Shadow Fortress

by James Axler

  “Still need ammo,” Dean reminded him succinctly, exchanging the wet clip in his Browning for a dry mag from his jacket. The water from the sprinklers had been tainted with rust and scum that could cause a jam. Best to take no chances.

  “We’ll get some,” his father replied. “If not here, then at police headquarters. There should be a SWAT room, and a vault full of blasters. The cops used to keep the vault locked to make sure nobody could get their mitts on the weapons. But that just means they were sealed safely away from the corrosive sea air of the island. Could be everything we need.”

  “Only reason we’re here was because of the droids,” Krysty reminded him, fanning her shirt to make it dry faster.

  Dean frowned. “The machines will be waiting for us there.”

  “Mebbe,” Ryan agreed. “So we’ll go in through the roof. They won’t expect that.”

  “Who the hell would?” J.B. said, walking back into the warehouse. Stopping at the fifty-five-gallon drum, he gathered the foam cups and stuffed them into his munitions bag. Those would help a lot if they had to firebomb the droids.

  Leading the way, Ryan returned to the row of storage units, the smooth floor only damp in spots by now. The puddles had flowed into the drains and gone somewhere else.

  “Stay here. Me first,” Jak said, reclaiming the dropped pry bar and walking past the open unit to the next door.

  The teenager easily snapped the locking mechanism with the pry bar, then gave the door a shove and ran for the loading dock as the door slid aside. Silence ruled the warehouse, the vents remained quiet and no swirling clouds of yellow hissed into the corridor.

  “Seems safe,” Mildred ventured, sniffing carefully.

  They proceeded warily to the second unit until the companions glanced inside and found it as empty as the first. There were a few candy-bar wrappers on the floor, and faded inventory sheets attached to a clipboard hung from a nail on the wall. Nothing else.

  Resolute, Ryan took the pry bar and went to the next unit only to find the same thing. It was starting to look as if the place might be empty, but there was only one way to know.

  “Why was there such a strong smell of horseradish?” Krysty asked, accepting the pry bar and starting on the end unit of the row. “Mustard gas made from horseradish?”

  “Don’t know for sure,” Mildred said, gesturing vaguely. “Could be. I know that VX gas is made from meat tenderizer. Read that in a newspaper.”

  “They used to put nerve gas on food?” Dean asked in shock.

  “Sort of,” Mildred said hesitantly. The complexities of the predark world were a bitch to explain sometimes. “In a powder form it’s harmless. Only deadly when it’s stabilized as a gas.”

  With a loud crack, Krysty broke open the door and checked inside. “Empty,” she reported.

  She passed the pry bar to Dean, who went to the next unit, muttering something under his breath about insane whitecoats.

  An hour later, the last door was ripped open and the companions stared at yet another empty storage unit, scraps of wood and packing material floating in tiny puddles from the earlier deluge.

  “Nothing again,” Dean said, marching into the room, brandishing the steel bat as if physically challenging the storage unit to produce supplies. There was a calendar on the wall showing the month of January 2000 and something, the final year blurry from the sprinklers. The days were checked off up to the twenty-first.

  He turned away in disgust. They already knew the date of skydark. There was nothing to be learned here.

  “Come on,” his father said, turning to leave. “Still got the next level to check.”

  “And if that’s cleaned out, too?”

  “Then we try for police headquarters,” Ryan replied. “We know the droids will be waiting for us, but there should be lots of blasters and grens in the SWAT vault. Those are often airtight.”

  Passing by the elevator, Krysty paused for a moment, straining to hear the popcorn sound again, but she couldn’t hear anything unusual. Maybe the popping had something to do with the gas? Made sense.

  Without electricity, the elevator couldn’t move, so the companions went straight to the door for the stairs. Looking over the portal with a lantern, J.B. decided it was clear of traps and pulled it open. Inside, wide concrete steps edged with steel led down into the darkness.

  SIG-Sauer in hand, Ryan took the point, with Krysty right behind holding the lantern high. That left the man’s hands free, and cast both of them in the shadow of the bottom of the lantern. That would make them a difficult target for a sniper to zero in on. Ryan really didn’t think there was anything alive in the pre-dark building but the mice and beetles feasting off the ancient moldy paper.

