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The hallway was completely buried in squirming, wriggling pig-rats, crawling on and over one another in their single-minded desire to get to the end of the hallway and the live food trapped there. They were at least five or six deep in the hallway, a living carpet of gray-brown fur, dotted every few inches by a pair of large, black eyes and thousands upon thousands of needle-sharp teeth.
For a millisecond, everything came to a halt. The mutie rodent host stared up at them, and Ryan and company stared back.
The moment was broken by the soft chime of the elevator announcing to all that the doors had opened.
“Now!” he shouted.
Primed and ready, Doc unleashed his shotgun round first. The concussion slammed through Ryan’s head like a wall of bricks had fallen on him. The cluster of lead balls smashed into the first group of rats, already crouching to leap at them. The pellets ripping away limbs, tearing through faces, pulverizing bodies, disintegrating the point guard in a welter of blood, bone and brains.
A heartbeat later, J.B. opened up with the M-4000. With each shell containing dozens of razor-sharp steel fléchettes, he laid down a curtain of metal moving at a thousand feet per second, obliterating anything in its way.
The next wave, already running toward the door, was pulped where they stood, their remains bursting apart to splatter comrades behind them. Encountering little resistance, the fléchette wave continued into the next line, each tiny dart carving into another furry body, and another behind that.
For a moment, Ryan thought he knew what the sound of the bombs going off during skydark sounded like. The Smith & Wesson’s awesome roar reverberated through his head like the pounding hooves of Death’s hellhorses. His plugged ears trembled in agony, and his skull felt like it had been stove in by a sledgehammer.
But the gambit worked. For a few precious seconds, the pig-rats’ onslaught was broken as they retreated before the impenetrable steel veil of death sweeping through them.
J.B.’s shotgun clicked on an empty chamber, the overpowering roar echoing off the walls to beat through Ryan’s head one last time before fading away. He glanced around to see similar expressions of shock and awe on the rest of his companions’ faces.
“Let’s go!” Ryan said, his voice sounding muffled and far away, even to him. Stepping into the corridor, he saw the multitude already massing for another run. Turning to face the group, he leaped up and clamped both hands around the pipe on the left, using the wall to climb up until he could wrap his legs around it as well, and shimmying forward as fast as he could. He felt the strain on the pipes as J.B. followed suit, then the crack of a blaster from the elevator.
“Shut it!” he yelled back, but immediately stopped as the effort unbalanced him, nearly causing him to lose his grip on the cold metal.
“They got the doors closed,” J.B. grunted behind him. “Move, move, move!”
Clinging to the pipe, Ryan began inching down the corridor, aware of the fanged, clawed death that awaited below if he slipped. Left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot. Inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, he made his way along. Once he brushed the middle pipe, only to draw back in surprise.
“J.B., the middle pipe’s bastard hot. Watch it.”
“Got it.”
Below, the pig-rats went absolutely crazy. The squealing and gnashing of their teeth was deafening now, and Ryan sensed movement below him, closer than he would have liked.
“Hold up.” Twisting his head, Ryan looked down just in time to see one of the muties launch itself at his face, its claws outstretched to rip the skin from his cheeks, dripping fangs bared and ready to feast on his eyes, nose, and tongue.
“Shit!” Unable to move, Ryan pressed himself against the pipe, staring as the beast grew larger in his vision. But about a foot away from him, it reached the apex of its jump and fell away into the writhing mass below. “Fireblast!”
“What happened?”
“Mutie nearly chewed my face!”
“Get you?”
Even though he’d seen it fall before striking, Ryan took a second to check. “No!”
“Then get moving!”
“Just a sec!” Making sure his left grip was secure, Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer, thumbed off the safety, pointed down and fired three times. The pained squeals of the wounded pig-rats ended quickly as they were torn apart by their ravenous, uncaring brethren.
“Little free with the ammo, aren’t you?”
“If what Doc said was true about how these bastards think, I want them to know if they try for me, they pay the final price.” Holstering his blaster, Ryan crept forward mechanically, his leaden arms and legs clamped on to the pipe, his fingers growing more numb with each yard gained.
