As J.B. prepared to send fragments of Burning Man’s skull seventy feet in the air, he heard Mildred’s voice behind him.
“Look around, J.B.,” she said urgently. “Before you pull the trigger, look around…”
Raising the muzzle higher, making the baron stand almost on tiptoes, he glanced over his shoulder. Mildred stood with her back to him, her Czech wheelgun raised in both hands. She was aiming at the whitefaces who were sighting in on her. The other companions all had the same problem: outnumbered three to one, weapons ready to fire, they stared down the barrels of their former allies.
Even Jak, the whiteface scout, was under the gun.
“We’re not going to win this one, J.B.,” she said. “There’s too many of them and they already believe they’re the walking dead. Look at them—they’re smiling at us. They don’t give a shit.”
Then, from across the nukeglass, Krysty yelled to him, “Ryan could still be alive. We have to find him. Every second counts…”
J.B. eased off the pressure, letting Burning Man come down off his toes. When he removed the M-4000’s muzzle from under the baron’s chin, it left a 12-gauge-diameter ring indent in his flesh.
Burning Man flipped his goggles up onto his forehead.
“You made the mess,” J.B. said. “How do we clean it up? We can’t dig them out with our bare hands.”
The light in the man’s eyes made J.B.’s skin crawl. It wasn’t the look of a man who’d just nearly had his head blown off. It was the look of a man on the verge of completing his life’s holy mission.
“Scrounge up the dropped tribarrels,” Burning Man said. “Use them to cut through the cave-in. Have to be careful and go slow, or you’ll saw up the survivors, or burn ’em to death with melting glass.”
“Everybody!” Mildred shouted. “Weapons down! Right now! Let’s find some laser rifles and get to work.”
As the companions holstered their blasters, the whitefaces lowered their blasters, too. Standoff over.
“You can help us look for the cutting tools,” J.B. told the baron.
“There’s something else that has to be done first,” Burning Man replied. He pointed behind them, at the other side of the ore processer. “The jump zone,” he said. “That needs to be destroyed immediately. It’s the she-hes only way out of here. We can’t let any of them escape. And we can’t leave any of their technology intact.”
“Go ahead, we’ll start without you,” Mildred said
“Let’s do it, then,” J.B. told the baron. “And let’s be triple-quick about it…”
Burning Man took a satchel of pipe bombs from one of his warriors and broke into a run. J.B. followed him to a crude circle etched into the nukeglass. At the circle’s center was a squat bank of electronic machinery, a single
black cabinet the size of a small wag, with its own set of batteries.
The steady hum of the system was audible. “It’s running,” J.B. said.
“They’re keeping the apparatus ready, so they can jump at a moment’s notice,” the baron said. “Better stand well clear. This will only take me a second.”
J.B. backed away as Burning Man stepped inside the circle.
Crossing the empty space at a trot, the baron knelt on the glass beside the machinery, opened the loaded satchel and took out a single pipe bomb. J.B. saw him light the fuse. When he had it sputtering, he dropped the bomb into the open bag, alongside the rest of the explosives. Then he shoved the pack hard up against the black cabinet, positioning it to do the most damage.
As J.B. turned to put even more safe distance between himself and the ensuing bang, he glanced back at the baron, who was sprinting away from his handiwork, full-out. He got only as far as the perimeter of the jump zone, the crudely etched circle. When he reached it, his head lowered, arms and legs pumping, he slammed into an invisible wall and bounced back into the circle like a NOMEX-clad rag doll.
As a thin haze of residual, mixed smoke and dust swept across the jump zone, J.B. glimpsed the domed outline of a force field. Somehow the baron had managed to accidently enable it.
J.B. watched spellbound as Burning Man scrambled to his feet and raced back to the satchel. He had the bag open, and was frantically searching around inside, when the whole package blew up.
With a muffled, baritone boom, the inside of the force field dome bloomed white-hot, and the nukeglass shuddered underfoot. In the overturned bowl, white turned to orange as the air itself ignited.
The force field held its shape for five or six seconds, then it dissolved before J.B.’s astonished eyes. When it did, black smoke boiled upward and a shower of crimson spatters fell onto the ring of charred nukeglass.
It was all that was left of Burning Man.
And at the same instant, the power to the kliegs surged, their brilliance momentarily blinding.
As if in final salute.
Ryan swept the hall beyond the cell’s entrance with the scanner for the tenth time in as many minutes. “They’re gone,” he announced.
“Are you sure?” Ti said.
“See for yourself.”
The little auburn-haired beauty took the device and had a look. As she lowered the unit she said, “Just because they’re not right out in front, doesn’t mean they aren’t waiting for us somewhere around the corner.”
