Although the companions had maintained a guard over the places on the lower level where there were points of entry for any foe, none of them had believed they were under serious threat of attack while they waited for Jak to recover. Not only did the redoubt seem to have been long since deserted, but there was also some doubt as to whether they could reach the surface level.
That was the purpose of this initial recce by Ryan and J.B.—they intended to scout the next two levels before bringing up the rest of their party. Despite his assertions to the contrary, Jak was still not at full fitness and alertness, so Ryan intended to leave him with a protective party until they were out in the open. From his own experience after being wounded or traumatized in some way, the one-eyed man knew Jak would come up to speed in the action of moving out, but would still need a degree of cushioning until he had attained full health.
So it was that the two men had ascended the levels of the redoubt until they were only one away from the top—and exit—level. There had been nothing to bar their way, and nothing to indicate that anyone had been there for a very long time. The comp system was failing to an even greater extent on this level, and it took them time to adjust to the dim lighting and the musty air.
And then they had found the armory.
"I wonder if they went out aboveground or used the mat-trans," the Armorer remarked, recovering from his anger at the sight of the armory.
"Only the one way to find out," Ryan replied. "If we find the exit level fucked, then we know the answer."
J.B. looked at his old friend. "You reckon we should recce that first, or bring everyone up?"
Ryan shrugged. "Doesn't seem to be even the remotest chance of things going triple red, but no point in moving them until we find out if we can actually get out this way."
J.B. nodded, pushing his spectacles back up his nose and setting his battered fedora on his high forehead. "Let's get to it, then," he muttered grimly.
The two men set off, adopting a defensive formation. Despite the quiet, still atmosphere of that level of the redoubt, and the vague notion that they would be absurd to anyone watching, both also knew that anyone watching would make such a formation a necessity.
But there was nothing, not the slightest indication of life in the upper reaches of the redoubt. Neither was it obstructed in any way. Despite the stale and dust laden air, and the lights failing with an even greater regularity, there was nothing that would in any way be an obstacle to the companions leaving the redoubt via this route. When Ryan and J.B. reached the exit door, with the code scratched onto the metal above the key plate, the one-eyed man turned to his number two. "Keep watch here. I'll get the others."
When he reached the lower levels of the redoubt, he found the rest of his party ready to move. Despite the fact that the way had been cleared in advance, they still adopted an attitude of caution and moved off in formation. Ryan took the front, with Krysty bringing up the rear in lieu of J.B. Behind them came Dean, Mildred and Jak—the albino moving with an extra caution brought on by the awareness of his slightly weakened state—then Doc.
At the exit doors, J.B. was waiting. He greeted them with a curt nod, and at Ryan's word they fanned out to cover the doors as they opened… if they opened, the one-eyed man added to himself as he passed on the lever that would raise the door, a chore that Dean had recently given up. There was no guarantee the mechanism would work.
His fears were allayed as the door rose with a squeal, the metal buckled slightly in its frame by the land shifts that had occurred around it in the previous century. When the door had lifted eighteen inches from the ground, Ryan stopped its ascent to take a quick look outside. No one ever got chilled by being cautious.
The entry to the redoubt was in a recess cut into the side of a small hill. A dirt-track road led away into an expanse of nothing—low level scrub and vegetation, with no large outcrops or forestry to give the land any kind of definition. From what he could see of the hill they were standing within, it was soil and grass covered rather than rock. With the way clear, Ryan pushed the lever, allowing the door to continue upward.
Moving out cautiously, checking the surrounding area confirmed that they had been hidden within a low hill, similar to some others that were scattered around the landscape. The dirt road petered out, and there was little sign of habitation within view. The friends saw no signs of any large predators, as the land was undisturbed, with no real hiding places. There were some clusters of trees, but these were stunted and dwarf. J.B., taking a reading with his minisextant to try to determine their rough position by the sun, noted that the trees looked like mutie elms.
