by James Axler
Even if you were a whitecoat.
Once all muties in sight were down, it was a safe bet that the black suits would sweep in from both ends of the main corridor and mop up the wounded with head shots. People caught in yellow coveralls would not get off this level alive.
“We just lost the only person who could lead us out of here,” Krysty said.
He looked at her beautiful, smudged face and said nothing. Without a guide, their chances of escaping the underground maze were slim to none.
“What are we going to do, Ryan?” she asked.
“Tear bed frames, make clubs,” Jak said. “Spears. Fight back. Chill bastards.”
“Yeah, why didn’t I think of that,” J.B. said. “Clubs and spears versus full-auto. Piece of nukin’ cake.”
Though doom stared him full in the face, Ryan refused to accept it. “We head deeper into the housing section,” he told them. “We split up and recce the place triple-time. Try to find another stairway entrance that will take us up.”
As the sustained blasterfire from the core tailed off, it intensified in the opposite direction, the landing entrance to the hallway. Though machine guns stuttered, bullets no longer whined down the corridor. The concentrated fire was outside, in the stairwell. Ryan guessed the enforcers were cutting down the last of the escaped muties. They had to take advantage of the lull.
“Go now,” he said, waving the companions toward the dormitories.
As they turned to run, the floor underfoot took a hard jolt, hot shrapnel clipped the corners of the intersection, and the resounding, unmistakable whack of detonating grens rolled over them.
It stopped Ryan cold.
That the black suits were using grens on the muties made no sense. It was not only overkill, it was insanely reckless, if not suicidal. There was no way to control the spray of shrapnel or the concussive blast in the confined space of a stairwell.
When the others looked at him expectantly, Ryan hand-signaled them to hold position and rushed back to the corner. Peeking carefully around it, he saw a wall of gray smoke billowing toward him and heard the slap-slap sound of running feet. He braced himself for a hand-to-hand fight to the death. At least he could give the others time to get away.
A lone enforcer with a whitecoat running alongside him burst out of the cloud. The black suit sprinted with his head lowered and his face obscured from view, laboring under the weight of the large bag on his back, but there was something familiar about the long legs, the gangly gait and the dusty, flowing hair. When the enforcer lifted his chin, Ryan saw a perfect set of teeth clenched in a wide grin.
Doc was a sight for sore eyes.
The shooting from the landing end of the hallway had stopped. Thinking the man in black was one of their own, the enforcers stationed in the core held their fire, too. But as Doc rounded the corner to the side hall, they had to have realized he was an impostor. They sent a torrent of bullets flying through the intersection.
Ignoring the whitecoat, Ryan took hold of Doc’s shoulders. “Where’s Mildred?” he asked.
“She’s busy at the moment.” As the others rushed up to join them, Doc dropped the duffel to the floor and unzipped it. Then much to the surprise and delight of the companions, he started passing out automatic weapons and extra mags.
“You hit the nukin’ mother lode,” J.B. said, hefting an MP-5 and looking down the sights. “These are quality blasters.”
Everyone took a submachine gun, Ryan included. He felt a wave of relief. They were finally armed.
The hallway rocked as more grens detonated somewhere off to the left and slightly above them.
Moments later another gren went off. It sounded farther away.
“We need to link up with Mildred before the enforcers from the core seal us off in here,” Ryan said.
Ricky and Jak ducked around the corner and sent a hail of covering fire down the long straight hallway. The opposition was a hundred yards away and only made visible by their muzzle-flashes. As the two youths sprayed bullets in the direction of the core, giving the enforcers something to think about, Ryan and the others took off running for the landing. Incoming fire zinged around them, but it wasn’t massed and it wasn’t well aimed. Using the bodies of the muties for cover when possible, they leapfrogged the corridor and reached the exit with Ricky and Jak falling back behind them.
The landing outside was strewed knee-deep in corpses, and detached parts of corpses, and those still dying. Muties and black suits lay in a tangled sprawl of gore. The stairway leading up was likewise decorated with the dead, and the walls with sprays of blood and blast marks and soot from the explosions.
Mildred had cleaned house, metaphorically speaking.
She shouted at them from the landing above, waving for them to follow her. Her eyes looked crazed, her beaded plaits and face were dusted with gray. There was blood on her teeth.
Stepping over and around the bodies, they raced up the stairs, past the landing, trailing Mildred to the level above. As they approached the doorway to the interior, it swung open and they came face-to-face with more enforcers. From their expressions the enforcers weren’t expecting armed opposition at close range. Before they could react, Ryan, Mildred and J.B. cut loose with their MP-5s. The black suits in front never got a shot off. Driven backward, they spun and fell under the withering barrage. Those in line behind them turned and ran.
The door automatically swung shut.
“We can’t go down that hall!” Krysty said. “It’s suicide! We’ve got to find another way.”
Ryan seized Lima by the throat and slammed him against the wall. “Take us to the mat-trans!” he said.
“The security force knows where you’re headed,” Lima said. “They’ll be waiting for you there. Or they will ambush you as you come up the stairs.”
“What about the elevators?” J.B. asked.
