Authors: James Axler
Starting forward even more slowly than before, J.B. discovered several more traps: a spring-loaded bear trap with the crushing steel jaws colored a dull reflectionless black, and a deadfall rigged to release tons of rocks that could have aced anything alive in the corridor and blocked it solid, offense and defense combined into a single lethal action.
Turning a corner, J.B. found another locked iron gate, but beyond this one was a brick bunker, a narrow slit set at chest level, the vented barrel of the .50-caliber machine gun pointing his way. The Armorer paused at the sight and quickly checked his compass, but the needle stayed pointed toward north. His heart pounding wildly, he slowly tried the keys, attempting to make as little noise as possible. None of the keys on the ring worked this lock, so J.B. hauled out a lock pick and got it open in less than a minute.
Oiling the hinges, just in case they had been deliberately overtightened to squeal, J.B. silently swung the gate aside and led his friends to the bunker. Peering through the blaster-
slot, J.B. exhaled in relief at the sight of the empty interior. There was also a door set into the left wall.
Going to that side of the bunker, he ran his fingertips along the rough brick for several minutes until locating the release button set high on the top course. Holding his breath, the Armorer pressed the button. There was a pause, then a dull click, and a section of the brickwork slid into the wall.
Entering the bunker, J.B. passed the goggles around to let the others have a fast look at where they were. Aside from the machine gun, there were also a couple more pairs of night-vision goggles hanging from hooks set into the brick wall, as well as a wooden rack full of shotguns, boxes of ammo and a plastic milk crate full of grens. Ryan scowled at the proliferation of weaponry. The Fifty was more than enough firepower to stop an army of coldhearts from getting through the iron gate. All of the other weapons were completely unnecessary, the sort of thing an amateur would do in ignorance. Whoever built the bunker and tunnel had a lot of military hardware, but no damn combat experience at all. That was interesting.
A metal door in the bunker lead to a stone wall and yet another iron gate. But beyond that was merely a dirt road cutting through a field of tall corn, the young stalks stretching for hundreds of yards into the night. In the far distance came the glow of electric lights from behind some kind of a high wall.
As J.B. removed the goggles and stuffed them into his munitions bag, Ryan pulled out his navy longeye and extended it to the full length. Through the telescope, he could see that there were brick guard kiosks set at regular intervals along the top of the wall, the intervening space thick with coils of barbed wire suspended from glass knobs. Electrified? Damn.
Standing uneasy in the moonlight, the companions could faintly hear sounds coming from the ville: excited voices, the cadence call of marching troops, raucous laughter, as well as the soft twang of an expertly played steel guitar. Mildred was
shocked to recognize the voice as a country singer from her own time period. She could not recall the name, but she knew the tune well, a funny song about trucking, “Wolf Creek Pass.” Jerry Reed? Tom T. Hall? Hank Williams? No, those weren't right, and for some odd reason she could not remember what the famous musician looked like, all that came to mind was some sort of a hat and a pair of sunglasses. With a shrug, Mildred dismissed the mystery as unimportant.
Tucking away the telescope, Ryan pointed at the companions, telling them what to do, then advanced to the iron gate. It was closed with a heavy steel chain and a combination lock. While the others stood guard with their blasters at the ready, J.B. first checked the area with his compass, then cracked the lock and eased off the chain, laying it softly down in the nearby grass.
“Welcome to Cascade,” J.B. whispered, pushing open the metal gate.
Holstering his blaster, Ryan pulled out the panga and knelt. Gingerly probing the earth with the blade, he was rewarded with the soft clink of steel on steel, and laid a spent brass on that spot to mark the location of the land mine. He would have left a clear zone around the gate to trick invaders into a false sense of security, and then laid out a thick minefield.
Forming a line behind the man, the others also got busy with their knives, and soon they reached the drainage ditch edging the cropland. Stepping over the shallow trench, Ryan relaxed with the thick tangle of roots under his boots. There could be no land mines here.
Sheathing his panga, Ryan listened to the gentle rustle of the stalks and the distant strains of recorded music mixing with the muted voices of the guards on the wall. They were discussing what to do with the new harvest. That was puzzling to the man, as the corn was many months away from being ready to be gathered. Then he heard them comment on the new trucks, computers, laser cannonâ¦and the many women.
