Chapter Five

It was obvious that they hadn't found the main exit from the whole complex. There were no extra security points, and the passage hardly opened at all. It was just wide enough for a single wag to drive through.
"Got the standard number-code control panel," called Dean, who'd been given permission by his father to go along ahead of them. There wasn't any likely danger with the air tasting the way it did, along with Krysty's strong feeling that there was no kind of life anywhere within the redoubt.
Ryan looked at the others. "Might as well go out straightaway. Nothing to gain by waiting. You agree?" Nobody spoke. "Well, you don't disagree. On condition red. Dean, punch in the usual code and see what happens."
"But be ready quick stop," Jak reminded him.
"Sure," the boy snapped. "I know I don't know much about using the right word and all that shit, but I know what to do with redoubt sec doors."
The albino shrugged, holding out his hands, palms showing. "Back off, Dean," he said quietly. "Stick your fingers down bear's throat and get bit off."
"That a threat, Jak?" Dean stood by the control panel, his body as tense as a drawn bowstring.
Ryan took a half step toward his son. "Enough," he warned. "Time for fighting among ourselves. But this isn't one of them. Press in the code."
"Three, five and two," Dean said.
"Right."
Ryan crouched again, ready to peer under the rising sec door and give a warning of danger. The others were ranged in a rough half circle close behind him, everyone with a blaster at the ready.
The buttons clicked loudly in the oppressive stillness. Five. Three. Two.
This time there was no problem.
The monstrous weight began to lift. Ryan squinted into the opening, but didn't order his son to stop the process, not calling a halt until the door was about eighteen inches off the ground.
Dean pressed the single button that held the sec door in position, waiting for the word from his father to continue.
"Humid again," Mildred stated, breaking the silence. "Hope we're not back at the village."
" It is humid, lover. And got the same kind of green taste as before."
Jak dropped to one knee beside Ryan and peeked out cautiously. "Smells like swamps to me," he said. "Smells to me like home."
Ryan nodded. "Bayou smell. More rotting vegetation than the last jump. Not so hot. Not so wet. Least we can breathe this air all right."
"Louisiana?" J.B. said. "Think we're back down in the southeast again?"
"Could be." Ryan turned back and looked out under the door again. "Can't see very much. Gray-green trees, dripping with Spanish moss."
"Always reminds me of the rotting wedding dress of some dead duchess in a Jacobean tragedy," Doc mused. "A kind of faded decadence."
Mildred nodded. "Must be getting soft in the head, Doc. Here I am agreeing with you again."
"Take it up all the way, Dean," Ryan ordered. "Unless You don't feel any threat, do you, Krysty?"
"Feel a lot of life, but nothing that close and nothing personally hostile."
Dean pressed the release, and the mass of dull metal began to ascend again, reaching up to the ceiling before it stopped with a faint hydraulic hissing.
Now everyone could see out past the entrance to the redoubt, see the tall trees, festooned in the Spanish moss. There was an open space of overgrown tarmac, surrounded by the vegetation, but no sign of any kind of trail.
"Air smells wetter than last time. Sort of gray, colder wetness. Kind strikes through to the heart of your bones," J.B. said. "I'd lay money on the bayous again."
"We exploring some, lover?" Krysty asked. "Hunt us up some food?"
"I'd be interested in trying to get at the main entrance to the redoubt." The Armorer looked around. "Got to be something special to have labs that size."
"I cast my vote against that suggestion," Doc said, his voice ringing out loudly.
"Why?"
"Because, John Barrymore Dix, I have more knowledge of the whitecoats than any of you." He bowed slightly to Mildred. "Even more than you, Dr. Wyeth. And I have found them universally evil psychopaths."
"I'll go with that," Mildred said with a nod. "Some good doctors, but when you get to the experimenters Needles into the eyes of kittens and electrodes that probe directly into the brains of week-old monkeys. No, that's not for me."
"Could be something triple interesting in there," the Armorer insisted.
