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The Armorer shook his head. “Doors opened slick as sh— Well, slick enough, anyway.”
Ryan jabbed a button with his thumb, but nothing happened except the two lights above the slot came on, blinking red. He hit the other buttons in order, but there was no movement, only the same blink of twin red lights.
J.B. joined him at the panel. “Broken?”
“Don’t think so, looks like sec is still running. Think we need a key card or something to get it moving.”
“Shit.” The Armorer looked around, at the rest of the walls, ceiling and floor. “No access hatch. Hope no one ever got trapped in here.”
“You mean like us?” Mildred asked.
“Jury-rig a work-around?” Ryan asked, staring at the smooth steel panel.
J.B. tapped the metal with the hilt of his knife. “Don’t have the tools to get through this. There’s no screws or seams. Could go through the buttons, but short this panel out, and we’re stuck. Got a bit of plastique left, but the concussion’ll likely scramble our brains besides destroying its guts.” One corner of his mouth quirked up in what might have been the ghost of a grin. “I think we aren’t going anywhere for the moment, unless you aim to take another walk outside.”
“You—” Ryan started to reply when Krysty held up her hand.
“Shh! Hear that?”
Everyone fell silent, straining to pick up what the flame-haired woman was hearing. Then the sound came through the thick doors—the frenzied squeals of the pig-rats outside, accompanied by the thud of dozens of bodies hitting the elevator doors, the pack slamming into the barrier in their frenzy to get at the group.
“Dark night!” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and polishing them on his shirtsleeve. “They sound bastard hungry.”
“They sound goddamn insane, is what they sound like,” Mildred replied. “Well, what’s the story, morning glory?”
Ryan frowned at the woman for a moment until he realized she wasn’t insulting him. The term had to be more of her strange twentieth century slang. He shrugged. “Not sure just yet. We don’t seem to be able to go up, and you know what’s outside, so the mat-trans is out for the time being, as well.”
“So, we’re just going to hole up here a while and wait them out?” Mildred asked.
Ryan picked the cleanest corner of the floor he saw and sat down. “Yup. They should give up in an hour or two. Mutie bastards’ll be off looking for their next meal soon enough.”
“Mildred, my dear?” Doc’s sonorous voice cut across the discussion. “I think you might want to have a look at Jak. Our snow-headed companion appears a bit under the weather, even to my less-than-trained eye.”
All five heads swiveled toward the albino youth, who was huddled in another corner of the elevator, his shoulders shaking. “Don’t worry me. Fine.” He fixed them all with his chilling, red-eyed stare for a moment before his eyes rolled back in his head as he slid down the wall, crumpling in an untidy heap on the floor.
Ryan pushed himself to his feet. “Thought you said he’d be all right for now, Mildred?”
“He should be, damn it.” Frowning, the doctor trotted to Jak and felt his forehead, then grabbed his wrist.
The boy stirred weakly under her ministrations. “Lemme ’lone. All right. Just cold. So cold…”
“He’s got a fever and is burning up. His pulse is also racing.” Mildred took the bandage off his wound. “Jesus H. Christ!”
Jak’s hand was red and swollen, and the slash was dark, puffy and angry looking. It had stopped bleeding, but now oozed a clear fluid. Mildred sniffed, then pulled back, wrinkling her nose. “Sweet-sour stink. Either those little bastards have some kind of venom in them, or their feces is more virulent than I thought.”
J.B. squatted by one of the grisly corpses, probing it carefully with the tip of his flensing knife. “Fangs seem solid, not like a rattler’s, if that helps. Don’t see any kind of obvious poison sac in the mouth or throat either.”
“Thanks, John. Whatever the cause, I have to radically revise my prognosis for him.”
“What do you mean?” Krysty asked.
Mildred glanced up, her brow knotted. “Judging by how fast it’s progressing, instead of a day or two, Jak might have six to eight hours—if he’s lucky.”
Chapter Four
“Hey, Doc, lend me your coat, please?”
“My pleasure, dear lady.” Shrugging out of his frock coat, Doc presented it to Mildred with a slight bow. “It does not look good for young Jak, does it?”
“No, it sure as hell doesn’t,” Ryan answered. He turned back to the panel, which still silently mocked him with its obstinate refusal to work. “Our clock just started ticking a whole lot faster. Either we figure out a way back to the mat-trans, or we get this hunk-of-junk steel box moving.”
“Got four choices.” J.B. pointed at the double doors, then at the elevator floor as he leaned against the wall, his dusty brown fedora tilted up. “Over, under, around or through.”