  Cobwebs festooned the handrail, and Ryan’s combat boots rang on the metal strips supporting the steps. Nothing he could do about that but stay icy. The steps took a turn at a landing, and he stepped over a couple of limp uniforms lying alongside several rusted beer cans. He snorted at the sight, and deliberately stepped on the soldier’s uniforms. Just a pair of goldbricks caught forever shirking their work.

  Two more landings later, the stairs ended on terrazzo floor, a duty roster posted by the only door. There were no signs of any boobies, so he tried the handle. The door was unlocked, but swung open only a few inches before hitting something solid on the other side. Ryan tried reaching through the slim crack, but his muscular arm was too large. He threw his weight against the door, and it merely yielded another inch.

  “Let me try,” Krysty offered.

  Giving her space, Ryan moved out of the way, and the woman squeezed her arm through the crack. For a brief moment, Krysty thought something brushed against her bare flesh, then she found the obstruction and traced its outline with her fingertips.

  “It’s a forklift,” she said, extricating her limb. “Must have run wild like the cars on the bypass when the nuke went off.”

  “Those things weigh a ton,” J.B. snorted.

  Turning, Ryan placed his back to the door, then put a boot onto the cinder block wall across the landing. Lifting his other boot into place, the man heaved against the blockage, and the door began to scrape along the floor, hinges squealing in protest.

  Placing aside their weapons, Krysty and J.B. joined Ryan and the trio forced the stubborn door open another foot, the forklift shuddering from the sideways motion. Suddenly, the door swung open all the way and the machine toppled over in a strident crash, the noise echoing through the blackness. Expecting this, Ryan dropped a boot and stopped himself from falling, then stood and spun with his blaster out. Krysty and J.B. were already in that position, studying the room beyond in the light of the pressurized lanterns.

  The bottom level of the warehouse was filled with open wooden crates bearing military identification codes. Excelsior stuffing was strewed about in piles a yard deep, the broken tops of the crates dashed into corners. Empty plastic pallets lay on the cold terrazzo floor, tangles of steel packing straps coiled into wild formations. Foam packing pellets covered the floor like snow, and everywhere lay sheets of gray cushioning foam bearing the cutout silhouette of weapons, handcannons, longblasters, rapidfires.

  “Shitfire,” J.B. muttered as they walked through the vast piles of litter. “Been looted.”

  Bending to pick up the top of a plastic box, Ryan couldn’t read the military code set in raised lettering, but he knew the distinctive shape.

  “LAW rocket,” he growled, tossing the lid away. “Just what we needed.”

  “Looks like the soldiers took everything,” Krysty said, trying to see what lay beyond the range of the lanterns. The mounds of trash and packing material seemed to extend forever. How big was this level of the armory?

  “Not everything,” Dean said, lifting an M-16/ M-203 combo assault rifle into view. Brushing away the foam packing peanuts, he inspected the weapon, working the bolt and opening the breech of the 40 mm gren launcher fitted underneath the M-16 machine gun.

  “Just fine,” the boy
announced, tilting it against the wall. “Just needs ammo.”

  Grabbing a large wooden crate that was lying on its side, Ryan flipped it over and laid the M-16/ M-203 on wooden slats.

  “We start here,” the man directed, glancing around. “If they missed one blaster, there could be more buried in the rest of this crap. J.B., stand guard, the rest of us rummage through the trash.”

  “Better stay in a group,” Krysty said, surveying the acres of garbage. “Or else we’ll only end up going over the same ground.”

  “Like hunting land mines,” Jak said, squatting on the floor, stabbing a knife into the plastic foam and bubble wrapping. “Only now want find.”

  Going to their hands and knees, the companions started shifting the ancient litter, running stiff fingers through the mounds of pellets and carefully pulling apart the sharp strands of steel packing strips. Mildred cried out, lifting another M-16/M-203 combo from the rubbish and placing it on top of the crate next to the first longblaster. Shifting a pallet, Jak pulled out a belt of 40 mm shells that had slid underneath. In a pile of foam pads, Dean found a repair kit, and mixed into a heap of used tape Krysty located two empty ammo clips, and then two more.