"I believe that's what Pandora said before opening her box and releasing every plague and wickedness into the world." Doc stared challengingly at J.B. "And, forget not, my friend, that the cat was slain by curiosity."
J.B. glanced at Ryan. "What do you think? Might not get a chance like this again."
Ryan swatted a persistent wasp away from his face. "I honestly don't know, J.B."
"There might be some kind of predark virus just waiting to leap out and start chilling all over again," Krysty said. "I'm with Doc and Mildred on this. If there are any dogs sleeping up there in the main lab complex, then leave them sleeping."
"Three to one against going in," Ryan stated. "How about you, Jak? And you, Dean?"
The younger boy waited for the teenager to answer. Ryan would have laid a wagload of jack that his son was going to go along with whatever Jak decided.
"Doc's double right," Jak said. "Where white-coats step, grass dies."
"Dean?"
The boy looked at his father, brushing a curl of dark hair from over his eyes. "I reckon J.B's the one who's right. Wouldn't do no harm, and it might be a real hot pipe to find what they were experimenting with. Could be monsters."
Ryan grinned, glad that he had never had a wag-load of jack with which to wager.
The Trader used to say that you couldn't trust anyone. Not anyone. But you very specially couldn't trust any women, animals and children.
"Four to two," he said.
"How do you vote, Ryan?" the Armorer asked. "Just like to know."
Ryan considered refusing to answer the question. But that would have meant backing off, and he had never liked backing off anything for anyone.
"I say there has to be a risk of some bug still being around. Place that size was working for the military. Wouldn't have been making raggedy dolls, that's for sure."
J.B. took off his glasses and gave them an extra polish. "Five to two. Real solid majority. Still doesn't make it right. Trader said that a man who turns his back and walks away from a closed door'll never get rich."
Ryan laughed. "You cunning son of a bitch! You know that Trader didn't say that."
"He didn't?"
"No, J.B., he didn't. He said that a man who turns his back and walks away from a closed door'll never get himself chilled. Kind of different."
"Guess so." J.B. put his spectacles back on. "We going to recce, or do we stand here jawing all day?"


WHEN THEY LOOKED behind them, once they were clear of the lowering weight of the sec door, the main surprise was that the redoubt was almost invisible.
"It's all buried," Dean said.
As on previous occasions, Ryan was awed by the extent of the labors of the predark government. To build anything remotely similar in Deathlands would be impossible. The man-hours and technical expertise involved were mind-blowing.
The redoubt, from the map, had to have been over a mile in diameter and have a total depth of more than a thousand feet. Like an iceberg, most of its unimaginable bulk was buried out of sight below the swampy ground.
He looked at the complex. Apart from the open sec door, looking like a toothless mouth, the place was amazingly well concealed. It had been covered in layers of earth, and time and weather had sown and nurtured seeds of all sorts of plants and trees, so that it was now hidden beneath an impenetrable layer of vegetation.
With the doors shut, you could probably have walked right by it and never noticed it was there.
"Big," Jak commented.
"No sign at all of anyone trying to break into it," J.B. observed.
Doc was staring around him. "There appears to be a narrow trail over to the right. Perhaps we could begin our exploration in that direction."
Ryan nodded. "Sure. Dean?"
"Yeah, Dad?"
"Punch in the closing code. Let's leave it secure. Particularly as we couldn't close the entrance into the gateway."
The boy ran to the small panel, concealed by a section of camouflaged rock, and entered two, five, three, watching as the heavy vanadium-steel door slid slowly and almost silently back down to close the entrance.
Ryan sniffed, looking up at the gray sky, with occasional streaks of blue. "Let's go, people."


THE PATH WOUND SLOWLY downhill, getting muddier as it went. Judging from the pools of water lying in the ruts and hoof marks, it had rained heavily within the past hour or so.
When they reached a large clearing, J.B. took out his minisextant and got a bearing on the pale sun, checking his readings carefully.
"Where are we, John?" Mildred asked.
