Sky Raider

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“They had somebody tied down to a table,” Doc began, then his stomach rebelled and he turned to heave in the corner. But only bile came up. What food he had eaten that morning was long gone, purged from his system by the multiple jumps.

“Cannies?” Jak asked, peeking inside.

Wiping his mouth clean on an embroider handkerchief, Doc spoke softly. “Jak, my dear friend,” he whispered. “I am fully aware that my mind is half gone from…the things that have been done to me by scientists and that madman Strasser, but if whatever befouled this redoubt starts to enact its virulent filth upon me, please…”

“Won’t feel thing,” Jak promised, patting the time traveler on the shoulder. “My word. But you do same for me.”

Doc solemnly nodded, and the two men shared a moment beyond friendship, brothers in blood standing against the world.

“Then let us press on,” Doc said, starting down the corridor. “There is much to do, and I yearn for the feel of clean air on the face.”

“Hope blast doors work,” Jak said, pushing open the door to a lavatory. The smell was long gone, scrubbed clean by the life support system, but the floors were smeared with ancient filth. “Else, why these not run?”

Doc tilted his head at that comment, and looked upward as if he could see the blast door somewhere above them.

“A very good question, my friend,” he muttered. “That is a very good question, indeed.”

THE REACTORS in the basement proved to be intact, the techies inside all killed by self-inflicted gunshots. It seemed clear to Ryan and Krysty that the techies had known what was happening inside the rest of the redoubt, and had chosen the fast way out.

With Krysty standing guard, Ryan did a fast sweep through the armory on the middle floor of the redoubt, but it was as he had expected. Every weapon case was either open or smashed apart. The shelves were empty of C-4 satchels, grens and Claymore mines. Only wrapping paper and warning labels remained. Dozens of longblasters and rapid-fires lay trampled on the floor, the treads of a forklift impressed into the plastic stocks and the bent barrels.

In the far corner, the floor and walls were charred black, and from the bodies on the floor it seemed that somebody had tried to operate a flamethrower on six other soldiers. He’d failed and they’d all died together in a fiery backblast of the erupting fuel tanks.

Trudging out of the room, Ryan noticed a card-board box on a shelf and snatched it quickly, as if it might vanish into thin air. Peeling off the plastic wrapper, he saw it was a full box of 12-gauge shotgun shells. He tucked the box into a pocket for J.B. to use in his S&W M-4000 shotgun, and left the armory.

“Anything?” Krysty asked hopefully, lowering her wheelgun as he appeared.

“Not much,” Ryan said with a growl. “They were fighting in here, too, and most of the stuff got busted bad. I saw a couple of crates of Stinger missiles in the rear, but the seals were broken so the electronics would be dead.”

“We might still be able to salvage the C-4 from the warheads,” she said. “Take a couple of pipes from the bathroom and we’ve got grens.”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, removing the cap from his canteen and taking a swig. “Sounds good. We can do that tonight after chow. Now let’s finish this sweep. The sooner we get back together with the others, the fucking better I’ll like it.”

Her red hair flexing protectively around her face, Krysty gave a wry smile. “It’s even getting to you, eh?”

The big man shrugged. “This hellhole would get under the skin of anybody. Makes the bug-infested redoubt in Texas seem friendly as a gaudy house in comparison.”

As the couple left for the elevators, something stirred in the shadows of the armory and sluggishly started trailing after them.

Chapter Five

As the elevator doors opened on the top level of the redoubt, Ryan and Krysty saw that the garage was filled with row upon row of vehicles, all of them parked neatly within the painted lines on the concrete floor. Most were civilian wags, brightly colored cars, pickup trucks, vans, and about a dozen motorcycles. The bikes looked in good shape in spite of their flat tires.

On the far side of the garage some military vehicles were parked behind a wire divider that went from floor to ceiling. Ryan could see a couple of Hummers, several GMC 4x4 trucks, and even an armored half-track, the front tires flat on the floor, but the rear-looking treads seemingly intact. The half-track was armed with a .50-caliber rapid-fire, a belt of linked ammo dangling from the side. However, none of other vehicles showed any signs of damage.

“Odd,” Krysty whispered. “There doesn’t seem to have been any fighting up here.”

“Mebbe whatever caused the madness never reached this level,” Ryan said, sucking his hollow tooth thoughtfully. “Or—”

“Or this is where it started,” she finished for him.

“Yeah.”