In a surge of uncontrollable rage, Ryan felt a red fury fill his mind as he realized the brutal truth. Fireblast, they were talking about jacking the trader. War Wag One was the harvest! The beautiful field of clover was just a lure to pull the trader in close, make him enter the tunnel, andâ¦what? Would they collapse the entrance and seal him inside? Release poison gas? Flood it with water? Suddenly he understood that Yates was not a spy for Pete, but for Cascade. That was the only
possible explanation for the stolen keys. Son of a bitch! Now the recce took on a pressing urgency. The companions had to know more, real fast, to try to save their comrades.
“Jak, take the goggles,” Ryan said, pushing them over. “Go back to the UCV and use the radio. Try to warn Roberto that this place is a trap.”
The albino teen donned the goggles. “What if not work?”
“Then fire a missile at him.”
Jak grinned. “That do the job!”
“If Pete arrives first, fire two missiles,” Krysty suggested. “Hell, fire all of them!”
With a nod, the youth moved off to merge with the night and disappear.
“What if these folks can listen to his radio transmissions?” Doc asked tersely in a worried tone.
“Oh, they might hear us, but there's no way they can know what the name code means, or triangulate on Jak's location,” Mildred replied confidently. “That would require special equipment and several broadcasts. Jak is safe as long as he doesn't talk too many times, or for too long.”
“That is never a problem for the taciturn Mr. Lauren,” Doc said in obvious relief.
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” Mildred agreed, awkwardly shifting the M-16 rapidfire in her grip.
The physician much preferred the deadly accuracy of the ZKR over the spray-and-pray of the military assault rifle. But the M-16 had ten times the range of her revolver, and thirty rounds of something were a lot better than six of nothing.
“Okay, we really should split into groups to do a fast recce of this place, and get out of here double pronto,” J.B. said, straightening his fedora, preparing for combat. “But I think we should stick together. Safety in numbers.”
“Agreed, John Barrymore,” Doc replied, tying a dark cloth over his silvery hair. “The more I find out about these folks, the less, and less, I like these dastardly palliards!”
Keeping to the rows between the tall stalks of corn, the companions moved swiftly through the cropland, J.B. constantly checking the compass in his hand. They were about halfway to the stone block wall when there came a low thumping noise and water sprinklers came into action, spraying a fine mist over the crops.
Stopping in her tracks, Mildred was flabbergasted at the display. A modern-day farm in the Deathlands? The technology needed to achieve such a simple action was staggering. Cascade would need a steady water supply, regulated pressure, valves, pumps, electricity, storage tanks, timersâ¦The list was endless! In an uncharacteristic swell of greed, the physician ravenously considered what they had to have in their hospital and how much she could haul away without actually breaking her spine.
Cursing vehemently, Doc shoved the LeMat under his coat and sprinted forward, hunching over to try to protect the weapon. The sprinklers lasted for only a few minutes, then cut off. Coming to a halt, Doc withdrew his blaster and sighed at the sight of thick black fluids dripping from the damp cylinder. Until thoroughly dried and reloaded, the Civil War handcannon was now only an oddly shaped club.
Without comment, J.B. passed over the S&W M-4000 shotgun. Nodding his thanks, Doc worked the pump to eject a 12-gauge cartridge, then shoved it back inside. The two weapons had about the same range, and the shotgun was actually less noisy than the thundering LeMat.
Less than an hour later, the companions approached the end of the farmland and crouched low among the rustling plants to study the area ahead. There was an open expanse of grass about a hundred feet wide separating the crops from the city wall, with a smooth asphalt road going through the middle. A pothole had been recently filled, the new macadam much darker than the rest of the roadway.
Nobody had to tell them that was for the armed war wag,
as well as the big combine harvesters needed to handle a farm of this size. The wall itself was made of large granite blocks clearly mined from the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a formidable barrier even without the electrified barbed wire, searchlights and heavily armed guards.
“Wonder where they get electricity from?” Krysty asked, her hair flexing and waving. “I don't see any smokestacks for a steam generator. Think they might have a nuke plant?”
“It's possible,” Ryan admitted. “But more likely they have a hydrodam of some kind. That would be easy to build with all of these rivers and cliffs.”
That was when the one-eyed man saw that the sec men on the wall were wearing air-force-issue bulletproof jackets and carrying M-16/M-203 combos, devastating mixtures of M-16 rapidfires and 40 mm gren launchers. Fireblast! Cascade seemed to be wealthy beyond belief, which raised the question of why they would risk exposure to jack Deathlands traders. Mebbe the comps and wags and blasters were merely a fringe benefit, and the real goal was the women, fresh blood to enrich their families and prevent inbreeding. That was a chilling thought, and the companions redoubled their determination to finish this recce and get out of this pesthole as fast as humanly possible.