Ryan had ordered Mildred to stay back in the mouth of the redoubt with Jak until the immediate area had been recced. The albino youth hated the feeling of being protected, and of not being able to pull his weight within the group, but he also knew that Ryan was right. Until he was one hundred percent, he was a risk, a possible liability.
So he hadn't had a chance to view the full landscape until the area had been secured, and Ryan called both Jak and Mildred from the mouth of the redoubt.
When Jak took a look at the area where they landed, he felt his head swim for a second.
It was the area of his nightmare.
THEY TRAVELED for six days, with very little happening. On the first night, after J.B. had taken a sextant reading to confirm his initial estimate, they gathered around a campfire.
"Definitely what they used to call New England," the Armorer affirmed. "I figure that we must be about a hundred miles from the coast."
"The farther away the better," Krysty said with a shiver.
Dean gave her a quizzical stare, and the Titian-haired beauty told him about their previous visit to the New England coast, when Ryan and J.B. had been press-ganged into serving on the whaling ship led by the vicious Pyra Quadde, one of the ugliest and meanest women they had ever crossed, and far more dangerous than any of the mad male barons they had had to fight along the way. She was inclined to flog her crew for the sake of it, and drove them hard when they were on the seas. She also had a voracious and murderous sexual appetite, and had fixed on Ryan as one of her victims. It was a situation from which they had escaped by the skin of their teeth.
But despite that, the younger Cawdor found it hard to suppress a laugh at the thought of his father being cornered by a sexually rampant Pyra Quadde.
"C'mon, Dad, you know you really wanted it," Dean teased.
The one-eyed warrior didn't answer. Instead, he reached across the campfire to cuff his son around the head.
"My dear Ryan!" Doc exclaimed. "Surely you cannot blame your son for pointing out that which, to the rest of us, is nothing more than the obvious."
Ryan stopped and glared at Doc for a second before cracking his face with a smile. "Mebbe he's right there, Krysty. What do you think of that?"
She kept a straight face while replying, "Perhaps I should start rubbing myself with whale oil and get fat, eh, lover?"
They were making the most of such an opportunity. Chances to truly relax were few and far between. But Mildred, looking across to Jak, stopped laughing when she saw the expression on the albino's face. He was always stone faced and impassive, but even he would usually have joined in with such ribaldry. However, he was distant, as though not even listening.
"Jak," Mildred whispered, plucking at the sleeve of his patched camou jacket, "what is it?"
The albino looked at her with eyes that, despite their fiery red, were as cold as ice.
"Know this place," he said simply.
The laughter ceased, all attention on Jak. Haltingly, he told them of his nightmare while in the semicoma. He gave them every detail he could remember, and was insistent about the landscape in which they now found themselves. And then he reminded them about his previous dream of Gloria.
When Jak had finally finished, there was silence while the companions pondered what Jak had told them. Finally, Doc spoke first.
"I think it would be u
nwise to discount this experience," the old man said softly. "After all, has not young Jak already shown himself to be in some way empathic to the Gate tribe?"
"That's a lot of long words, Doc, but I guess what you're saying is that Jak has some kind of link with Gloria, and that this dream was trying to tell him— and us—something," Dean added.
Doc nodded.
J.B. shook his head. "But the settings on those comps were random. How could it land us near both the Gate and the Illuminated Ones? Surely it'd be designed to spread anyone using those chambers after them as far apart as possible?"
Doc grinned humorlessly. "The ways of the whitecoats are not something that can be easily understood. Their minds worked in perverse manners, and the Illuminated Ones are nothing less than descendants of that foul breed."
Ryan agreed. "I figure that we should keep on triple red. Sooner or later, we're going to run into trouble."
"Tell me when we don't," Mildred added.
But despite this, and despite the aura of expectation created by Jak's nightmare, it was some days before they encountered any sign of life beyond that of the small mammals and birds that populated the area.
