Chapter Twenty-Two

 

It was the body of a man, a pathetic and twisted caricature of what he had to have been in life. The light from the fluorescent strips overhead barely revealed him through the ice coating.

 

"Mildred," Ryan called out, squatting to rub the loose ice from the years-old accumulation.

 

"Son of a bitch," Mildred said as she approached. She pressed her hands against the ice and got almost nose to nose with the corpse.

 

"I didn't see a gunshot wound," Ryan stated. "No stab wound. Not even any blood. Know what killed him?"

 

"Not without digging him up," Mildred replied. "But whatever it was must have come for him bastard quick."

 

Ryan nodded. "Thought so myself. Still got his military uniform on. After nukecaust, he'd have gone on."

 

Krysty knelt and put a hand over the dead man's face. Her touch had to have reached past the inches of ice, though, because Ryan saw the redhead's face knot up with distaste and pain. "He died burning," she said.

 

Mildred peered closer. "Can't be. I don't see any tissue damage that looks anything like burns. And there aren't any signs of it on the wall, either."

 

Krysty shook her head, clearly not understanding everything she was picking up through her mutie ability. "Not from the outside. From the inside. Something that affected his lungs. His chest got tight."

 

"You can feel all that?" Dean asked.

 

She nodded and took her hand away. "Can't do it with old dead every time, but sometimes, if I put my mind to it, I can get a feeling about their passing. I don't like doing it, but this time, I thought mebbe we should know."

 

"Let's move," Ryan said, curiosity eating at him. They were clearly in a military installation. Where they could read them, signs were in military jargon that the one-eyed man found only partially decipherable.

 

More dead followed, all encased in ice, and all in uniform.

 

"Died after nukecaust," Jak ventured as they found a group of corpses lying on top of one another farther down the hallway. "Or wouldn't be many so close. Wouldn't all be uniformed."

 

"Something else about the condition they're in," Mildred said as she studied the latest accumulation of corpses. "The cold had to have hit them soon. Otherwise we'd be finding skeletons here and there instead of whole bodies. Either the elements would have stripped them down, or predators would have."

 

"The redoubt's integrity was compromised suddenly," Ryan said, "allowing in the cold. As thick as this ice is, as strong as it is now, there must have been a lot of water here at one time."

 

"Mebbe close to the sea?" Mildred suggested.

 

Ryan nodded. "That's what I'm thinking. That could account for the thickness of the ice."

 

"A flood would have washed these bodies out of the corridor."

 

"Could have," Ryan agreed, "and this is where they ended up." He got the companions up and moving again, following the tunnel. Another thing that totally confused him was the direction they were traveling in. According to the signs posted on the tunnel walls, they were in the south wing, supposedly heading south. Instead, according to the compass he had, Ryan charted them as going west.

 

Another quake shook the redoubt.

 

Ryan pressed up against the wall, holding on to Krysty as the sound of the intermittent, booming cracks filled the corridor. This time Ryan got some of the feeling Doc had talked about. It felt like the redoubt did bobble slowly a bit. After he was sure all the ices chunks that were going to drop from the ceiling had fallen, he pulled back.

 

When he checked his compass again during a breather, he found they were now progressing down the tunnel in a northwesterly direction instead of mostly west. The tunnel hadn't changed direction, just continued straight.

 

And he had no explanation for that at all.

 

 

 

"NERVE GAS," Mildred said, pointing to a metal canister held in the frozen grip of the ice. "I recognize the toxin classifications."

 

Ryan took a closer look at the metal canister. It was pressure sealed, like a lot of other storage containers they had found in other redoubts, and marked with a skull and crossbones. "Somebody set it off inside and chilled everybody here?"

 

Mildred shook her head. "I don't think so. Look at the tear in the side of that canister. See how jagged it is? Leads me to think it was hit from something outside the canister, but maybe still inside the redoubt. Could have been sabotage."

 

"Sabotage?" Dean echoed.

 

"Boobied it from the inside," Ryan explained. "By somebody who was acting like he was one of them."

 

"Or she," Mildred said. "Don't forget which is the deadlier of the sexes."

 

Ryan knew she was only halfway joking. "These were Americans by the looks of their uniforms. Mebbe the Russians brought them down."

 

"That would be my guess," Mildred agreed. "With this much ice around, we've got to be somewhere up north. Mebbe even as far as Russia. If we are, that was a long jump."

 

Ryan nodded. And it would be an even longer walk back to familiar territory if they couldn't get the mat-trans unit operational again.

 

Farther on, they found the room where the bomb had to have gone off.

 

Ryan stood on the lip of the room, gazing down into what appeared to be a research lab of some kind. A lot of comps, frozen over now, sat against the wall along a ring that encircled the hub of the large room. Mechanical claws hung from the ceiling, black power cords as thick as pythons leading down from them.

 

He made his way gingerly to the edge of the railing and peered down. The light fixtures below weren't operational at all. All he saw was a thick pool of frozen water, interrupted occasionally by bulky equipment that thrust up from the level surface.

 

"How far down, Jak?" Ryan asked.

 

"Fifteen feet, mebbe twenty. Light not good. Hard judge distance."

 

"Yeah."

 

"You can figure there's probably thirty feet of ice before you reach the concrete bottom of that room," Mildred said. "This must be where they were storing the nerve gas."

 

Ryan silently agreed. His eye scoured the walls, seeing signs where explosions had ripped into the metal. Huge gouges lay under the sheets of ice, disfigured by the depth.

 

"I get bad feelings about this place," Krysty said in a soft voice. "A lot of people died right here."