  Time passed as the work slowly progressed. Many times the people grunted as slivers of wood stabbed their questing fingers, or the steel straps sliced across knuckles, but the hunt neither paused nor slowed. The piles of trash reached more than six feet high in some spots, and they went through every bit, watching for individual rounds. A single HE gren was found and added to the small pile on the crate, then a battered Claymore mine in questionable working condition. Next, came a windfall as an entire box of timing pencils for C-4 was discovered, but no plastique itself.

  Reaching the far wall, the companions took a short break, then started digging their way back, now tossing the litter into their original path. This made the work a lot easier, and their speed increased. But nothing was found on this pass, or the next.

  Grabbing a sturdy fiberglass crate, Ryan tried to lift it aside, but the container seemed stuck to the floor. Kicking a clear area around the crate, the man saw that the lid was still screwed in place, the sides intact and undamaged. Drawing the panga, he used the tip of the blade to remove the screws, then cut away the security tape sealing the lid in place.

  “Find something?” Krysty asked, looking up from the floor, her hair peppered with foam bits.

  “Tell you in a sec,” Ryan replied, carefully pulling out handfuls of stuffing until finding a huge plastic case buried in the center. In spite of its size, the case wasn’t very heavy, and Ryan lifted it from the nest of packing to place it gingerly on the floor.

  “I know that box,” J.B. said from across the room.

  Ryan undid a latch. “So do I,” he said, and swung open the case to expose a mint-condition M-1 A military flamethrower. The burner and louvered hose shone with protective gel, the twin tanks satin smooth under the camou paint job. Checking the main crate again, Ryan found canisters of condensed fuel and a charging unit for the pressure tank mixed in with the flamethrower. Excellent. This was old tech to the man. The Trader liked to use flamethrowers in battles. They were fearsome weapons that often made raiders leave, thus saving lives and ammo. Ryan and J.B. could repair the things in their sleep, and both men knew how to walk a burner and not get scorched by the splash.

  “This will do,” Ryan said and closed the case to search through the rest of the crate. There was nothing more inside, so he ferried the flamethrower over to J.B. and continued the garbage hunt. A few more of those and they would be back in business.

  An hour later, the tired people reached the starting point and broke for a fast meal of granola bars and beef jerky while J.B. finished his inventory of the meager finds.

  “From the grease trails and fuel stains on the floor, I’d say the National Guard stored their wags down here,” Ryan said, biting off a chew of jerky. “Lots of Hummers, a few trucks and a couple of APC wags, Bradleys from the tire tracks. The soldiers loaded them with the blasters from storage and drove away.”

  “To where?” Dean asked.

  His father shrugged. “Where did all of the troops from the redoubts go? Nobody knows.”

  “And they just tossed the trash down here as they unpacked the weapons,” Krysty added, unwrapping a stick of gum and popping it into her mouth. “Must have been in a hell of a rush to leave the area.”

  “Which was lucky for us,” Mildred observed. “We found quite a few working weapons accidentally disposed of in the trash.”

  “And some that are worth shit,” J.B. said, joining the group and tilting back his hat. “Want the bad news first?”

  “Nothing good?” Jak asked, wiping his mouth on a sleeve, then screwing the cap on his canteen.

  “Some,” J.B. admitted. “We have an M-60 with no ammo. A hundred rounds of 30 mm shells and no blaster they’ll fit. Got ten blocks of 4.5 mm caseless ammo, which I wouldn’t give as a gift to a stickie. There’s two shotguns with bent barrels, four M-16 longblasters with dented receivers, six Stinger guided missiles without a launcher tube or radar box, not that the circuits would have worked anyway after the EMP of the nuke.”

  None of the companions smiled at the information.

  “Now the good news,” the Armorer said, turning to walk along the line of four crates covered with military hardware. “We got a flamethrower with ninety seconds of fuel. Six M-16/M-203 combo blasters, nine usable clips and a thousand rounds of ammo. Plus, twenty assorted shells for the 40 mm launchers. Ten grens, two of them smoke charges, one Claymore land mine with a broken timer, but I can jury-rig something for that, a hundred timing pencils, a 4-shot LAW rocket with one live round, and an Armbrust with five HE rounds, only one of which is usable. Plus a ton of assorted small-arms ammo, more than we could ever carry.”