They crossed a vast region of sparsely wooded and vegetated land, with little in the way of outstanding landmasses, and the monotony of the vista before them was beginning to make them wonder if there was any population of note.
It was then, when their guard was lowered most by the drudgery of their trek, that violence suddenly hit.
J.B. had defined a course north by northwest, and they had just crossed the remains of what had once been a series of fields with large arable crops, when Jak stopped, his very being tense with sudden awareness.
"What is it?" Ryan asked.
"Listen," the albino replied.
The companions stopped. All ears were attuned to the silence, although none but Jak seemed able to detect anything. However, Ryan noticed that Krysty's sentient hair had begun to curl closer to her scalp, wrapping itself protectively around her neck.
A short time later a high buzzing noise became audible. It was like a swarm of insects, but somehow more alien.
"Look! Over there," Dean yelled, indicating a point to the northeast. Turning, the rest of the companions could see a distant dot that was approaching rapidly, growing into a shape that was recognizable, and yet…
"Holy shit," Mildred cursed, "I never thought I'd see one of those again."
Approaching them, growing larger with each second was a predark biplane, making good time and homing in on them.
"Some kind of sec scouting machine?" J.B. asked of no one in particular.
"Whatever it is, it's got us out in the open," Ryan replied. "Take cover. Spread and keep moving until you find it. Don't give them a chance to take us as a group."
He had no doubt that the craft would be armed, and this assumption was confirmed as they scattered. The whine of the aircraft was punctured by the staccato burst of a machine blaster, and the soil around them was ripped up by a hail of shells.
"Fireblast!" Ryan exclaimed, diving and rolling for the cover of a clump of bushes as the shells tore at his heels. Coming up for air, he could see that J.B., Mildred and Doc had found similar cover, while Krysty, Jak and Dean were headed for more outlying clumps.
The pilot of the sec machine had to be distracted while they attained that cover.
"J.B.! Try and take out the engine," Ryan yelled, taking the Steyr rifle off his shoulder.
"Okay, but wait until it drops a little more. Won't hit it otherwise," the Armorer returned.
Watching the craft turn and start to fire on the three still heading for cover, Ryan felt a gnawing impatience. He wanted to stop his people from being fired upon, but knew that J.B. was right. To fire now would be nothing less than wasting ammo, as the aircraft was still out of range.
Blasterfire strafed the ground around Dean, Jak and Krysty, firing in a wide arc that still encompassed all three.
"Now!" J.B. yelled to Ryan as the biplane came closer to the ground.
The one-eyed man and the Armorer both stood up from their cover and took aim. J.B. had favored his M-4000, and both blasters roared almost simultaneously.
Ryan had aimed for the front of the craft and the engine; J.B., with a load of barbed metal flechettes, had aimed for the body of the craft. Knowing it was made of fabric stretched over a metal skeleton, he reasoned that the flechettes could rip through and take out the pilot.
Both weapons achieved their aim. The engine coughed and spluttered as dense clouds of black smoke began to rise, and the flight path of the plane dipped and swerved as though the pilot had momentarily lost control. The machine blaster also ceased.
The biplane turned and headed off shakily, the course erratic and the engine spluttering.
The companions regrouped, watching it recede into the distance.
"Well, at least we know there's a ville near here," Mildred stated. "We just need to follow the trail."
"And I'm certain we'll be assured a warm welcome," Doc added with more than a little sarcasm.
Chapter Two
They followed the direction of the retreating biplane, which took them away from the course they had originally planned. The prospect of finding some kind of ville, some kind of life, was too good to ignore, even though, as Doc had pointed out, they were unlikely to receive a warm welcome.
After an hour spent trekking over the rotting arable fields, they came to the remains of a two-lane blacktop road that stretched into the distance. The biplane was still visible, its oily smoke trail etched in the sky. J.B. looked toward the west, where the plane was headed, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun.
"It's holding up well," he muttered, "and not dipping."
