Chapter Four

"You stupe kid! I might've put a full-metal-jacket round through your damn-fool head!" an angry Ryan gritted after J.B. had finally raised the door and the companions were together again.
Dean Cawdor shuffled his feet. "Sorry, Dad. It's just that as soon as the door started to move, we all figured that it had to be you and J.B. there."
"Suppose it had been one of those Japanese samurai guys we ran across a while back?"
"Well I didn't think"
"Right. You didn't think. Might have had a sword blade through your eye, Dean."
"Suppose so. Sorry, Dad."
"Come on, lover," Krysty said, putting her arms around Ryan, hugging him tightly. "Main thing is that we're all safe together. What happened back there?"
J.B. answered the question, holding hands with Mildred. "Tried to burn us out. Flooded the complex with gasoline. Didn't quite make it. We jumped."
"Both look dreadful," Jak stated, running his long fingers through his mane of stark white hair. "Bad jump?"
"One of the worst." Ryan shook his head. "Still feel like I've been run through the wringer."
"The natives didn't get in after you?" Doc asked. "After we deprived them of their godhead, there was some serious grief. They seemed unusually persistent in their efforts. I believe that the poor wretches would gladly have given anything to have laid a hand on you."
Ryan laughed. "Well, they came close to laying a hand on us, Doc. But that was all. Just one hand, and it's lying out by the gateway door."


BOTH RYAN AND J.B. were still weak from the effects of the jump, and they elected to wait in the control area for an hour or so until they felt better.
Dean was eager to explain how they'd opened the sec door while waiting for Ryan and the Armorer to come along. It had worked perfectly well that time, and everyone had gone out into the corridor beyond.
"Then we all heard this harsh snappin' noise, like a half-track breaking, you know? And the whole door started to move on down."
"Falling?"
"No, Dad, not like free-fall. That would've been a real triple-hot pipe. Start a quake clean across Deathlands if it had crashed down."
"So it came slowly?"
The boy sniffed. "Not real slowly. More sort of not fast. I don't know the right words for it."
"Well, when you've gotten some learning, then you'll know all the right words, son."
"Sure. I know that. Anyway, the control lever, the green one, didn't work it and there was no override outside in the passage. So we was fucked."
Krysty had been listening. "That's not the right thing to say, Dean."
"Sorry. You mean saying 'fucked,' Krysty?"
"I mean that. Partly. Also, you shouldn't say that we 'was fucked.' Bad grammar. Say we were fucked."
Ryan grinned. "Better still, don't say fucked at all, Dean. Not until you're a little older."


SINCE THE CONTROLS WERE so obviously shot, Ryan decided that it was safest to leave the sec door raised three-quarters of the way toward the ceiling.
"Someone could get in at the gateway," Mildred warned, "leaving us in deepest ordure."
"Have to take that chance." Ryan sniffed the air. "Still smells like nobody's been in here for a hundred years. You didn't find anything interesting?"
Krysty answered him. "Never got to do any exploring. Like Dean said, the door came down too quickly. Good job that you and J.B. stayed behind. If we'd all been together, we'd have been trapped on the wrong side of making another jump. And we don't have the nuke-missile power to blast the sec door open."
"You feel any signs of life anywhere else in this redoubt, lover?"
She shook her head, her mane of fiery hair dancing across her shoulders. "Nothing. Be surprised if I'm wrong. Like Uncle Tyas McCann used to say back in Harmony ville, feels deader than a beaver hat."
Ryan whistled softly between his teeth. "Then we might as well get moving, friends. Let's go ahead on orange and we'll see what we see."
Orange meant having the option to draw your blaster if you wanted. Red meant there was no choice.
Even on green it didn't mean you walked free as air without paying attention.
You never moved carelessly in Deathlands.
Ryan led his friends out in a casual skirmish line, leaving the gateway behind. The passage was fifteen feet wide, with concrete walls that rose vertically and then curved in toward the arched ceiling, at least twelve feet above their heads. There were sections of neon strip lights at intervals, casting a ghostly pallor over everyone. About one in four had failed over the years, but there was still plenty of light in the tunnel.
Every forty or fifty yards small sec cameras were fixed at ceiling height, some with tiny ruby lights showing that they were still dutifully obeying their programmer's instructions and sending pictures back to some hidden control center.
The setup they found was similar to many of the other redoubts that they'd visited. The gateway was located at the farthest end of the line. To the left of the sec door the corridor ran along for less than fifty featureless yards before ending in a wall of solid stone. There was the familiar feeling of being deep below the earth.
Ryan strode along to the right, his boot heels clicking on the cold stone. Krysty was second, followed by Dean. Doc was fourth, his knees creaking at every step, while Jak padded silently at his heels. Then came Mildred, walking together with J.B. at the rear.
There was no sign of life anywhere in the redoubt.
The farther they went along the featureless passageway, the more lights had failed. But there had been no side corridors or doors on either side.
The corridor seemed to wind ceaselessly around to the right and to climb slowly.
"It's like being inside the shell of a snail," Dean observed. "Been walking miles."
"About a mile and a quarter," J.B. corrected him, checking his wrist chron.
"Certainly going up and up and around and around." Jak shook his head. "Where we finish up?"
"Inside our own rectal orifices if we go around many more times," Mildred commented. "I swear that I'm starting to get dizzy. This layout remind you of anything, Doc?"
"I don't believe so. Though the simile proposed by young Master Cawdor was unusually accurate. Around and around the little wheel goes, and where it stops, nobody knows. What does it remind you of, Dr. Wyeth?"
"Place in New York. A big art gallery called the Guggenheim after the guy who paid for it. Got the same kind of shape. You go up to the top and stroll down and around." She stopped walking for a moment. "Thoughts like that are bad, aren't they? Brings back a tiny part of what was lost. Last time I went there with my Uncle Josh, Dad's younger brother, they had a beautiful exhibition of paintings by Chagall."
Everyone else rested for a few moments while the black woman recovered her composure, blowing her nose noisily on a white handkerchief.
"You feeling all right, Mildred?" J.B. asked. "Want to take five?"
"I'll be all right. Guess it must be that time of the month again. Always get a little weepy."
"Wait till you reach my time, madam," Doc said, baring his startling white teeth. "Someone once said that old age is an island surrounded by death. I vow that there are days when I feel that I am slipping off that island."
Mildred smiled at him. "Know what you mean, Doc. You and me, we're the only people in all Deathlands with such long pasts. Gets hard at times, knowing that everyone you ever knew has been dead for years."
"Well over a hundred years, in my case. I sometimes dream, you know, friends. Dream of my beloved wife. And sometimes of my children. Of Rachel and beaming little Jolyon. Oh, he was such a merry little fellow." Tears gathered in the corners of Doc's pale blue eyes, breaking free and trickling through the silvery stubble on his cheeks. "I dream that they are full grown with their own children. And grandchildren."
"They probably lived good lives, Doc," Ryan said, trying to cheer up the old man.
"Perhaps. But they are still so long dead."