Everyone jumped as a bird exploded out of the screen of flowering bushes to their right, making its way skyward with long, slow movements of its powerful white wings.
"Snowy egret," Doc said. "One of the most beautiful creatures in God's own aviary. Vain and stupid women thought so, too, so they sported the feathers in their silly hats. In the early part of the last century there were only a dozen or so birds living. I suppose that it was about the closest a species has come to extinction, without falling clean off the edge of the world. There was an active policy to save the snowy egret and, miracle of miracles, it was successful. By the time I arrived in the future, there were more than a hundred thousand birds. The Lord alone knows how many more of them there might be by now."
J.B. took his reading again, nodding. "Right about the bayous," he said.
"Where?" Jak looked at him intently, not hiding his eagerness.
"Close to your home," J.B. replied, putting away the sextant. "South of Lafayette, from what I recall of the maps. More south of Baton Rouge. Some way west of Norleans. Probably not all that far from the Gulf of Mexico."
"Heart of swamps," the albino said.
"Looks that way. Unless there's been some big climate alteration the last couple of years. It happens." Ryan stared at the vegetation around them. "Doesn't seem like there's been too much change. Just classic swamp."
"Cajun country," J.B. muttered. "Place where you get a sore neck from having to look behind you all the time." He cleared his throat and spit in the mud. "Dark night, Ryan! Mebbe we should get right back into the gateway and jump out of here. Swamps mean trouble."
"Have another jump like the last one?"
"Might be better this time. Couldn't possibly be a whole lot worse, could it?"
"Mebbe not. Still reckon we'll take a look around. See if we can find any food. The trail winds on ahead over there."
Other than that single magnificent snowy egret, they had seen no wildlife at all.


THEY WERE STILL HEADING gently downhill. Ryan's guess was that they'd soon be running into some serious water.
It was Jak who spotted something off to the right of the track, a half mile after their stop.
"Folks around about," he said, pointing to the skeleton of what looked like a good-size deer. It had been stripped by the predators, large and small, from the swamps. A few ants were still marching busily around the jumble of bones, picking out the last shreds of decaying meat from the darkened carcass.
"Just look at what chilled it," J.B. said, walking closer and dropping to his knees to see it better.
His right hand pointed to the arrow that protruded from between the xylophone of ribs, its shaft split and broken halfway along. It wasn't like an arrow you'd normally see anywhere around Deathlands.
It was close to five feet in length, made from a bamboo shaft with dark goose feathers at the end. The point seemed to be made out of hand-carved bone, and faded strips of colored silk were scrolled neatly at regular intervals around the peculiarly long shaft.
"I recognize that," Doc said quietly. "I would think there is no doubt that it once belonged to one of our Oriental friends."
"The samurai?" Jak asked, looking behind him at the stunted bushes and the thick mud that lay all around them. "Think it belongs to them?"
" Belonged to them," Ryan corrected him. "Been here some time. Must've hit the deer and not killed it outright. So it ran and died here. It hasn't been butchered for cooking and eating, so the man never found his arrow."
Some months ago they had heard the first whispers of an odd band of slant-eyed strangers roaming through Deathlands. But it was a time of rumor and fantasy, and they hadn't taken much notice of the stories.
For one thing, the tales put these Oriental mercenaries all over the place up in the Darks and down on the Keys, out in the western islands and drifting through the high plains, in too many places, too close together.
Nobody traveled that fast.
Unless they were using the gateways.
More recently Ryan and the others had been given irrefutable proof that a gang of Japanese killers had definitely been making mat-trans jumps. Indeed, there had been a confrontation with them that had left one of the samurai warriors dead and another badly injured.
Now here, in the bayous, was further proof that they were active within Deathlands.
"How long ago?" Mildred asked.
"Months," Jak replied. "Probably at least two months. Might be three."
"So there's no danger," Krysty said.
"No danger," the albino agreed.
As they all turned away from the dead deer and the broken arrow, the ground around them seemed to erupt and a dozen or more screaming creatures leapt at them, attacking with short stabbing spears.