“There’s no access to that level from the elevators because of an earlier collapse. The doors are blocked.”
“Can we come at it from above?” Ryan said.
“You could climb to a higher floor, then descend by stairs to the mat-trans level, but they’d still be waiting for you when you arrived.”
Mildred leaned in. “But we can reach the hangar using the elevator.”
Lima nodded.
“What hangar?” Ryan said.
“They’ve built a structure on the surface to shelter and hold their fleet of aircraft,” Mildred stated.
“Hovertrucks, more precisely,” Doc said.
“Right, hovertrucks,” Mildred said, clearly irritated by the correction. “They’re loaded with gear and food and staged for a mass exit from this place. If we can get to the hangar, we can commandeer one of the larger hovertrucks and fly it out of here.”
“Flying out of their reach isn’t enough,” Krysty said. “We have to get off this frozen waste. We can’t survive for long here. We’ll either starve or die of exposure.”
“I overhead Lima and Echo talking about the colony invading South America,” Ryan said. “The closest landfall is the tip of Argentina.”
He pressed on the whitecoat’s throat and said, “That’s where you’re headed, right?”
“Yes,” Lima said.
“Tierra del Fuego is a long way off,” Mildred said. “Thousands of miles, and there’s an ocean in between.”
“How are we going to manage that?” Krysty asked. “We need a pilot.”
“We can take a pilot hostage,” Ryan said.
“And if that doesn’t work out, I can fly the thing if I have to,” J.B. said. “A hovertruck is just a machine built by a human being. I can figure out the controls. And once I get it going, the hovertruck won’t be traveling very far off the ground. Mebbe fifty feet tops. Nothing to worry about.”
“Are you sure?” Kryst
y said. “You’ve never even seen the things.”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Ryan pressed on Lima’s throat again. “Take us to a level where we can get on the elevator without meeting opposition,” he said.
The whitecoat nodded.
As they climbed higher, it was obvious that muties had gotten past the stairwell blockade on the main level. The steps were littered with human small parts, fingers, ears, noses and hanks of hair attached to bloody scalps. Enforcers had also been snatched off their feet, pierced by poison fangs and carried up the stairs whole. Tucked in the corners of the landing ceilings were bundles wrapped in spidie web. In some of them the contents still moved, struggling feebly against the countless overlaid windings.
The trail of body parts petered out after the third level. On the fifth, they found another entrance door ripped from its hinges.
“This level will take you to the elevator, unless it was badly damaged by the last quake,” Lima said. “It was never inhabited.”
“It’s inhabited now,” Mildred said, running her fingers over the bright, deep gouges in the door frame.
The muties were most likely inside, looking for more victims. There was no telling where they’d gone after they entered the hall.
“Is it far to the elevators?” Ryan asked the whitecoat.
“No, only about fifty yards.”
“Then let’s do it,” Ryan said. “Keep your blasters up. Watch the intersections and the interior doors.”
The corridor was dimly lit; the side passages not lit at all. They advanced in double file, moving quickly. There was quake damage, but the debris on the floor didn’t block their progress. They reached the elevator doors without incident.
After Ryan pressed the up button, he said, “There’s no way of telling what’s coming up in this car. Step back and get ready to fire.”
When the bell chimed and the doors jerked open, the car was empty. They packed in and Mildred pushed the top button on the left-hand wall. The doors closed sluggishly and a moment later the car jolted upward. They all watched the lights shift on the numbers over the door.
“If there are enforcers on the hangar level, they’ll be ready for us by now,” Ryan said. “We need cover when the doors open. The enforcers seem reluctant to shoot their own. Doc and Mildred, if you stand at the entrance with weapons down, it will give the rest of us a chance to clear any opposition.”
“Shoot quick and straight, please,” Doc said.
Three levels from the top Ryan knelt, bracing to open fire when the doors opened. The others did the same.
When the car stopped and the doors slowly opened, five black suits were standing on the other side with blasters raised.
Even though they were aiming at Doc and Mildred, it took a split second for them to compare coverall color and faces and come to a conclusion.
A split second was all the rest of the companions needed. A furious clatter of blasterfire blew the enforcers off their feet and sent them crashing onto their backs on the frozen ground.
As the others exited, Ryan said, “Get me one of their knives!”
J.B. underhand tossed him a nine-inch combat blade. He plunged it into the hand guard in the gap between the nearest door and the frame, jamming the door open so the car couldn’t be recalled. Pursuit, when it came, was going to have to take the stairs.
When Ryan stepped out into the vast, uninsulated hangar, Antarctic air slammed the front of his body, head to foot. He thought he was cold before; he was wrong. This was cold. Though the air aboveground burned like fire inside his nose, it smelled clean and fresh compared to the redoubt.
The twenty or so hovertrucks lined up on either side of the hangar were separated by a wide central aisle. All were painted bright red. He couldn’t tell if the white floor was frozen pavement or made of compacted snow or ice, but he noted the huge circle painted in the middle of it. A few dozen workers in green scurried to take cover behind or inside the aircraft. A lesser number of black suits and orange suits took cover, as well.