The dirt road through the cropland joined the paved road a couple of hundred feet to the right and arched around a corner of the high wall, going out of sight. That was probably the location of the front gate, so Ryan headed to the left. The Trader had once taught him that since most folks were right-handed, they automatically went to the right most of the time. So a smart man should stay to the left to get behind the other fellow. The trick didn't always work, but near enough to make it sound advice.
Reaching a small clearing amid the corn, the companions saw a water pump rising from the ground like a hunchback gnome. Clearly, there were underground feeder pipes.
There was a soft thumping, and the companions took another shower, then moved on again, very thankful that all of them didn't have black powder blasters. Any invading coldhearts carrying those would find themselves unarmed every ten minutes. Orâ¦was that the point? Just because these folks were amateurs, did not mean they were feebs.
Continuing around the walled ville, several more outriders rode by the companions, oddly watching the sky more than the cropland.
“They must get hit by stingwings a lot,” Krysty guessed. “What else could get past those mountains?”
“Not much,” Ryan agreed.
Crossing into the next field, the companions saw a large bird coop set outside the cropland on the side of a nearby hill. The building was huge, the roof made of tin, or some other sheet metal, the walls made of strong chicken wire. However, inside the coop were only countless pigeons, fluttering about, cooing, picking at lice, or with a head tucked under a wing sound asleep.
Past the coop was a thick forest of poplar and pine trees, the trunks packed together so closely it was impossible to see anything on the other side. But there faintly came the crashing sounds of a white-water river.
“Well, I see that Cascade has some very good chemists, if nothing else,” Doc remarked casually. “Obviously, they did not slaughter their whitecoats and scientists like the rest of humanity. This is deuced clever, indeed.”
“Pretty smart,” Mildred agreed, reluctant to give the locals praise in any way.
“Really?” J.B. asked, frowning. “I would have thought those were, you know, just for food.”
“Pigeons?” Mildred said with the marked scorn of any former city dweller. “Good heavens, no! There is nothing more dirty, filthy or nasty than the common pigeon.”
“They're just birds,” Ryan said.
“No indeed, sir, these are part of their armory,” Doc explained. “Back in the Middle Ages, kings kept armed guards around their pigeon coops, not to protect the birds, but to protect theirâ¦excrement.”
“And what in hell can you make from pigeon crap?” J.B. demanded.
“Gunpowder,” Mildred replied. “You dry the feces and extract the nitrate crystals. That's step one for making black powder, which can then be made into the much more powerful gunpowder.”
“Are you serious, Millie?”
“Absolutely, John.”
“Gunpowder from shit, that's a new one on me,” Ryan admitted, moving onward. Mildred and Doc knew the damnedest things.
“Okay, that gets you the nitrates for saltpeter,” Krysty said. “But what about the sulfur?”
Doc started to reply when they heard the sound of a horse galloping along the paved road, the clip-clop of the iron hooves heralding the advance of the rider and mount long before they came into view.
Closely studying the cornfield, a young woman was in the saddle, her long blond hair tied in a ponytail and covered with a dark cloth to reduce the shine. She was dressed in denim, shirt and pants, both with quite a few patches, and worn combat boots. But she was also sporting a bulletproof vest, tied in front with lengths of green rawhide. There was a blue-steel wheelgun holstered in her gunbelt, the loops full of brass, and the stock of an AK-47 rapidfire was sticking out of a leather boot set alongside the pommel of the saddle. A few moments later, she disappeared around a corner of the wall, the sound of the hooves fading into the distance.
“If that's an outrider, somebody the ville can afford to lose, then we are out of luck,” J.B. whispered, removing his hat to
wipe the sweatband inside with a handkerchief before replacing it. “We'd need a fragging army to take this place!”
“Don't need to ace the whole ville,” Ryan replied grimly. “Just find out how they plan to attack Roberto, and then haul ass. No need to ever come here again.”
“You got that right, old buddy!” J.B. whispered, but then paused as the needle of his compass began to spin madly. Dark night, proximity sensors!
“Run!” he yelled, the need for secrecy over. “They know we're here!”
Instantly, weighted nets came crashing down, driving the companions to the ground with stunning force.
“Got 'em!” somebody shouted in glee.
Savagely fighting to free themselves, the companions found the actions only seemed to make the tangle of ropes and cables contract tighter. Then a harsh blue light filled the world and the companions stiffened in agonizing pain, several of them firing their blasters as their hands spasmed into gnarled fists before a tingling warmth overwhelmed their ravaged senses and they fell into a terrible inky blacknessâ¦