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