"Which means?" Dean queried.
"That the ville it came from is still some distance— good dozen miles, I reckon."
"Let's still head for it," Ryan suggested. "We'll try and keep good time, but stay triple red. Nearer we get—"
"—more likely to be sec patrols," Mildred finished. "We hear you."
They strung out in formation and proceeded along the side of the road, ignoring the smoothed surface in preference to a rutted drainage ditch that ran along the side. It provided cover for them in the event of hostility; and, more importantly, would do the same for any sec ambushes. So to prevent being taken by surprise, they would flush out this territory as they traveled along.
After the first four miles, the only sign they had of any kind of habitation were dirt roads that would lead off the blacktop at semiregular intervals. J.B. queried where they could lead, and both Doc and Mildred told him that they could be access roads to fields, or tracks leading to old farms from before skydark.
"Any chance of them being in use?" Ryan asked.
"Doubt it," Mildred replied. "Take a look at them."
Ryan cast his good eye over the state of the roads and tracks. They were rutted and cracked, with little sign of any use. Whereas the blacktop, despite the cracks of age and earth movement, had traces of recent use.
"Yeah. Anything that comes along this way only uses the main drag, and leaves the sides well alone."
"Which means we should find the ville the only populated place around these parts," Krysty added.
Progress was slow along the side of the road, and after six miles there were signs across the flat landscape that other old blacktop roads were beginning to converge in the distance.
Ryan eyed them speculatively as they took a rest. "J.B.," he said softly, "do you remember ever coming around these parts with Trader?"
The Armorer, removing his fedora to mop his forehead and then polishing his spectacles, thought carefully before answering.
"No, don't reckon I do," he replied, "but, thinking about where we are, I do remember something I heard about. There was talk of a trade route along the eastern trail that went through a ville called Crossroads, that had four old blacktop roads—still in good repair— come together from the four
points of the compass."
Ryan nodded. "I can see three from here. Guess the other one wouldn't be visible until we were actually in the ville. That many blacktops isn't that common, and neither is a ville right in the middle. Remember anything said about it?"
The Armorer shook his head. "Not that could help us. Good gaudies, good whiskey… The baron was a guy called Roberts, or Johnson, I heard. Pretty laid back."
"So perhaps we should not be too pessimistic about our reception after all?" Doc asked, leaning heavily on his sword.
Ryan smiled wryly. "I wouldn't bet on that, Doc. After all, we did blast one of his sec men, and a ville like that is worth a lot of jack, which means a lot of heavy sec."
"Ah, well, so much for thinking it may be a trifle easy." Doc sighed. "Shall we press on and face the inevitable?"
It wasn't until they were less than two miles from the ville, and could see the buildings in the distance, that the trouble began.
Ryan suddenly halted. Knowing there had to be a reason, the rest of the companions came to a halt and also drew their blasters. J.B. moved around the rest, keeping low, until he came to Ryan.
"What is it?" he asked.
Ryan indicated three points in front of them—fanning out across the level of the blacktop—with the long barrel of the Steyr.
"Patrol, moving across the road. I just caught sight of a man keeping low to the blacktop. There's movement in the foliage there—" he pointed to the left "—and there—" pointing to the right "—and I don't reckon the moving man was the one I saw originally. I figure they're moving across from different posts in relays."
"Split into two parties and take them?" the Armorer asked.
"Yeah, but try not to chill them," Ryan advised him. "We don't want to piss the baron off by chilling some of his men, but we don't want them taking us out before we have a chance to say hello."
"With you there," the Armorer agreed. "How we gonna do this?"
"Me, Krysty and Dean will try and get across the blacktop and take out that side."
J.B. frowned. "What about Jak?" He was aware that the albino youth was the best suited among them to lead a raid such as this. Indeed, Ryan would normally have no hesitation in picking him. But now?
Axler, James - Deathlands 60 - Destiny's Truth Page 3
