Ice and Fire

by James Axler

  The tension stretched, against the background of flickering lights, dancing dials and chattering comp-consoles. This was the nerve center of the whole redoubt, where every aspect of the building was controlled. Once, it had all been set running for the convenience of the human occupants. Now they were gone, but it still kept steadily to its ordained tasks.

  "Looks like they left in a hurry," Krysty said, easing the moment.

  In his blood-blurred anger at Lori's casual stupidity, Ryan had barely noticed what the control room looked like. Now he took a few moments to glance around.

  If he hadn't known better, he might have guessed that the workers had only rushed out of the big room minutes ago, rather than nearly a hundred years back. There were a number of Styrofoam cups, and plastic containers that had once held sandwiches, long rotted and gone. Pens and pads lay scattered on the benches, scraps of crumpled paper on the floor. On an impulse Ryan stopped and picked one up from the tiles near his feet, unfolding it carefully.

  "Like the Dead Sea Scrolls," Doc said. "Open with caution."

  The paper was part of a comp-print, covered on one side with an incomprehensible mass of jumbled figures. He turned it over. There, on the other side, was faded handwriting—a question from one person, with a reply in different colored ink.

  My room after last food?

  Piss in a hot spot!

  Ryan grinned. "Nothing changes, does it?" He crumpled the note to brittle shards and let them filter through his fingers like grains of sand.

  They spent a quarter of an hour wandering around the control center. Ryan joined Doc by the main display panels that ran all of the gateway's mat-trans functions. The old man was shaking his head at the coded numbers and letters on the liquid-crystal console.

  "Make any sense of it, Doc?"

  "No. The men who worked on these were a small and highly specialized team, some of the best brains on all of the Totality Concept. I had heard the odd whisper, of course, around the canteens and bars. But nothing that… If only we could learn how to drive these darned buggies! Least we could get where we wanted and not where they shoot us. All along the disassembly line and back again."

  "Place like this—abandoned in a hurry—could there be a manual or something?"

  Doc sucked at his peculiarly perfect teeth. "Doubt it, my dear fellow. Software and all instructs would go first of all. Instant self-destruct. Press the button on the can, and it's incinerated and pulverized in fifteen seconds. It's the hardware you can't get rid of so easily."

  "Must have been someplace they held copies of all the vital documents and stuff?"

  The old man patted him on the arm. "Course there was, Mr. Cawdor. Course. Nearly all missile complexes, military bases, fortresses… all of them. But there was one small problem. As soon—"

  Ryan interrupted him. "I get it, Doc. Primary, triple-red targets for the nuking? Missile complexes, military bases and… Yeah, I get it. Mebbe one day we'll find something, tucked away at the back of a file, forgotten. Mebbe."

  Doc Tanner shook his head. "We had a saying, Ryan. It'll happen when pigs fly. I haven't seen any airborne bacon for a very, very long time."

  There was a printed card tacked to the wall by the exit door from the control room. The letters had peeled, and one or two had fallen off completely. But it was still legible: Warning.

  On Egress No B12 Sec-Cleared Documentation to Be Removed Under Pain of Instant Court-Martial. This Means YOU

  Doc nodded. "Brings it back. A sign like that surely brings it back. Once they saw I was a kind of threat to them, they watched me closer than a hawk watches a rabbit. By then all international security had become so compromised and infiltrated that I guess us and the Russkies knew all along what we were all doing and what they were doing. Secrets!" He gave a short, cynical laugh. "Not anymore, there weren't."

  Jak coughed. "Sorry interrupt. Hungry. Gotta be food around redoubt left in big hurry. Let's go."

  "Sure," Ryan agreed. "Everyone ready? Lori? You ready?"

  Her bad mood had blown away like a summer squall, and she favored him with her broadest smile. "Yeah, Ryan."

  From their previous visits to the concealed fortresses, they all knew that they now faced one of the moments of maximum danger. The entrance that linked the control room and the gateway to the rest of the redoubt was sufficiently strong to withstand almost any power used against it. It wasn't uncommon for local muties to have broken into other sections of the redoubts, but they lacked the weaponry to force the double doors.