A sharp whistle cut the air, and the two spun around, automatically taking a step to the side to throw off the aim of an enemy. Then they saw J.B. and Mildred coming out of the tool room near the fuel pumps. He was carrying a handful of road flares, and she was tucking a roll of duct tape into her open med kit.

“Any sign of Doc and Jak?” Krysty asked as their friends joined them, tucking away her weapon.

“Not yet,” Mildred said, tying shut the flap on her med kit. “But knowing that old coot, he’s probably grabbing a snack in the kitchen.”

“Hope so,” Ryan added, walking among the rows of wags. “We’re low on food. Only got a couple of cans left.”

“Find any MRE packs?” J.B. asked, tucking flares into his munitions bag.

Rattling the door to the pickup, Ryan shook his head. “Nothing. Even the armory was stripped bare.” Then he grunted in remembrance and pulled out the box of cartridges.

“Here you go, 12-gauge,” he said, tossing it over.

“Thanks,” J.B. said, making the catch and placing the ammo alongside the flares.

“Well, we found some soldiers wearing gas masks,” Mildred said, and then told them about the sandbag nest.

“But they went insane, too?” Krysty said, resting a cowboy boot on the fender of a car. In the bright fluorescent lights, the embroidered pattern of winged falcons could be dimly seen through the layers of dust and dirt. “So either they put the masks on too later—”

“Or else they didn’t work. Yes, exactly.”

“Gaia protect us,” the redhead muttered.

“Amen to that,” Mildred added grimly.

Stepping over a corpse in greasy coveralls sprawled on the floor, Ryan tried the handle on a sports car. Opening the door, he got hit by an exhalation of trapped air that sighed out carrying the smell of rotting leather and dust. He quickly closed the door. There was rarely much to scav in an ordinary wag.

Spotting the fuel pumps in the far corner, J.B. started maneuvering through the vehicles. If the pumps were still sealed, they might be able to get a few of these machines going again. If Doc and Jak didn’t find anything in the kitchen or galley, they would have to go hunting outside, and wags would let them cover more ground in shorter time. With luck, there might even be a ville nearby where they could trade with the local baron. A single working wag and a can of juice would buy more food than the companions could carry in a week.

“Hell of a lot of wags here,” Ryan stated, sounding suspicious. “It’s as if everybody drove inside, parked their cars, then went downstairs to go insane.”

“Come on, let’s check the mil wags,” Ryan suggested, getting back to business.

Going to a workbench, the three took some tools, then walked over to the wire fence. With a hammer and chisel, Krysty notched the padlock holding the gate closed, then Ryan easily smashed the lock open with a sledgehammer. The noise echoed loudly across the still garage.

As the chain snaked noisily to the floor, Mildred swung the gate open as Ryan and Krysty walked into the motor pool.

Separating again, the two circled the vehicles to make sure the area was clear, then started checking the machines. Choosing a Hummer, Ryan went to the back for the emergency kit. Sure enough, the box was there and still sealed. Forcing it open with his panga, he extracted a small first-aid kit, some road flares, a thermal blanket, three MRE food packs and a gun case. Opening the black plastic box, he found a Veri pistol coated with Cosmoline gel. The flare gun would need a good cleaning before it could be used, but it seemed in perfect shape, and there were six flares nestled in the soft gray foam cushioning alongside the pistol. Three of the aerial flares had split along the sides from age, but the others were intact, and the plastic tubes felt resilient when he gently squeezed. As a blaster, the flare gun was pitiful, but it made excellent trade goods.

Smashing open a locked window with the butt of her blaster, Krysty was already checking inside the cab of the half-track as Mildred pawed through the contents of another Hummer.

“Anything good in the first-aid kit?” Krysty asked.

“No.” The physician sighed, tossing the open box back into the wag. “It’s all useless. Just too damn old.”

“Well, I found a few grens.”

Excellent! Any ammo?” Mildred asked.

“No.”

“Damn.”

Just then, the concrete floor shook with a low rumble.

“Is that a quake?” Krysty asked, looking over a shoulder, her hair flexing as if stirred by secret winds.

“No, too weak,” Ryan snapped as the sound increased in volume and strength.

“Mother of god…that’s the blast door!” Mildred gasped in astonishment, dropping an ammo box. It hit with a crash, spilling brass rounds across the floor. “Somebody is coming inside!”

The startled friends turned to stare at the front of the redoubt where a wide tunnel opened in the wall. The distant end of the zigzagging tunnel couldn’t be seen, but there was no mistaking the sound of the powerful electric motors hidden inside the walls as they started to cycle open the massive nuke-proof doors that lead to the world outside.