  “Got the bikes,” Dean reminded him, going closer.

  “More than even they can carry.”

  The boy nodded. “Good.” His Browning didn’t really have much of a punch, and Dean was thinking hard about getting a second blaster, something with more power. However, the Weatherby weighed ten pounds. He wanted something lightweight, but with maximum chilling capability.

  “Was hoping for more,” Ryan said gruffly, standing. “But it should do. Everybody take an M-16/ M-203, I’ll haul the flamethrower.”

  Each of the companions took their fill of ammo for their personal weapons, filled their pockets with grens and draped themselves with the new blasters.

  Taking his share, J.B. then went to help the man with the straps and tapped the pressure gauges to test the needles.

  “Should have thirty-two, three-second bursts,” the man warned. “But it might only be half that since the pressure valve was sticking and we don’t know if that’s a true reading.”

  “Say fifteen. So at short range, forty-five seconds total,” Ryan finished. “Good enough for the droids. Don’t know about the spider. That last mutie fought for a long time after we set it on fire.”

  “No prob.” Jak pulled shut the 40 mm gren launcher of the M-203, and slapped a clip into the receiver of the M-16. Then with a scowl, the teenager pulled the clip and primed it first by rapping it against the wall, then sliding it into the weapon.

  “Triple-stupe design,” he muttered.

  Mildred grunted in agreement. “Give me an AK-47 any day,” the physician said, yanking the top bolt on the blaster. “Or an Uzi. Something reliable.”

  “Blast, I can’t carry all of this,” Krysty said, and laid down the Webley. “We’ll have to make two trips.”

  “Better save the .44 bullets for Doc,” Ryan suggested, tugging the body harness of the flamethrower into place. “Mebbe we can finally get him to abandon that antique and keep the other Webley.”

  “Hope he’s okay,” Dean said, changing the subject. He knew only one person was needed to guard the bikes, and with the gates closed the parking lot should be secure. But the National Guard base was cut in two by the cliff, and any
thing could have climbed onto the mesa and caught the old man from behind.

  “He fine,” Jak stated confidently, stuffing a box of .357 ammo into the pocket of his jacket. “Hear shot if trouble.”

  Closing her eyes, Krysty tilted her head for a moment.

  “Curious,” she said, frowning. “There it is again.”

  “Doc?” J.B. asked, stuffing the Armbrust into his backpack.

  Pensive, the redhead turned slowly. “No, it’s that soft popcorn noise again.”

  “More gas?” Dean demanded, looking about for any signs of yellow smoke.

  “I hear it, too,” Ryan added with a frown, tucking the vented wand of the flamethrower through the chest straps and drawing his handcannon. “Seems to be coming from the elevator.”

  “We never checked that,” Mildred said, pointing the double barrels of her M-16/M-203 in that direction. “If the soldiers sent the trash down here with the elevator, then anything could be in there.”

  “Making popcorn?” Jak asked, puzzled.

  “Or mebbe something walking on bubble wrapping,” Dean suggested.

  “Droid?” Jak asked skeptically.

  “Damn near anything,” Ryan said. “Triple red.”

  Quickly, the companions assumed positions behind the mounds of rubbish.

  With his Uzi in hand, J.B. walked to the elevator to listen for a moment, before placing a hand on the lever of the elevator door.

  “Open it,” Ryan directed, leveling the fluted muzzle of his weapon.

  Grabbing the handle of the cargo elevator, J.B. pushed up the gate, the action making the bottom half drop from sight.

  Inside the lift was a towering stack of wet wooden crates piled high on a plastic pallet identical to the one used for the Pegasus. The sides of the boxes were soaked with an oily residue that was dribbling onto the metal floor. As each drop struck, it detonated like a firecracker. The irregular sound was vaguely reminiscent of making popcorn.

  “Dark night,” J.B. gasped, going motionless at the sight. “Everybody freeze. Don’t move. Don’t move a goddamn muscle or we’ll be blown to bits!”