After what seemed like an eternity, Ryan saw the pipes bend at a right angle and vanish into the wall a couple of yards away. Carefully hanging his head down, he saw the doors to the mat-trans anteroom just beyond them. Turning his head sideways and looking out of the corner of his eye, he watched the pig-rats tumble and swirl over and around one another, with the occasional one making a futile leap at him, only to fall back into the teeming mass.
It was at that moment Ryan realized the fault in his plan. “Son of a bitch!”
“Yeah?” There was an odd tone in J.B. voice that Ryan couldn’t place, but he had more pressing things to worry about at the moment.
“How in hell are we getting’ through the bastard door without bringing half the muties in with us?”
“I thought it might come up, so I made us a little door knocker,” J.B. replied. “Wedge yourself between the pipe and the wall, eye closed, mouth open.”
Ryan knew what was coming, and scrambled to brace himself into the narrow space between the cold gray wall and the colder green pipe. Forcing his body into the crevice, he secured himself firmly enough so that he could also cover his left ear, which would suffer the most from what was about to go down.
“Ready?” J.B. called.
“Ready.”
“Fire in the hole!”
Ryan squeezed his eye shut and opened his mouth to equalize the coming shock wave. A few seconds passed before another thunderclap erupted in the corridor, and he felt an invisible force press against him for a moment, right before his entire left side was splattered with sticky wetness.
“Go!”
Without looking, Ryan dropped his legs from the pipe, trusting J.B.’s skill to have cleared a path. Even before his feet had touched the ground, his SIG-Sauer filled his fist, ready to chill anything that might still come at him.
The immediate space in front of the doors looked like a small bomb had gone off, which was exactly what had happened. J.B.’s small wad of plastique explosive had cleared an area about two yards wide of pig-rats, shit and everything else, blowing it out in a neat, smoking circle. The rest of the horde milled about in confusion, some stunned by the blast, some confused by the noise, all unwilling to approach for the moment.
Whirling, Ryan tapped in the keypad code, praying that the barrier wouldn’t choose that most inopportune time to malfunction. The portal silently opened, and he rushed inside, J.B. hot on his heels. Stabbing the reverse code into the keypad, he endured the agonizing wait as the doors cycled closed again. Leaning against the wall, Ryan closed his eye and let out a long, shuddering breath. Too close.
A low, sibilant sound brought him out of his respite. Ryan opened his eye to see J.B.’s lips twitch in the slight chuckle that passed for his laughter. “What the fuck’s so funny?”
“Nothing, ’cept your left side looks like you marinated in rat guts and dried shit.”
Ryan glanced down to see exactly what J.B. had described coating his left boot, pants leg, shirtsleeve, and even his face. Wiping the disgusting mess away, he looked up at the Armorer, who was oddly untouched. “How the hell’d you stay so clean?”
“Got higher on the pipe. Also helped that I wasn’t point man.” J.B. wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Dark night, but you’re smellin’ worse by the second.”
Ryan stared at him for a moment, then the corner of his mouth quirked up in a slight grin. “You had that booby ready before we left, didn’t you?”
J.B. ran a hand through his hair. “I was prepared to take as many of those fuckers on the last train with me if I had to.” He strolled deeper into the room. “Let’s look around.”
For the next ten minutes, the two men methodically searched the room, leaving no wall, comp station, or desk console untouched. Neither one discussed the possibility of what would happen if they couldn’t find an access card to unlock the elevator.
“Fireblast,” Ryan grunted after bending down to check the underside of the last desk. “Too much to ask for them to place the cards in a neat little box in the wall with a sign on it?”
“We could rig up a harness to get Jak over here, use the mat-trans again.”
“Too hard to move him that way. Besides, do you really think Doc could hang upside down and hand-overhand it all the way down here like we did?” Ryan didn’t even mention Krysty, and as he stared back at J.B., he knew he didn’t have to mention Mildred either. “Nope, all of us are gettin’ out, one way or another. We’ve just got to figure out which way to go.”
J.B. sat in one of the dusty chairs and propped his feet up on the desk. “I’m open to suggestions.”
Ryan whirled, his ears straining. “What did you say?”