THEY FOUND THE PLAN of the redoubt at a junction about 350 yards farther along. It was bolted to the wall, behind a Plexiglas screen.
They gathered around, peering at it in the semi-darkness, as five out of the twelve overhead lights had blown.
"There's the mat-trans unit," J.B. said, pointing to the bottom part of the layered map. "And that's this corridor."
"And this must be where we are now." Ryan traced the circling corridor with his finger until he reached the first junction. "Looks like the gateway has its own entrance. Get in and out without having to go through the rest of the redoubt."
"Doesn't give us any clue where we are, does it?" Krysty said, scanning the map.
"They never do. Just the number at the top. Redoubt 47."
"It seems to have had an unusually large laboratory complex," Doc commented. "I wonder what fresh evils the whitecoats were up to there?"
"Since we can't seem to get up there, I guess we'll never know," Mildred stated.
"Probably stripped bare, anyway." Krysty looked again at the plan. "This corridor sort of winds upward and around and around, kind of on the perimeter of the main part of the redoubt."
Dean had wandered off on his own, checking out the side passage, returning with the news that it ended abruptly in a closed sec door.
"Locked shut, Dad. And there's no kind of control panel or lever or nothing."
"Anything," Krysty said, automatically correcting him.
"Mebbe it could only be opened from the inside." Ryan scratched his chin. "Or they could've had some kind of automatic device. Like they used to have on garage doors."
"Sure there's no way of opening it?"
Dean turned to Jak. "Go look for yourself. There's nothing there. Plain walls."
They stood for a moment, undecided what to do.
Ryan looked ahead of them, referring again to the map. "Well, if we can't get into the rest of the redoubt, we might as well head straight for the exit. Least we can find out where we've ended up."


THEY WALKED PAST three more side corridors, but each was blocked off by vanadium-steel sec doors, firmly and immovably locked shut.
"Unusual this," Ryan said as they paused for breath. "Wonder why the gateway section is so carefully isolated from the rest of the redoubt?"
Krysty looked about her. "Has it occurred to you, lover, that it might be the other way around?"
"How do you mean?"
"That it's the redoubt that's been isolated from the mat-trans section. That huge laboratory sectionnever seen anything like that in any of the redoubts that we've jumped to, have we? It's a new one."
"Yeah, could be."
Doc was entranced with the idea. "Those devilish whitecoats!" he spit. "Their fearsome experiments behind the safety of locked doors and screened units. Highest sec clearance anywhere. Who knows what frightful mischief they might have been up to in those last weeks, before the nukecaust revealed the utter futility of all research."
"Less we know, less we worry," Jak commented. "Be good taste fresh air after this weak recycled shit. How much farther?"
J.B. considered the question. "Nor more than another quarter mile," he replied. "Been climbing all the while, but it's finally starting to level off some."
"I'm hungry, Dad."
"We're all hungry, Dean. Something about jumping that makes you feel sick and hungered, all at the same time. Long as the main entrance sec door can be opened, we'll soon be out in the good air and do us some hunting."
"Right now I could chew on a mutie's skull and drink a bowl of stickie's blood."
Doc shuddered theatrically. "Drink blood, my sweet imp! There is nothing more profane."
The boy grinned. "Well, better than rat piss."
Ryan ruffled the boy's hair. "Let's get to the entrance first and see what we can see."