“Auriel said they wouldn’t leave before they’d infected us and blown us apart like the others,” Ryan said. “Something had to have made them move from their station out there. For all we know it even chilled them.”
Ti gave him a scowl.
“We can’t stay down here forever,” he told her. “There is no food and no water. The power is going to run out eventually, and when that happens we’ll be trapped here in the dark. We’ll never escape.”
“Okay, I get that, and you’re right. But what about the force field? We’re stuck in here.”
“The off-switch has to be inside the battlesuit glove,” he said. He bent over Auriel’s body, and after some gentle fumbling, found the release button for her right gauntlet.
When he pulled it onto his own hand it was still warm
inside from Auriel’s body heat. The sensation filled him with a crushing wave of sadness. Ryan shook off the unsettling upwelling of emotion, pointed the index finger at the force field and waited.
Like magic, the field fell.
“What now?” Ti asked as they warily stepped out into the corridor.
He dropped the glove to the floor. He couldn’t blame her for shooting Auriel. She had done the right thing, the only thing, for all concerned. “We’re going to look for survivors,” he said. “And then find a way out.”
They cautiously but steadily climbed up the spiral passage, until they reached the clot of exploded miners and whitefaces. The remains were so pureed that they were unidentifiable even as human.
Ryan picked up a tribarrel from the floor, where it lay against the base of the wall. Probably the one Ronbo had been carrying, he thought. One side of the weapon, barrels to buttstock, was slick with red fluid and textured with flecks of bone. He wiped it off with his palm, sweeping the residue to the ground.
He and Ti continued upward. When they reached the laboratory, they had another look inside. It was still unoccupied.
Ryan waved the woman over to the lab’s computer screen. The remote cameras at the mine’s entrance showed the companions and whitefaces cutting their way into the shaft with captured tribarrels.
“Help is coming,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here.”
As they advanced up the main passage, both of them began shouting for people to come out of hiding, telling
them that the immediate danger was past, and that they had to work together to get out while they still had operational lights.
Slowly, pale faces began to appear at the entrances to the mine’s side passages ahead of them. Then the slaves who had lived through the specters’ attack staggered out into the shaft.
Ryan counted just fourteen survivors; none of them were whitefaces.
“We need to gather up all the tribarrel rifles the cockroaches dropped,” he told them. “We’re going to use them to burn our way out of here.”
As they moved toward the entrance, full of high spirits and new purpose, the miners went through each of the blaster emplacements, turned over bodies and looted the laser weapons.
When they got to the floor-to-ceiling barrier, Ryan sensed the wind going out of their sails. Great slabs of glass were mixed with the boulders and rubble—all of it razor-sharp, and some of it teetering on the verge of avalanche.
He called the miners with weapons forward, and ordered the rest of the people to stand well back and against the tunnel’s side walls.
“Rescuers are coming toward us from the other side,” he said. “They’re using lasers to melt through the glass. With any luck, we’ll meet them in the middle. If you don’t know how to power up these weapons, this is the button here that does the trick…”
He hit the tribarrel’s power button and armed the weapon system.
When the three slaves had their tribarrels humming,
he said, “We’ll start at a single point, focus all our beams on it, and work out from there. We’re going to have to cut a fairly large hole, otherwise the glass melt is going to fall on us while we work.” He turned to the people along the walls. “Make sure you stay back from the center of the floor,” he warned them, “because the molten glass is going to flow out of the hole we’re cutting and there’s going to be a lot of it.”
Ti appeared by his side, holding up a strip of rag. She said, “Better cover your nose and mouth with this. You don’t want to breathe in the smoke that comes off the melting nukeglass.”
After tying the mask in place, he braced the tribarrel against his hip and pressed the trigger. A fine green beam shot from the muzzle and stuck the barrier. The glass immediately began to smoke, then drip like hot, green-gray candlewax. The others fired their weapons at his impact point, and the drip suddenly became a splashing fountain.
Boring through the collapse was sweaty, dirty work and not just because of the caustic black smoke. Even after the glass had solidified, it radiated sweltering heat. Ryan and the other men carved out a roughly rectangular tunnel, foot by foot, yard by yard. The laser beams fused together the loose material, so the five-foot-wide walls and ceiling didn’t fall in on them.
The laser weapons’ power was just starting to give out when Ryan caught sight of a shifting green light on the other side of the blockage.
The light was growing brighter.
Ryan waved for the miners to get back. “The other side is going to be breaking through any second,” he told
them. “We have to get out of the way or those beams are going to cut us, too.”