THE CRATER WAS blisteringly hot under the sun, the hard stone ground seeming to reflect the solar heat until the temperature became almost unbearable.

Carrying a small umbrella, Sandra Tregart relished the meager shade it gave as she watched the almost-naked eunuchs toiling under the harsh sunlight. The lean men were wearing only sandals and loincloths, their sweaty skin burned to a deep, rich brown. The eunuchs were crawling along the rocky ground, removing every bit of windblown trash or sharp rock from the volcanic ground. The predark tires of the Angel were heavily patched, and every bump threw off their balance and shook the plane badly. Sometimes, it was difficult for her to gain enough speed for take-off. Thus every obstruction, no matter how small, had to be removed. It was a dirty job, inching along the strip that served as the runway, but Sandra refused to have slaves do the job. Slaves always wanted to rebel, and couldn’t be trusted. The eunuchs were fanatically devoted to her, and so only they could perform the vital task.

That is, Sandra griped, unless the Demon worked. Then all of her prayers would be answered. After which…

From the tent that served as the eunuchs’ barracks, she could smell roasting meat and bread. After she had bombed Indera ville out of existence, her eunuchs had ridden the last few horses there to loot the ruins. In return, she gave them the first pick of the food. Naturally, the rest went to Thunder ville, but her men were fed before the ville folk. After all, they guarded her at night, and, what was more important, they protected the Angel. Although few enemies had ever gotten onto the impact crater that served as an airfield.

Jagged peaks of ancient lava formed an impassable barrier around the crater. There was only one break in the rocky walls, and it was closed with a barrier of tires filled with rocks and topped with rusty barbed wire. Flanking both sides of the small door were wooden sentry towers containing armed eunuchs who trained every day with their homie crossbows. They could ace a vulture on the wing at a hundred yards. Neither man nor mutie got close to the wall, and nobody had ever even touched the gate without her permission. Anything that headed in its direction was chilled on sight. Even her brother Edmund had been wounded once for coming too close. To her father and mother, Sandra had professed her most sincere apologies for the terrible accident. But in private, she had praised Digger for his marksmanship and promoted him to sec chief for the airfield.

Pausing on the barren field, Sandra frowned at the thought. Such a pity that Digger was gone. Perhaps Stone would take his place. After the teen had been properly altered, of course. She smiled at that, and continued her inspection tour of the airfield. Everything needed to be perfect this day. A lot depended on the success of her newest experiment. Black dust, the whole world depended on its success!

Glancing skyward, Sandra frowned at the orange and red sky, streaks of black ripping across the polluted heavens as endless lighting crashed amid the roiling death clouds. It was the same way almost every day. But on rare occurrences, the wind would shift direction and the cloud cover would break. That was when blue sky would show through, tempting her into the beyond, calling a sweet siren song of freedom. She turned and walked away. But it was a dream unfulfilled. No matter how quickly she got the Angel off the ground, the clouds would roll back in to the fill the momentary gap and steal away the blue once more. Her brother had often warned that even if she made it through to the clean air above, she would be trapped on the other side, maybe for days, or even weeks. Sooner or later her plane would run out of fuel and she would sail powerless into the roiling chem-polluted clouds to suffer a death beyond words. It would be unlikely that even her bones would make it through to fall upon the nuke-blasted soil below.

Sandra had quickly learned that flying was a matter of staying high enough so spears couldn’t hit the Angel, yet low enough to avoid the deadly sky. It was a balancing act, but the results were worth the terrible risks involved. The freedom of flying! The incredible power!

Just then, an eruption of steam caught her attention, and she headed toward a group of swearing men. They were working around an iron van set on top of a brick hearth. A couple of bare-chested boys were shoveling scraps of wood into the banked fire under the vat, while a second group adjusted pressure valves. Coming out of the top of the vat was a large coil of copper tubing that arched downward to dribble a clear fluid into a fuel container. As it was filled, a man capped it tight, and slipped another container under the end of the tubing without spilling a single drop. Nearby, a lone man with a horribly scarred face was chopping up cactus plants and piling the juicy innards into a plastic bucket. With every burst of steam from the pressure valve, the disfigured man flinched as if to protect his scars.

