Some of the humans had been more carefully disassembled.
In the school gymnasium they found a makeshift surgical theater. The hardwood floor was smeared with swooshes of blackened, congealed blood. The air was thick with the stench of death and swarmed with flies. Dissected organs lay piled on the bleacher seats: hearts here, lungs there, eyeballs in a plastic bucket. The horror hadn’t ended very long ago. The blood in the tiled showers was still red; it stood in pools where the butchers had hosed themselves down afterward.
At the far end of the predark basketball court, a man in a lab coat was hanging from the rim of the hoop, by the neck, by his own belt; his belly had been slashed from sternum to crotch. Greasy gray intestines looped around his ankles. He had a large irregular purple birthmark on his right cheek—it looked like a silhouette of Texas.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc had gasped through the kerchief over his nose and mouth, “that poor soul’s wearing his guts for garters!”
The entire ville had been chilled; everything alive had been ground up and spit out. What Magus had been looking for, if anything, was a mystery. Replacement parts for a deteriorating body? Recreation for a deteriorating mind?
In the end the reasons didn’t matter. What was done was done.
Only this time there would be payback.
After Ryan and Ricky had skirted the back side of the desert hills for a goodly distance, he sent the young Latino up to a summit to recce their position relative to the enemy camp.
“Wags at the bottom of the hill after next,” Ricky said when he returned. “No campfire that I see.”
Minutes later they belly-crawled over that summit, then descended to just below the ridgeline. Over tops of sagebrush and boulder, Ryan could see the five wags parked in a ring, bathed in rosy light as the sun slipped behind the peak of the mountain. Ricky was right; there was no campfire in the center. He peered through the Scout’s scope. There were no milling figures. No one seated, either. No sign of Magus. No lights on inside the Winnie.
Ryan didn’t give the attack signal as planned. There was no one to attack.
He and Ricky moved carefully down the slope. He slipped between two sets of bumpers, his longblaster held waist high. The Steyr’s 7.62 mm round packed enough wallop to drop all of the hellscape’s large predators; it figured to be more effective versus enforcers than 9 mm handblasters, but that was a proposition yet to be tested. As the last light began to fade, the other companions emerged from the shadows between the wags, with weapons raised.
A quick search of the parked vehicles turned up nothing.
“Where did the rapscallions go?” Doc asked when they reconvened in the center of the camp.
With head lowered, Jak was already circling the perimeter. He stopped abruptly and pointed at a patch of churned-up dirt that led past the pickup with the cab-mounted machine blaster. “This way,” he said.
The trail was wide and easy to follow, even as night fell. It ended a short distance away, farther along the base of the hill, where the bedrock had been cut away, carved into an unnatural arch. Before they stepped under it, Ryan and the others knew what they’d find: a redoubt’s vanadium-steel door.
The massive portal stood ajar, and weak light spilled out from inside.
With weapons up, they slipped single file through the gap, into a tunnel with a polished-concrete floor. Ryan stared down at the mass of rusty, overlaid footprints in front of them. There were way more than thirty-five sets of feet. The toes were headed in both directions—in and out. The redoubt had been breached many times in recent memory.
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “that is somewhat dire...”
He wasn’t looking at the overlaid footprints and drips of enforcer sweat, which turned the tracked-in dirt dark brown in spots. His attention was focused on the painted metal warning sign hanging on the wall. In eight-inch-tall letters it read:
SECURITY LEVEL RED ALPHA
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL BE MET BY
LETHAL FORCE
TURN BACK NOW
Cartoon silhouettes below the lettering showed helmeted soldiers with automatic longblasters shooting down a running man, woman and child.
“Think it still applies?” Mildred asked.
“Only if skeletons can fire M-16s,” J.B. said.
“After more than a century, such threats do tend to lose their teeth, my dear Mildred,” Doc said, displaying his own remarkably fine set.
“We don’t know what defenses this place has,” Krysty stated. “But we sure as hell know what’s gone in ahead of us. Fighting enforcers in close quarters means big noise. Our element of surprise is going to disappear quick.”
“We could wait for the stinking pendejos to come out,” Ricky said. “Booby-trap their wags. Blow them all to hell and back when they try to drive off.”
“What if they’re planning to use the mat-trans to jump out of here?” Ryan queried. “What if they have no intention of ever coming back? We could wait outside this redoubt until we’re skeletons, too.”
The companions said nothing. He could see from their expressions his point had sunk in.
“We’ve got to find out what Magus is doing here,” Ryan went on. “We’ve dealt with enforcers in a redoubt before. The tight spaces belowground will make the incendies even more effective. Think about it—chain-reaction fireballs!”
“I do like the sound of that,” J.B. admitted.
One by one, the others nodded. None of them wanted to abandon their quarry after so long a hunt and with the finish almost in sight.
Her eyes gleaming, Krysty said, “Let’s go fry us some big, fat lizard butt.”
“Before we do that,” Ryan said, “we’ve got another little job on our plates.”
At a trot he led them back to the circled wags. “Only way anyone is leaving this camp is on foot,” he said as he unsheathed his panga. With that he slashed the blade across the sidewall of the Winnie’s left front tire, dropping the wheel to its rim with a sudden whoosh.
The companions needed no further instructions. They spread out in the near darkness and quickly cut all the tires on the wags.
As they returned to the redoubt entrance, Ricky said to no one in particular, “There’s lots of gas in the wag tanks for our bikes. And water in the Winnie.”
“Ah, the unbridled optimism of youth,” Doc said with a laugh.
J.B. chuckled, too. “Yeah, the kid thinks we’re actually going to live through this.”
“J.B., what do you mean?” Ricky asked.
“Wait until you come toe-to-toe with an enforcer, my boy,” Doc told him, “then the veil will be lifted.”
The far end of the tunnel was blocked by a blast-proof sec gate, steel bars backed by armaglass, which stood open. Along a bowed-out section of wall near the entry, the snouts of three M-60 machine blasters protruded from a single, horizontal firing slot. Against the wall opposite was a six-foot-high backstop on skids, designed to absorb blasterfire and minimize ricochets. The backstop was decorated with lines of 7.62 mm bullet holes at waist height. They looked as though they’d been drawn with a yardstick. Above and below the holes were irregular patches of brown—ancient crusted blood spatter.
With the others standing well clear, Ryan swept his hand over the electronic eye set in the wall above the blaster muzzles.