After they’d cleared the entrance to the passage they’d made, he shouted through it to the companions, “You’ve got about four more feet to go!”
Moments later, blinding green beams sliced through the last of the barrier, stabbing deep down the shaft for hundreds of yards.
“Everybody stay put!” Ryan shouted when the tribarrels ceased fire. “The hole has to cool off.”
Waiting was hard. The slaves were champing at the bit to put the depths of hell behind them forever.
Ryan let everyone else go first. He came out of the hole after Ti, under the blazing kliegs and the dark night sky, into the open air and endless space, and found himself locked in the passionate embrace of a lovely, long-legged woman.
Ryan and Krysty held each other for a long moment. When she relaxed her grip, he noticed that she was staring fixedly at the little auburn-haired former slave, who was staring right back.
“That’s Ti,” Ryan said. “She was a prisoner here. She was a big help in getting us all out. Ti, this is Krysty.”
The two women acknowledged each other with nods of the head, but didn’t exchange words of greeting.
The other companions surrounded Ryan, slapping him on the back and smiling from ear to ear.
“Where’s Burning Man?” he asked.
J.B. pointed toward the former jump zone. “The baron’s that big wet spot over there, on the other side of the processer,” he said. “Whitefaces might want to scrape it up and put it in a jar to take home.”
“He was the last of the invaders,” Doc said. “The last of the conquistadores.”
“Good riddance to ’em all,” J.B. spit.
Ryan took in the carnage scattered across the width and breadth of Ground Zero. At what cost? he thought. Bodies and parts of bodies were strewed everywhere. “Buzzards are going to have quite a picnic come sunup,” he said.
“No picnic,” Mildred said. She gestured back toward the mine entrance. “It was already decided. There’s going to be a mass burial.”
Ryan saw whitefaces and ex-slaves pushing emptied ore carts out of the mine and onto the massif. Tenderly, they lifted their dead into the cargo boxes, and then they ferried them back across the glass into the depths of the mine.
It took a long time to collect all the bodies and move them belowground. When that was done, the companions chucked the drained tribarrels into the shaft. Then the whitefaces used the last of their homemade explosives to demolish the ore processor and reseal the mine entrance.
As the smoke and dust of the final explosions blew past the banks of lights, across the desolate wasteland, Krysty said, “This place was never meant for humans to see.”
“No human will ever have a reason to see it again,” Mildred said.
“A place forever cursed, forever avoided,” Doc agreed. “There will always be evil lurking in this spot. Terrible evil and terrible sorrow.”
“More than you ever know,” Jak remarked cryptically.
“Jak, do you know something that we don’t?” Mildred asked. “What do you mean?”
“Mean nothing,” the albino youth said. He turned his back to all of them and stared across the ruin. He didn’t say another word.
B
ECAUSE THEY HAD
to wait until daybreak to start the long walk out of Ground Zero, the companions and the other survivors searched the pits for dry places to sleep.
In an open hole, under the glare of the klieg lights, Ryan and Krysty huddled together, face-to-face, locked in each other’s arms to stay warm. She kissed him softly on the mouth, and as she did, the tips of her prehensile hair clung to and stroked the sides of his neck.
“When the entrance blew up,” she said, her lips a half inch from his, “I didn’t think anybody could have survived.”
“The rest of the whitefaces didn’t,” he said.
“I thought I’d lost you.”
“Not a chance.”
“Should I be jealous of that little cutie with the AK? You know you have a thing for redheads.”
“For one redhead in particular,” he said.
Her emerald eyes flashed with pleasure. “When are you going to tell me what really happened down there?” she said.
Ryan said nothing.
“It was something triple-bad, wasn’t it?” she went
on. “I can see it in your face. You can’t hide something like that from me, lover. I know you too well.”
Ryan still said nothing.
“You have to tell me what happened.”
“The cockroaches got themselves contaminated again,” he said. “Only with something much worse than what they picked up in Deathlands the last time they dropped in. They brought the contamination with them to Deathlands when they jumped here. I can’t really even describe it to you, except that down in the mine it killed all of the she-hes and a lot of innocent people, too. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.
“Krysty, some things just aren’t meant to be. No matter how much we want them to happen, no matter how hard we fight or how much we pray, we aren’t in control of events. The she-hes thought they were in charge, and they learned the hard way that they weren’t. Turns out the only thing we can control is our own thoughts. And honestly, I don’t want to think about this, now.”
He paused for a long moment, then said, “You know, I really miss my boy…”
“I know, lover. I miss Dean, too.”
She squeezed him so tight he thought his heart would break. And then he told her about Auriel.