Forming a semicircle around the still were eight large tents. One was for Sandra’s ground crew to take shelter in during an acid rain storm, the floor raised high with rocks and old sheets of plastic to protect them from the runoff. The next was her home, with a bathtub for washing and a lockbox full of weapons and precious ammo. Two more tents were the workshops, another contained the Angel, and the rest were what Sandra called her lab, miscellaneous parts and bolts of cloth salvaged from ruins across the land. The last tent held the Demon.

“How is it going, Carter?” Sandra asked, stopping a short distance from the still. Between the crackling fire and the hissing steam, she couldn’t understand how the men survived the awful heat. That was how Karl had been disfigured. He’d fallen asleep from the heat and caught a steam blast in the face. Incredibly, he’d lived, but never spoke again, and flatly refused to work the still again.

“Good afternoon, my lady,” Carter said in a squeaky voice, grinning widely. Sweat poured off his hairless chest as if he were standing in the rain. “We just finished a new batch of shine. And Karl harvested enough cactus for a second batch. We’ll start it fermenting tonight.”

“Excellent,” she said, mopping her forehead with a cloth. Already her white shirt was soaked, the thin material clinging to her skin. None of the men seemed to notice. “Take ten gallons and fill the tanks on the Demon. The wind is good, and I’m going to try again while we still have sunlight.”

“But ten gallons is barely a quarter tank, mistress,” Carter began in his child’s voice. “How will you know if the Demon can be trusted until you fill the tanks completely?”

From under the shadow of her umbrella, the woman stared in growing anger at the giant.

“Yes, of course, you’re right. Ten is more than enough,” he burbled, cowering slightly. “I’ll get them myself.”

As the colossus lumbered away, Sandra allowed herself a private smile. She knew that Carter meant well, but the man was overly concerned with her safety. He was so large many believed him to be part mutie. The man stood almost seven feet tall, his wide barrel chest rippling with hard muscles. Yet his face was as smooth as a newborn infant’s, his body completely without hair. Castrating the men working on the airfield had been her father’s idea. And she knew that the main purpose of the mutilation was merely to keep her safe from the lustful advances of the sec men and to safeguard the ville throne from any bastards. But it was her mother who suggested using boys too young to notice her figure and face. Sandra had decided to do both, and the sexless youths grew utterly devoted to their female master.

Many years ago when she had first dragged the Angel to the crater, a coldheart had leaped out of hiding in a mountain pass and clubbed her to the ground. As the man started to rip off her clothing, the eunuchs leaped upon the man and literally ripped him apart with their bare hands. The story soon spread to other villes, and nobody had ever bothered Sandra again on her many journeys across the Deathlands.

Once, long ago and far to the east, she had found a graveyard of hundreds of predark planes, along with dozens of other things, machines that looked like soap bubbles but with rotors on top. Sandra had no idea what those could be, and so ignored them. She almost could have believed that the soap bubbles were also flying machines, except for the fact that they had no wings, nor anyplace for a wing to be attached.

Now, most of the planes in the junkyard had only been rusted skeletons, but a few of the machines stored inside a crumbling building were still intact, and one seemed repairable. Unfortunately, the yard was infested with some mutie form of millipede. With no other choice, Sandra had set fire to a forest to cause a stampede of animals through the yard. The millipedes attacked, eating everything that came their way, and in the bloody carnage, she and some eunuchs had been able to steal the Angel.

Over the next few years she had gone back twice more for spare parts, cloth and engines. But on the last raid, Sandra lost five eunuchs to the millipedes and still carried a nasty scar on her arm where one of the bugs had attached itself and started burrowing into her flesh before she’d doused it with shine and burned it off.

Someday, when she had a large enough army of sec men, the woman planned to return to the junkyard, slaughter the bugs and build a wall around the yard and make it her private ville. But that was for the future. This day, she had to worry about the Demon.

Heading for the last tent, Sandra heard a pervading hooting. Inside one of the tents to her left was a row of iron cages with stickies inside, bowls placed underneath to catch the natural gluelike resin they oozed when tortured. A red-hot knife could get her more glue than boiling the bones of a hundred horses. And the bones of people produced very little glue, even if they were red-raw and fresh.

Entering the last tent, Sandra lowered her umbrella and savored the delicious drop in temperature. The roof of the predark tent somehow blocked most of the sun’s heat, and a cooling breeze from the nearby river ruffled the edges of the cloth along the ground. Wonderful.

Using stiff fingers to fluff out her hair and help it dry faster, Sandra emotionlessly studied the Demon resting in the middle of the tent. A humming man was energetically polishing the wooden propeller while another worker checked the pressure on a tire with a patched hand-pump.