Even under the circumstances, Ryan couldn’t help smiling at the phrase, one of the Trader’s favorite aphorisms. “Yeah. Let’s try up first. C’mon, I’ll boost you.”
Ryan squatted, and J.B. nimbly climbed on his shoulders. When the tall man straightened, the Armorer reached the elevator roof with ease. For the next several minutes, he looked for any kind of hidden hatch, lever or emergency controls but came up empty. As he was finishing his sweep, he jerked his hands away from the ceiling. “What the—?”
“You got something?”
“Felt something. Wait a sec….” J.B. gently placed his hands back on the plastic grilled ceiling tiles. “Black dust!”
Mildred looked up from tending Jak. “What’s going on, John?”
Ryan glanced up to see J.B. staring down at them with wide eyes. “I can hear them jumping on the roof. There’s gotta be more of those rad-blasted pig-rats.” He slid off Ryan’s shoulders to the floor. “Stirred up one hell of a rat’s nest.”
They all listened, and once again, heard the squeals and thumps of rodent bodies hitting the ceiling, followed by the click-click of their hooves as the muties clattered around on the roof of the elevator.
Ryan shook his head. “What the fuck—fireblasted muties takin’ this personal?”
“Either that, or we smell better than whatever they been eating recently.” J.B. shrugged, as phlegmatic as ever.
“Rats chew on just about anything,” Mildred said with a shudder. “Think they’ll gnaw through the cable?”
“If they do, all the more reason to get the hell out of here. Let’s take a look at the floor.”
Two minutes later, the thin industrial carpeting had been torn up, revealing more of the same smooth metal. Drawing his knife, J.B. pressed the point into the steel as hard as he dared without risking the blade, but didn’t even make an impression. “No-go that way.”
“Right. That leaves the hallway.” Ryan turned to face the doors.
“Lover.” Krysty placed a hand on his arm. “You can’t be serious. You wouldn’t make it ten steps.”
Glancing at her, Ryan took her hand in his own callused one, squeezing for a moment before letting it fall. “Got no plans to take the last train to the coast just yet.”
J.B. joined him, the sallow man scratching his forehead. “What are you thinking?”
Ryan flashed him a tight grin. “Over. The way I remember it, those three pipes ran the entire length of the corridor.”
“Leap up, grab them and scoot. Crazy enough that it might work. How do we open the doors and get out without being overrun?”
“That’s the tricky part. Doc?”
“At your service, good sir.”
“Got any rounds left for that scattergun barrel of yours?”
“I believe I can find a few at the bottom of my capacious pockets.”
Ryan nodded at J.B., who had already picked up on his plan and had unslung the M-4000 shotgun and was checking the load.
“Ryan, you aren’t serious about this?” Mildred asked, rising from beside Jak.
The dark-haired man turned to face her. “Look into my eye and tell me I’m joking.”
She frowned. “The blasts in this enclosed space could permanently deafen us all.”
“Better alive and deaf than hearing and eaten alive. If you want to help, figure out a way to protect our hearing as best you can.” Ryan shrugged off his rifle, leaning it against the corner of the elevator, and made sure there were no loose pieces of cloth on his garments that might provide a convenient rope for the mutie horde outside. “Make sure everything’s secured, J.B.”
“I’m on it.”
Mildred shook her head, then looked around. “You two are both nuts.”
Ryan saw red for a second. “Fireblast, Mildred! If you aren’t helping, you’re hindering! Now get useful, or get the hell out of the way!”
Mildred’s face tightened, but Ryan didn’t give an inch, pinning her under his icy glare. Finally she turned away. “We need cloth, cotton wadding, anything to shield our eardrums.”
“How about that carpet we tore up?” Krysty borrowed J.B.’s knife and began cutting it into long strips.
Mildred felt it, then nodded. “Got just enough padding to do the trick. Make them narrower if you can. The more we can cram into our ears, the better.”
J.B. glanced over at their work. “At least it’ll muffle the noise of those little bastards slamming into the door.”
“I’ll get Jak ready.” Krysty moved to the motionless albino teen, plugging his ears and covering his head with Doc’s coat.
Doc had finally fished out a round for the shotgun barrel of his LeMat, and now stood with the pistol ready in both hands. J.B. had his shotgun ready, his gaze on Ryan. “Who’s going?”
Ryan smiled. “You and me, of course. I need your devious mind in case the cards are locked up or hidden somewhere.”
J.B. sighed. “Hip-deep in the shit, as usual.”
“Where else?”
Doc pressed his ear against the door. “Is there any chance that waiting a bit might make the cretins leave us in peace and seek more suitable prey?”
“They might, but if Jak’s getting worse—”
“Which he is,” Mildred broke in from the corner. Ryan glanced over to see the kid convulse and vomit a thin stream of pale bile onto the floor.