  "Three-five-two code?" J.B. said.

  "Guess so."

  It bore out Doc's comments about how ridiculous a lot of the sec regs had become. In every redoubt they'd entered, the "code" to get in and out of the control section had been numerical. Three-five-two to open it and two-five-three to close it.

  Ryan wondered why they didn't just have a pair of buttons marked Open and Close.

  The Armorer punched out the triple numerals, standing to one side, his Uzi at the ready, braced against his hip. The other five companions were ranged behind him, ready to pour full-metal jacketed death into anything waiting for them. Nothing happened at all.

  "Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed in a voice of the mildest annoyance.

  "Try it again," Krysty suggested. "Could try reversing it," Ryan said. "If they've played tricks, it'll take a long time to go through all the combinations of three numbers," Doc said, sighing. "The number of possible permutations is… about… approximately… Well, it's a lot."

  J.B. pressed the same three numerals again. "Two's a mite sticky. Ah, that's got it."

  Behind the immensely thick walls, huge gears began their ponderous engagement, moving for the first time in all the long, still years. Grudgingly edging the double doors apart, the powerful hydraulics hissed at the weight.

  Once the gap was wide enough, J.B. slipped through, eyes searching in both directions down the brightly lit corridor beyond. The rest waited, nerves stretched tightly.

  "Clear," the Armorer called. "It's a sealed section. Ends in a blank wall one way, no doors. Other way it curves a little to the right. Then there's a big sec door, a ceiling-to-floor job. No side entrances."

  Jak led the others out. The entrance to the control section was now wide open. This was always a difficult moment, particularly as the controls weren't functioning perfectly. If they left the doors open, then there was a serious risk of other trespassers finding their way in and destroying the gateway, stranding them wherever they were. But to close them meant a similar danger—they might permanently malfunction and keep them locked out for good.

  "You got two bad options then pick the least bad," had been the advice of the Trader.

  Ryan punched in two and five and three. Unhesitatingly the double doors closed tightly shut.

  It was a typical redoubt corridor, around twenty feet wide, with a slightly arched roof nearly fifteen feet high at its crown. Strip lighting was set at the line where wall and ceiling merged. Ryan spotted the tiny sec cameras dotted along the roof, their probing lenses turning in an eternal quest. No doubt they were already carrying the pictures of the first intruders for a century to some far-off security center. And nobody would be there to take notice of the invasion of the redoubt.

  "Least there's no problem which way to go," J.B. said, pushing his glasses farther up his narrow nose.

  THE STEEL SHUTTERS had been carefully dropped and locked during the evacuation of the redoubt. The main control was a simple, counterweighted green lever, which had to be lifted to raise the doors above their heads.

  It was an unusual setup. The gateway section of the redoubt seemed to be stuck out on an isolated wing of its own, with no other passages opening off the main corridor.

  They passed under a half dozen of the metal doors before they began to notice some changes.

  "Seismic damage," Doc observed, pointing with his cane at several narrow stress fractures in the ceiling.

  Everyone stopped and gazed up, seeing r
ippled furrows in the stressed concrete. The floor under their feet was no longer perfectly regular. There were chunks of loose grit and larger pieces of stone, some as big as a child's thumb. They also noticed that not all of the lights were functioning. About one sol-strip in five was darkened.

  "Nukes?" Jak asked.

  "I would hazard a guess that we are still too deep for any primary effects of missiles," Doc replied. "But there is no doubt that the effects of heavy nuclear activity can affect the earth for many miles, exposing frailties in its crust and causing shock waves to run far and deep."

  Beyond the next barrier the roof was much worse and parts of the walls had split and fallen. The floor was corrugated in tiny waves. Now three in five of the lights were out.

  "Don't much care for the way this is looking, lover," Krysty warned. "I've got a feeling that there's something in this place, 'part from us."

  "Something? Or somebody?"

  She shook her head, closing her eyes and trying to focus the mutie "sensing" powers she'd inherited from her mother.

