“This is rather unnerving,” Mildred said, watching a sec camera in the corner of the ceiling steadily move back and forth. The people were all aced, but the machines continued to function on whatever was their last setting.
“Be a lot worse if somebody had activated a sec hunter droid before collapsing,” J.B. countered, pulling out a pipe bomb and tucking it into his belt for fast access.
Without comment, Ryan reached up and yanked out the power cord of the vidcam, the red indicator fading to black.
“How many of those do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked pointedly, gesturing at the explosive charge with the barrel of his LeMat.
“Just the one.”
“Then pray, make it count, my friend.”
“That was the plan, Doc.”
Reaching the fifth level, Ryan and the others found the main hallway clear of bodies. But that was only to be expected. Combat personnel didn’t lounge around the armory for fun.
Located at the end of the hall was a massive armored door, a truncated cone of layered steel and titanium that not even a laser could burn through. Luckily, the formidable barrier was ajar, a skeleton lying across the threshold, holding a clipboard of ancient papers, a CD player clipped to his belt.
“Hmm, he had good taste in music,” Mildred said, reading the title through the clear plastic.
“Beethoven?” Doc asked curiously.
“Billy Joel.”
The companions stepped over the bones and into the armory.
“Good God!” Mildred gasped.
Turning fast, Ryan had his blaster out and ready, but then he blinked in surprise and slowly smiled. Jackpot.
Many of the armories the companions found were completely bare, not even a scrap of paper remaining behind. Sometimes they found a few loose rounds under a shelf, or a single live gren left behind when the base personnel departed before or after skydark, heading for, well, wherever they had gone a hundred years earlier. None of the companions had ever discovered where all of the people had gone, or even had a plausible theory. But this armory seemed to never have been touched. It was completely full, literally stocked to the rafters.
The companions couldn’t speak for a minute at the miraculous sight of dozens of pallets filling the room, the wall shelves jammed full of supplies. There were also endless racks of M-16 assault rifles, M-203 combination assault rifles, 40 mm gren launchers, M-60 machine guns, even bulky .50-machine guns too heavy for a person to carry, much less fire and remain standing. There were entire rows of plastic drums marked as containing ammunition, and pallet after pallet of sturdy plastic boxes that the companions knew contained grens, and even LAW rocket launchers. It was the military might of the predark world spread out in front of their astonished eyes like a holiday feast.
“Nuke me, this redoubt was never emptied after skydark!” J.B. cried happily. “The people must have died just before the evacuation order came.”
“Fully stocked redoubt,” Jak muttered. “More than we dream finding!” For the normally laconic teenager, that was an extraordinarily long speech.
“Thank you, Gaia,” Krysty whispered.
“Not even that deep storage locker in New Mex had this much ordnance,” Mildred agreed, already looking around for any medical supplies. Sometimes, field packs were stored in the armory along with the weaponry.
“All right, fill your pockets, but nothing more,” Ryan ordered brusquely, resting the stock of the Steyr on a hip. “Krysty and I will stand guard. Don’t weigh yourself down for the rest of the sweep. We can come back later and take what we want.”
Instantly the rest of the companions separated, walking swiftly through the stocks and piles, checking the numbers on the countless sealed containers and mentally translating those into descriptions. Boots, combat, size ten, for use of. Milk, powdered, vitamin fortified, for daily consumption. HazMat suits, Level 10, hazardous materials: antinuclear, antibacteriological, antichemical.
Going to a wall cabinet, Mildred pulled it open to find a stack of boxes full of MRE food packs. Grinning widely, she went to a nearby pallet and grabbed a nylon duffel bag, then returned to start packing the shiny Mylar envelopes. There was beef stew, veal parmesan, meat loaf and mac and cheese. Pausing for only a second, the woman removed the smoked gopher from her backpack and unceremoniously deposited it into a waste chute.
Eagerly, Doc went in search of trade goods. Among the thousand and one things stored in the redoubts, the predark government had considered the fact that some sort of crude civilization might arise from the nuclear ashes of America all by itself, so the base personnel would need trinkets to trade with the survivors outside. The companions had found such things before and they were always tremendously useful, such as unbreakable pocket combs, Swiss Army knives, Bowie knives, plastic mirrors, pots and pans, rain ponchos, fishing hooks and, of course, lots of weapons. Mostly battle axes, shields and swords. The Pentagon had clearly expected civilization to fall all the way down to true barbarism, but sometimes there were also black-powder weapons, which was what Doc wanted. Especially the tiny copper nipples full of fulminating mercury that the Civil War–era .44 LeMat used as primers. He never had enough of those.
Unfortunately, Doc was unable to find any such items on this initial pass, and consoled himself with a Webley .44 revolver and a cardboard box containing fifty live rounds.
Meanwhile J.B. was having trouble restraining himself from taking everything in sight, and was snagging only a few choice items, several sticks of TNT and a box of detonator caps, a small coil of primacord, a fistful of waterproof timing pencils and items for pipe bombs. Then the man paused at the sight of a wall safe. A safe inside a vault?
Mentally crossing his fingers, J.B. went to work on the combination lock and soon it yielded with a soft click. Turning the handle, J.B. opened the door and stopped breathing. A portable lockbox filled the safe, and he removed it as gingerly as if defusing a land mine. Placing it on the floor, J.B. used his knife to trick the lock, then lifted the lid. There nestled in the soft, gray foam, were six implo grens, the most powerful predark weapon invented by the human race. It worked just like a regular gren: pull the safety pin, release the arming lever and throw. But instead of an explosion, the gren created a gravity whirlpool, an implosion that could condense an Abrams tank to the size of an orange in less than a microsecond. With these at their command, the companions no longer had to worry about sec hunter droids, or much of anything else, for that matter.
Quickly rummaging in his munitions bag, J.B. found some duct tape and securely attached the arming lever of each gren before transferring it to his bag. The weight was considerable, but the man had never seen this many implo grens.
Affectionately patting the leather bag, J.B. proudly started back to find Ryan when he saw something twinkle out of the corner of his sight. Twinkle? Oh shit.
Frantically grabbing for an implo gren, J.B. sniffed hard for any trace of ozone, but the air in the armory was warm and flat, sterilized and purified until it was completely without any taste or flavor.
With the gren clenched tight in a fist, J.B. crept around a pallet stacked high with plastic boxes containing M-4 rifles, to stop dead in his tracks. There was a small alcove directly ahead of the man, thick metal bars sealing it off from the rest of the armory. Set into the metal was an alphanumeric keypad similar to the type used to open the redoubt’s door, and behind the bars were a dozen crystalline containers, inside of which was a swirling white cloud filled with sparkling lights. The sight almost made him drop the gren.
“Cerberus clouds,” J.B. whispered, the soft words somehow sounding louder than thunder.
Backing