather gloves," J.B. muttered, as he spit on his hands and grabbed the recessed handle again. "Okay, all together on my mark. Ready? One, two, three, pull!"
The three friends groaned in unison, yet the door remained motionless, the hinges creaking loudly. Suddenly, there was a loud snap and the door swung away, the pieces of a pencil tumbling to the floor. The men dropped their tools and grinned in triumph.
"Ha! Just a freaking pencil caught in the hinge."
J.B. laughed, rubbing his hands together. "I thought it would be something simple- Dark night!" The Armorer threw himself backward as animal growls came from within the tank and a misshapen figure stepped into view.