Mildred pointed out a hovertruck on the right, beyond the painted circle. “Doc and I were in that one,” she said. “We helped load it. It has guns, ammo, explosives and food.”
Bullets sparked off the elevator frame as rapidly fired single shots rang out. The range was too much for the black suits’ Berettas. They were shooting from beneath one of the smaller aircraft. Jak and Mildred stood their ground and fired back while the rest of the companions sought cover behind the first hovertruck on the right.
Ryan watched Mildred prime a gren on the run. Using her forward momentum, she then wound up and chucked the bomb at the aircraft the black suits were using as a shield. The throw came up twenty feet short, but the small dark object skipped over the icy floor and disappeared under the belly of the craft.
A heartbeat later a powerful explosion lifted the light, two-passenger hovertruck. Parts of it went spinning off in all directions. For a moment it stood tilted on edge. In a cloud of gray smoke it came crashing back down on the runway. Moments later there was a second explosion and the aircraft was swallowed up in a fireball that licked at the hangar’s ceiling and shook the ground underfoot. Ryan instinctively shielded his face from the heat of the blast.
Then they had even more serious things to worry about.
Strings of even louder explosions rang out, and heavy projectiles screamed, tumbling through the frigid air. They sliced huge gashes in the hangar’s sides and roof, cut troughs in the landing field and slammed into and through the neighboring hovertruck and kept on going.
Cannon rounds in the small aircraft’s ammo bay were cooking off, Ryan thought. Probably 30 mm. The through-and-throughs told him they were armor-piercing rounds.
They were still cooking off when Jak and Mildred joined them behind the hovertruck. Sporadic fire from isolated black suits stopped as they, too, took cover.
“The chances of our finding a pilot don’t look good,” Ryan said. “No way to sort out the candidates. They seem to want to die fighting.”
“I got it, Ryan,” J.B. said. “I’ll fly the bastard thing.”
“We have to disable all the other aircraft,” Ryan said. “If we don’t, they’ll chase us down.”
“A lot of aircraft in here,” J.B. said. “Big room to cover in a hurry.”
“The hovertruck we loaded has crates of RPGs,” Mildred said. “They were too heavy and awkward to take below, but they should do the trick up here.”
She and Doc took the lead. The companions ran between the row of aircraft and the hangar wall, staying low and moving fast. The black suits on the other side took potshots at them, but to no effect. When they hit the open space of the gap, Ryan, Krysty and Ricky fell back a little and turned to touch off short, full auto bursts from the hip, spraying bullets across the line of aircraft opposite, forcing any black suits hiding there to hold fire and keep their heads down.
Seconds later, Ryan was following Krysty and Ricky up a ramp, through the designated cargo ship’s open bay doors and into its hold. Doc was attacking a long, wooden crate with a crowbar. Tossing the lid aside, he started passing out launchers, stabilizing pipes and high-explosive, impact warheads. The companions set to work screwing the boosters into the back of the warheads and loading the launchers.
When Ryan had one prepped to fire, he stepped down the ramp. “Stay clear of the backblast!” he said as he shouldered the launcher and aimed at the large hovertruck on the other side of the central aisle. The rocket took off with a whoosh, crossed the space in a fraction of a second and exploded in the heart of the red machine. The force of the detonation rocked it on its skids, and sent the upper, cockpit level flying off and crashing into the hangar roof. Huge chunks of metal, some from the falling debris, some from the hovertruck’s fragmenting engines, slammed into the aircraft on either side, caving in
their roofs and the sides of their cargo holds.
“Jak, Ricky,” Ryan said as he lowered the launcher, “grab some extra RPGs and let’s get this turkey shoot over with.”
* * *
J.B. KNEW HE had serious work to do and not much time to do it. Before he could get started, they had to clear the cockpit of corpses. While Krysty and Mildred held Lima at gunpoint, he and Doc dealt with the dead black suits. They tumbled the three bodies through the hatch, let them fall down the gangway and dragged them into a heap beside the cargo deck entrance.
Only then did J.B. plop himself down in the pilot’s seat. Looking over the complex control panel in front of him, he realized that he might have bitten off more than he could chew.
“Dark night,” he muttered under his breath.
“Can you fly it?” Krysty asked.
“Yeah, yeah, just give me a sec.” He waggled the control yoke and it moved easily in all directions—so easily it was a little spooky. Methodically he began to scan the instruments and their labels. It was instant readout overload, and some of the labels were abbreviations and acronyms. He couldn’t make sense of most of it.
Look for one thing at a time, he counseled himself. First things first. Find the bastard start button.
Of course it wasn’t labeled as such. The word “start” didn’t appear anywhere that he could see.
He tripped a big toggle switch next to the engine tachometers that looked promising. Nothing happened.
Well, that’s not it, he thought and tripped it back.
Outside in the hangar, aircraft began to explode in balls of coruscating flame and black smoke. Flying small debris rattled down on the top of the canopy overhead.
He tried another switch.
The ship-to-ship radio blasted on, hissing static through the speakers.
“J.B!” Mildred said. “What are you doing?”
“Got to be one of these,” he said.