  "No. Weird…not humanoid, and not mutie, either. Some sort of animal." She shook her head. "No. Not really animal. Just… something."

  They reached another of the barriers. Jak was leading and he glanced at Ryan, hand resting on the green control lever. Ryan nodded to the albino boy, keeping his own finger on the trigger of his G-12. If Krysty could feel something wrong, then it likely meant something was wrong.

  "Mechanism rough," Jak said. "Sticking bad." He didn't need to tell the others. They could all hear the grating sound from behind the crumbling walls of the passage.

  When it reached about two and a half feet in the air, the door stopped moving, with a final, inexorable metallic jolt.

  For a moment, in the stillness, Ryan thought that he could hear something moving on the far side, a faint rustling noise, like a breeze moving crumpled pieces of dry paper.

  "A ghastly smell," Doc observed, "like old vinegar. It's most unpleasant."

  Jak stooped and peeked under the rim of the jammed door. "Can't see much. Nearly all lights gone. Think there's a fork in passage ahead."

  Though bright lights affected the white-haired boy's sight, he saw better in semidarkness than any of the others.

  "Must be where this spur joins on the main redoubt," J.B. guessed.

  "We might as well go take a look," Ryan said. "I'm getting to feel as hungry as Jak. The living and sleeping quarters are where we'll find any eats that are still around."

  "Careful," Krysty whispered, licking her lips nervously. "There's… Just take care through that door."

  "Go first?" Jak asked.

  "Sure. We're right behind you. Watch what you're doing."

  The boy flashed a fearless grin and ducked under and out of sight, closely followed by the rest of the group. Jak was the first to find the cockroaches—or rather the cockroaches found him.

  Chapter Three

  THROUGHOUT THE DEATHLANDS there were many varieties of genetic mutations, mostly prompted by the effects of intensive radiation, combined with the use of chemical toxins. Ryan had seen some quite appalling examples of human or semihuman muties, sometimes made worse by each succeeding generation. Animals that bred much more frequently had sometimes mutated to a literally unrecognizable degree. And the insects, with their infinitely shorter cycle of life and reproduction—

  The first roach dropped from its perch high in the tumbling wreckage of the old ceiling, landing on Jak's shoulders, its clawed feet hooking into the white spray of his hair. There was precious little light in this part of the passage, and Ryan, seeing the "bug" fall, was puzzled rather than worried. The thing was a coppery-blue color and almost a foot in length.

  The boy screamed, high and shrill, echoing through the maze of linked passages. "Get the fuck off!" he yelled, beating at the creature, but it was snagged to him.

  "Gaia! This is what I saw!" Krysty exclaimed at Ryan's elbow, the disgust dripping from her voice. "There's hundreds."

  "Thousands," J.B. contradicted her.

  "Millions," was Ryan's own conclusion.

  Everywhere he looked he could see the metallic sheen of cockroaches, scuttling across the ceiling and down the walls, a sinuous, undulating wave of scraping, scaly legs and bodies. Eyes on stalks, seeking out the scent and taste of the intruders.

  The insects dropped all around the companions, on top of them. Ryan felt one trying to probe beneath his collar and he shuddered at the obscenity of the thing.

  Lori was starting to slide into a noisy panic, drawing in harsh, rasping breaths and letting them out in choked mewing noises.

  The combination of the darkness and the endless rustling attack was nearly too much for the friends, even for hardened fighters like J.B. and Ryan.

  "Hang on! Everyone, keep control!" Their leader's order held off the fear for a few vital beats of the heart.

  Each of them was reacting in a different way. Doc was hopping around, crunching the cockroaches beneath his boots, flailing at others with his swordstick, muttering to himself under his breath, trying to get near enough to Lori to help her, as well.

  Lori stood still, hunched over, hands clasped over her face, shoulders shaking in terror.

  J.B. responded to the mutie insects' attack by running on the spot to prevent any of the roaches from climbing his legs. At the same time he brushed at his hat, shoulders and chest, sloughing off any attached insects. He was keeping amazingly calm.

