“Good show, madam, then we can still egress as desired,” Doc said, checking a corpse slumped in a chair. The colonel had stopped in the middle of reloading a shotgun, but the body seemed to be without damage. Then he spotted the thin line that went from ear to ear. Somebody had slit his throat from behind as he’d thumbed in spare cartridges. Ghastly.
“They killed each other,” Krysty said, walking among the slain soldiers. Every branch of the service was here, Army, Navy, Air Force, and a few that she couldn’t recognize. Delta Force. Who were they?
“And when the ammo ran out,” Ryan muttered, resting the stock of his rifle on a hip, “they kept fighting with whatever was available, handblasters, knives, table legs, bottles…”
Slowly turning in a circle, Jak frowned. “What cause?” he asked. “Mutiny?”
“Not on a U.S. base,” Mildred stated as a fact. “No, a war plague seems more likely. Yes, that could be it. I had heard of such things. Rumors only, of course. Biological agents that drove the enemy temporarily insane so that they would slaughter each other, then our troops could march into the territory without opposition.”
“Filthy way to fight a war,” Doc rumbled, easing down the hammer on his massive LeMat revolver. “Although Tennyson would have been darkly amused.”
“This is the way the world ends,” Ryan said softly. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
Doc beamed at that. “You remember the poem!” he cried in delight.
“It’s about war,” Ryan countered gruffly. “And you sure as hell have repeated it often enough.” He nudged a corpse with his Army boot. The clothing rustled like old leaves, the dried body rocking from the impact as if weightless. “Mildred, why are the ones in here fresher than the husk in the jump chamber?”
“I have no idea,” the physician said, seemingly annoyed by the mystery. “The life support system keeps the redoubt constantly flushed with sterilized air. These bodies should be withered husks by now.”
Ryan scowled, but said nothing.
Kneeling next to a mutilated corpse with the glass fragments of a busted bottle embedded into his face, Jak eased the dead man’s service revolver from its holster and checked the load. Four spent shells, and one live round.
“Think safe stay?” Jak asked, pocketing the .38-caliber bullet. His Colt Python could use both .38 bullets and .357 Magnum rounds. Never made sense to him for anybody to carry a wep that only used one caliber of ammo.
“Yes, it’s safe,” Mildred said without hesitation. “There are no biological vectors that could survive exposure for a full week, much less a hundred years. But if anybody starts feeling dizzy, stop whatever you’re doing and sing out fast.”
“Fair enough,” J.B. said, pushing open the hallway door with the barrel of the Uzi.
A single corpse slumped against the wall in the corridor, an automatic pistol dangling from his raised hand, the wall on either side and the front of his uniform stitched with bullet holes from an automatic weapon.
“There’s a lot of lead to be salvaged here, if nothing else,” J.B. stated in hard practicality.
Kneeling by the body, Jak tried to free the blaster, but the hand was locked in a death grip. Pressing the ejector button, he dropped the clip and thumbed out the intact shells. There were four 9 mm rounds, but they were the wrong size for his Colt.
“Here,” the albino teenager said, passing J.B. two of the rounds for his Uzi, and giving the others to Ryan for his 9 mm SiG-Sauer. Everybody else used .38 rounds, except for Doc and his black powder Le Mat.
Pocketing the rounds, Ryan looked around for the body of the shooter, but the hallway was empty. There were no other corpses in sight, just the double line of doors leading to the elevator and stairs at the far end. There were no other signs of violence, no blast marks or spent casings on the floor.
Nobody cared about the hallway, Ryan realized. These soldiers fought for access to the mat-trans-mat. But that made no sense. The blast doors on the top level of the redoubt were large enough for a tank to drive through. A hundred men could have walked out that opening. So why fight over something that could only hold a limited number of people? Ryan scowled. Unless something was wrong with the blast doors.
Walking past the water fountain, Ryan found the usual framed map on the wall. Almost every redoubt was exactly the same, so the companions knew the bases intimately. This one seemed normal in every aspect.
“Okay, we better do a recon of the whole base,” Ryan decided, pulling out his SiG-Sauer and jacking the slide to chamber a round. “We go two on two. Krysty with me, Doc with Jak, J.B. with Mildred. Stay tight. You find anything still alive, blow its mutie head off and come running.”
“Why do you think it would be a mutie?” Krysty asked, her animated hair flexing in harmony with her thoughts.
Frowning, Ryan loosened the panga in its sheath. “’Cause nothing norm would have willingly stayed in this graveyard,” he stated. “We meet in the garage on the top level in an hour. Let’s go.”
As the companions separated into pairs, Krysty and Ryan headed down the main corridor toward the elevator. The doors opened with a soft sigh, exposing a tangle of bodies, knives still thrust into throats and bellies. Bypassing the corpses for the moment, the man and woman shifted the dead out of the lift. The dried bodies weighed very little.
Removing a colonel with large wounds in his back, Krysty discovered a naked woman on the bottom of the pile. Her military uniform askew and ripped in places. Both of the female soldier’s hands clutched a pair of automatic pistols with the slides kicked back showing they were empty, and there was spent brass everywhere. The black-rimmed glasses and rictus grin gave the face of the female mummy a demonic appearance that was unnerving even to the hardened travelers of the Deathlands.
Muttering a curse, Ryan looked at the male soldiers he had placed in the hallway, and saw that some of them had their pants unzipped and belt buckles loosened.
“Attempted gang rape.” He growled deep in his throat. Looking at Krysty, the man had a brief flash of when he’d first met the redhead in a burning barn, a coldheart going after her. “What the hell happened to these people? From what I read, the predark military of America didn’t do this kind of thing.”
“Well, for some reason, these were about to,” Krysty said. “At least the woman died fighting and took them with her.”
“Small comfort.”
“Agreed, lover. But better than the alternative.”
“Guess so,” Ryan stated as he took the woman’s ankles and Krysty took the shoulders. “But the sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“No argument there,” Krysty said, her green eyes flashing in ill-controlled hatred.
Gently, they placed the corpse off by herself and got into the waiting elevator. Ryan hit the button for the basement, and the door sighed shut. The elevator car began to silently descend into the bowels of the subterranean fortress.
In the hallway, something stirred in a shadowy corner and sluggishly started shifting the corpses until there was a clear path to the elevator once more.
Chapter Four
Heading for the front gate, Sandra Tregart strode along the streets of the ville. Now that the food had been delivered, she had more important things to do. Much more important.
This was the day to try the Demon! she thought, feeling a tingle of excitement. After so many failures, this one had to work. It would work! Or heads would roll.
Cutting through the marketplace, Tregart smelled the aroma of cooking soup in the air, and people were already lined up with cups or wooden bowls, impatiently waiting for their share. As she passed,