“We’ve got to move now. I think this is our best bet. Hellfire, it’s the only one we got. All right, let’s go over the plan.”
Ryan scooped up the unconscious Jak and moved him to the other side of the elevator, sweeping mutie corpses out of the way with his boot. “Krysty, you’re on the door. We give the signal, you hit the button. As soon as J.B. and I are out, close it triple-quick.”
“You just don’t let it hit your ass on the way out.” She smiled, but it vanished from her face as quickly as it had appeared. Her vibrant crimson hair was tucked up tight at her nape, revealing how she felt about this whole idea.
“Doc and J.B., you’re the firepower. Soon as the door opens wide enough, you both let fly with everything you got. Doc, hold your blaster at this angle.” Ryan adjusted the man’s hands to get maximum spread of the shotgun pellets.
The old man nodded, his limp, white mane flying around his shoulders. “Never fear, Ryan, I shall endeavor to send as many of the feral scum to hell as possible.”
J.B. didn’t say a word, only removed his beloved fedora and handed it to Mildred who, not having anywhere better to set it, perched it on her own head, where it sat incongruously over her beaded plaits.
“That’s the spirit, Doc, but just fire the one round, don’t switch to the cylinder. Mildred, you hang back and grab J.B.’s M-4000 when he’s empty. You know how to reload it, right?”
Wordlessly, she accepted the round magazine from J.B. and nodded, handing him a wad of carpet strips in exchange. “I got it.”
“Way I figure it, in less than five seconds, you two shoot, then we scoot. You seal that door tight after us.”
Krysty’s full lips were pressed tight with concern. “Assuming you find the card, how do you expect to get back inside?”
“We’ll just knock on the door, and you’ll do the same thing again.” Ryan looked at all of them. “Ready?”
Everyone nodded. Doc took a tighter grip on his LeMat, carpet strips sprouting out of his ears. J.B. braced the M-4000 shotgun against his hip, ready to spray the corridor. Krysty was poised at the door controls, her face pale. Mildred stood in the middle of the elevator, ready to grab J.B.’s weapon. Ryan folded up a strip and inserted into his left ear, then did the same with his right, feeling the noise inside the elevator fade away into a dull buzz.
Ryan paused for a moment, removing the carpet from his ear. “Hey, hear that? They’ve stopped.”
Everyone cautiously removed one of their earplugs to listen. It was now ominously silent.
J.B. frowned. “What you think that means? They get tired and left?”
Doc cleared his throat. “More likely, John Barrymore, they are regrouping to plan another method of attack. I recall a fascinating study on the common rat that proved the rodents possessed the ability of meta-cognition, previously found only in humans and some primates—”
“Skip the lecture, Doc. What the hell are you talking about?”
With a sigh, the old man stared pointedly at Ryan. “My point, my impatient companion, is that rats are one of the few animals who think about thinking—on an instinctual, primal level they are able to analyze their own thought processes. Beating themselves against the door was not working, so they are now trying to find another way into the elevator. The more salient point is that these mutated animals are probably more intelligent than you are giving them credit for. A dangerous assumption indeed.”
“Mebbe so, but we’re about to give them the surprise of their lives. Let’s see what your supermuties do when we charge straight into them,” the one-eyed man replied.
Ryan inserted his wedge of carpet earplug again. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter Five
On Ryan’s nod, Krysty stabbed the door button. There was a pause, and Ryan thought the whole plan might go to hell before it even began if the doors didn’t open.
He felt a tremor shiver through the floor and made sure J.B. and Doc were both ready. He was more worried about Doc. J.B. could be wakened from a sound sleep and be alert and ready to chill in less than three seconds. Sometimes Doc was the exact opposite, snoring through events that would rouse an entire ville. But now he looked more than ready, his eyes alight as he waited to unleash blood and thunder.
Ryan’s breath hissed through clenched teeth as he waited for the doors to open. His hands itched for a weapon, and he was acutely aware of the oddity of not leading this assault by example. But neither his hand-blaster nor longblaster was suited for the job, and he needed to get into the corridor and on the pipes triple-quick so J.B. could follow before being mobbed by the surviving muties.
After what seemed like an hour, but was probably just a few seconds, the double doors separated with a squeal, pulling apart to reveal the boiling, furious mutant mass outside. Ryan was counting on a moment’s surprise as the pig-rats took in this new development, and he was well rewarded. As one, the churning crowd all looked up at the suddenly disappearing barrier in front of them.
But as the muties took in this new development, Ryan’s breath caught in his throat as he stared out at what they were up against.