  As the first victim, Jak had suffered the worst shock. His greatest problem was to get the voracious mutie insects out of his long, fine hair. More and more cockroaches landed on him, nipping at the skin of his neck, biting at one another. From behind, it looked to Ryan as though the young boy were wearing a magical, shifting helmet of some mystic coppery material.

  Krysty's hair had coiled in on itself at the first presentiment of danger, forming a hard scarlet knot that repelled the attempts of the cockroaches to get a grip on it.

  Until he felt a savage bite on the back of his hand, Ryan wasn't sure how much of a threat the giant mutie insects presented. The pain and the spurt of blood brought home to him with a dreadful clarity that they were likely to be utterly overwhelmed by the roaches if they didn't act swiftly.

  "Everyone get in line, follow me!" he yelled. "J.B., you got the hat. You come last. Rest keep on knocking the scaly bastards off the guy in front. Let's move it!"

  For the rest of his life Ryan Cawdor would remember the ceaseless sound of the cockroaches being cracked apart under their feet as they walked steadily toward an uphill section of the passage. Ryan had glimpsed another closed metal sec door and built his plan around their being able to reach it, open it and get through.

  And find no more roaches on the other side.

  "Keep going!" he shouted. Krysty was immediately behind him, batting the scrabbling horde off his wiry mat of black hair, beating them to the concrete floor. Lori, weeping loudly, was performing the same service for Krysty. Doc, half carrying her, was pushing next in line, spitting out words with violent fluency in a language that nobody had ever heard.

  Jak was just in front of the Armorer, who was plucking the huge insects from the tangled skein of snowy hair, dropping them and splitting them under his boot heels.

  They reached the bottom of the slope, moving at a brisk walk. There seemed fewer of the massive roaches as they climbed upward.

  Ryan made the mistake of glancing at the dimly visible ceiling. At that precise moment two of the revolting creatures came flopping onto his face.

  He distinctly felt the saw-edged mandibles snap shut on the patch over his blinded left eye, while the other clawed at his lips, trying to wriggle into his half-open mouth. He dropped the G-12, letting it dangle from its sling, and tore at the glittering, hard carapaces of the roaches. The light was less faint, and he could see the eyes on their wobbling stalks, rolling at him on the elongated skulls.

  The one on the upper part of his face was easily dislodged, and Ryan hea
ved it against the wall, seeing it split open, the two halves trailing slime down the pale concrete. But the insect by his mouth was stronger and more persistent, and he feared it might pull off a chunk of his flesh if he tried to rip it from his face.

  On an impulse, Ryan opened his mouth wider, luring the roach to scrabble with its feelers, jutting its teeth toward the tempting target of the man's fleshy tongue.

  Snapping his teeth shut, Ryan felt the brittle crispness of the cockroach's neck yield between his jaws. Somewhere down in what used to be Alabama, Ryan had once rested in a field containing fresh, morning-cold celery. Now that same sensation came back to him.

  He spit out the severed head, feeling the body fall away, its legs twitching in a residual and belated state of panic.

  An acidic fluid burned Ryan's palate, and he spit several times to try to clear the bitter taste. He longed for a goblet of crystal water to rinse away the flavor.

  Krysty shook her head at what he'd done, whistling softly between her teeth in admiration. Doc was the only other one in the group to have witnessed the mutie insect's death throes. His lined face grew pale, and his eyes narrowed in revolted horror.

  "By the three Kennedys! I think that I have never been so close to giving the notorious rainbow yawn."

  The attacks eased, and they all managed to reach the top of the steepening slope free of the scuttling creatures. One clung tenaciously to the back of J.B.'s jacket, but Jak knocked it away and stamped on it, bursting the shiny body, leaving a smear of stinking slime.

  The evidence of earth-shifting was less obvious in this section of the redoubt. There were more lights, and the walls and ceiling were solid and unmarked. They opened and closed the next steel-shuttered door and passed through into a place where several passages came together. Krysty operated the control level, dropping the door shut behind them.

  "Looks like none of our insect friends have found their way into this section."

  "I'm hungry," Lori said, dropping again into her little-girl-lost voice.