 

"Took a lot of water to fill this room, Dad," Dean said. "Kind of curious about where it came from."

 

"Me, too," Ryan said, but he felt a gnawing certainty that he knew where it had come from. He'd had to knock ice from the handkerchief around his lower face three times since they had begun to walk. Every time he had tasted the ice through the material, and every time it had carried with it the distinct taste of salt.

 

Salt water could only mean a sea or an ocean. But there were a lot of those in the world. It also meant that wherever they were, it was cold by a damn sight because salt water took longer and colder to freeze than fresh water.

 

Another rumble shook the ground. Metal creaked this time, and huge sheets of ice ripped free of the walls in the room. Some areas had already been bared by the earlier quakes, but not all of them had torn free.

 

A sheet almost twice the size of a man crashed onto the railing in front of Ryan. The impact reduced it to fist-sized pieces that pelted them with bruising force and smashed into the walls around them.

 

Then the quake finished with a final spasmodic quiver that sent ice chunks skittering across the frozen surface.

 

"Getting worse," Jak commented as they pushed themselves up.

 

"Didn't feel any worse than the last one," Ryan said. He held a finger to the side of his nose, stemming blood flow where ice had hit him.

 

"Mebbe," Jak said. "But was." He pointed at the floor.

 

Fractures ran through the inches-thick accumulation beneath their feet. Ryan guessed that a few had been there from earlier, but in no way were they as bad as what he was looking at now. "Let's get a move on," he growled, "before this whole fire-blasted place comes tumbling down around our ears."

 

 

 

"THE EXPLOSION MUST have taken place around the time of the nukecaust," Mildred commented. She ran her hands through the pockets of the dead man they found in the corridor. More of the ice lining the floor had buckled, making footing even more treacherous. "Got paperwork here with a January 18, 2001, date on it."

 

"What paperwork?" Ryan asked. He moved forward, squinting in the dim light to look at the paper she offered. She gave him three sheets, all covered with feminine handwriting.

 

"Personal letter," Mildred said, shivering from the cold. She ran her hands along her arms, her gaze still captured by the young corpse on the ground before them.

 

The man looked to be in his early twenties. His hair was crew-cut blond, and his staring, dead eyes were hazel. A dimple centered in his chin gave him a look of arrogance, but the ice pieces clinging to his frozen flesh stripped him of that full effect. Sergeant chevrons marked his short-sleeved shirt. Some decay had set in before the freezing temperatures, and the ice had preserved what was left of his corpse. His body showed a watermark where blood had settled into his exposed limbs and the back of his neck.

 

The letter was just that, a message from home, written by a young wife who hoped to see her husband in two weeks for the first time in nearly eight months. Sections of the letter were covered over by black marker. From reading the text, Ryan knew the references had to do with where the young soldier had been stationed.

 

"Evidently this place stored a lot of war chems, lover," Krysty said. They had turned up more of the canisters. Some of them, however, hadn't been broken open. Ryan had given the order to stay away from them. If any nerve gas got released, the breeze blowing by them would have blown the gas cloud farther down the tunnel, killing them, as well as the others.

 

Mildred nodded. "Somebody in here was set up to take out this site. Maybe with all the tracking communications gear we've seen, it was part of the SDI."

 

"SDI?" Jak repeated.

 

"Strategic Defense Initiative," Ryan supplied. "Supposed to give the United States a chance to save the world in case the nukes were launched."

 

"Didn't work," Jak said.

 

"No." Ryan folded the letter and left it back with the dead man. He liked to read journals when he found them, and manuals, just to get an idea of what life had to have been like during the time before skydark. This was personal, and it belonged with the man. If there had been information in it, he would have kept it.

 

"Hot pipe!" Dean called up ahead. "I see light at the end of the tunnel."

 

"Ease up," Ryan called, moving forward across the slick ground. "Don't roam too far ahead." He followed the rising grade of the tunnel, his vision blocked ahead by the tunnel bending back down to level off again.

 

Dean stood at the top of the incline, his Browning in his fist and gray wisps of his breath dancing around his head.

 

Ryan went up the incline gingerly. The cracked ice made it easier going than the smooth ice would have been, but if the wrong piece was stepped on, a man would go back down the incline in a hurry. He noticed the sound when he was near the top, recognizing it at once as the crash and boom of surf.

 

The breeze thickened with the salt scent, and it became even colder. The wet handkerchief stuck to flesh where it touched Ryan's lips. His eye opened wide as he took in the scene, seeing but not believing.

 

The access tunnel leading to the redoubt had been sheared off. Not by an explosion, Ryan saw, but by a twisting elemental force. The tunnel now opened up on a peak of dirty white ice, pointing like an open throat toward the abominable orange and purple of the nuke-dust-filled sky.

 

The light coming from the sun barely visible through the heavy clouding was a jaundiced yellow. Ryan didn't think anyone around this place had ever seen a blue sky, which was still some days rare even in Deathlands.

 

And he knew they weren't in Deathlands anymore. No place he had been to looked anything like what he saw before him.

 

Sixty feet and maybe more below him, an emerald green ocean lapped at the bottom of the shelf they found themselves on. There was no indication of land mixed in with the accumulated snow and fresh layers of ice. Out before him, scattered across the wide expanse of the sea, were hundreds of ice floes. Nearly all of them were smaller than the one they were encased in.

 

"Jesus H. Christ!" Mildred said, stepping up beside Ryan to look out over the ocean. "We're in a damn ice cube floating in the middle of the goddamn ocean!"

 

And that, Ryan figured, summed it up about the best.