J.B. shrugged. “I said—”
Ryan held up his hand. “No, it wasn’t that, not exactly. I heard something else when you sat down, a noise, beep of some kind.”
The smaller man swung his legs off the desk, then his eyes widened as he saw the top of the flat console. “Look at this.”
Ryan walked over and was as surprised as his friend. The formerly blank, black surface had lit up under the pressure of the J.B.’s feet, and now showed long, horizontal rectangle, a nine-digit numeric touchpad, each button containing a row of three letters and a number. A single directive was next to it, followed by a small, blinking line: Enter Passcode:
Chapter Six
Instinctively, Ryan edged back a bit, J.B. right beside him. Although he didn’t fear anything living on this hell-blasted planet—after all, if it breathed, he could chill it—the soulless machines created by the predark whitecoats were something else entirely. Often just one breath away from a malfunction, they had to be handled with extreme care just to keep them running.
Ryan had seen plenty of comps shut down in showers of bright sparks or go what passed for crazy when touched. In the back of his mind, he feared one of these days the incomprehensible machines controlling the mat-trans would malfunction and tear them apart molecule by molecule. If that ever happened, he hoped he’d already be unconscious before it started.
Shaking away the thought, he returned to the here and now, staring at the glowing countertop.
J.B. rubbed his chin as he studied the machine. “Never saw anything like this before. What do you think?”
Part of Ryan wanted to have nothing to do with the strange console, but he also understood it might be the way to fix that elevator—if they could make it work. “Guess we should enter something.”
“No shit. What’d you have in mind?”
That question was worth all the jack in the world, or at least the way out of this nightmare tunnel, which would be just as good. What would the passcode be? What word or numeric string would be the magic key to unlock this thing’s secrets?
Tentatively Ryan reached toward the console, his fingers hovering above it. “If each button represents a letter…”
His index finger stabbed the button with the letter c.
A small, black dot appeared in the rectangle.
Ryan slowly tapped out the rest of his guess, one button at a time: e-r-b-e-r-u-s.
Nothing happened. Ryan noticed the lowermost right button on the pad, marked enter, was flashing.
“Mebbe this’ll do it.”
He pressed the flashing button.
The entire screen flashed bright red, startling both of them. New letters appeared on the screen: Invalid Passcode Please Try Again
“At least it’s polite.” J.B. noted.
“Yeah, but not enough to let us in easy. You got any ideas?”
“How about the entire program name, you know, Project Cerberus.”
“Yeah, that might work.” More confidently, Ryan pressed the buttons to spell out the word, then pressed the enter button again.
The screen flashed red again, and the warning appeared again, with more writing: Invalid Passcode Please Try Again Warning: Third Failed Attempt Will Result In Activation Of Security Procedures/Automatic Lockdown Mode.
J.B.’s face darkened. “I don’t like that.”
“It probably doesn’t mean anything. It might just try to summon long-dead guards.”
“Or it might gas us and the others in the elevator. Or seal all the doors and pump all the air out till we black out and die.”
The Armorer’s bleak scenarios stopped Ryan’s finger as it was about to touch the surface again. He took a step back and racked his brain, trying to do the impossible—think like a whitecoat.
The majority of the men and women claiming to be scientists that Ryan had encountered during his travels often had a few things in common. They were highly intelligent and inbred, often living sequestered from the rest of the population in hidden laboratory redoubts. They were usually very dedicated to their work, whatever it might be, often bordering on passion—or mania.
And they were often crazier than shithouse rats.
“The code would be most likely be something simple, easy to enter, easy to remember. Something you could punch in almost without thinking—”
His breath caught in his throat. “Could it be that bastard easy?” he whispered. No sooner did he think it than his fingers stabbed the buttons—3-5-2
The general access code to open the doors of the redoubts.
“Here goes nothing….”
Tensing, Ryan pressed the enter button.
Chapter Seven
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the screen flashed a brilliant, deep blue and a new menu appeared.
Access Granted
Welcome To Fort McCoy Redoubt Main Menu
1) Operations
2) Programs
3) Security
4) Maintenance
5) Matter Transfer/Enter Passcode To Access
“Looks like number five is out.” J.B. noted.
