Zero City Page 2

  Eventually, the hissing stopped, and the companions eagerly advanced. Doc and J.B. grabbed hold of the door and started to pull, while Jak and Ryan waited until it was far enough away from the jamb for them to start pushing. Dean and Krysty kept guard, watching the laboratory for any suspicious movements. Even when there was no discernible danger, it was wise to stay alert. The Deathlands were carpeted with the bones of people who let down their guard at the wrong moment.

  “How the hell did they get this open in the past?” J.B. grunted, his face distended from the effort. “Damn thing must weigh a ton!”

  “Two tons, by my calculations,” Mildred corrected, her hands splayed. She wanted to help, but only four people could reach the door at a time. “Perhaps there’s a system we haven’t found to mechanically open the locker. Or some machine we’re supposed to attach that does the work for us.”

  “Like those jimmy things on submarines,” Dean added, bobbing his head to try and see between the mass of bodies and sneak a peek inside the locker. A deep-storage locker could have food in there, maybe those terrific U.S. Army MRE packs with condensed soup, and bread and salt and coffee and nut cake, and cigarettes and toilet paper. The companions had found a few items in the past; the cigs they traded for food to the sec men at different villes, but everything else they kept for themselves. Once there had even been chocolate bars.

  “That’s enough,” Ryan said, and the group broke away from the metal slab. The portal was a good foot away from the jamb, more than sufficient room for them to wiggle through. It was pitch-black inside.

  Reaching around the jamb, Ryan slid his hand along until he found the wall switch. He flicked it on. Nothing happened. Then a soft high-pitched humming could be heard, and the ceiling began to strobe with flashes of light that came faster and brighter until most of the florescent tubes in the drop ceiling burst into blinding illumination. Eagerly, the companions shoved their way into the locker. Krysty stayed outside to guard the only exit, while Dean shoved a chair between the door and the jamb to make sure it stayed open.

  Faintly in the background, the ghostly music was heard again, then was gone.

  The air was still chilly inside the vault, the temperature deliberately reduced to help retard the damage to food and weapons from the passage of time. Their breath fogged before them, the tiny clouds instantly disappearing as the redoubt finally began to pump power into the locker. The vents blossomed into life, a steady stream of delicious warm air wafting over them battling the centuries-old chill.

  Then faces fell. Empty plastic shelving stretched for yards in every direction. Only a few scraps of plastic wrapping lay here and there to show where once thousands of ration packs had been stored.

  Craning his neck, Doc scrutinized the top shelves. Reaching out, he retrieved two clear plastic bottles. “Mineral water,” he announced.

  Mildred inspected the containers for leaks or mold, then added them to her med kit. “Better than nothing.”

  J.B. opened a metal bin. Damnation, even the bedrolls and spare blankets were gone.

  Following the maze of empty shelves, the companions turned a corner into the main area of the locker. Bare shelves stretched to the far wall, dozens of empty wooden pallets lying on the floor in mute testimony of the vanished cornucopia.

  “Nothing,” Ryan said bitterly. “Not a bastard thing left.”

  “On the contrary sir. Over here is a collection of office supplies,” Doc offered, sounding perturbed. “Yes, indeed. Fax paper and staplers are extremely useful nowadays. Shall we each take an armload or ferry them out one at a time?”

  Nobody even bothered to comment on the snide remarks. All of their hopes had been pinned on finding something in storage. The last few redoubts had been emptied like this one.

  “Hey, what’s this?” J.B. asked, peering behind a cabinet slightly angled away from the frosty wall. “Never found a second door before.”

  Snapping his fingers, Ryan pointed about the room. The companions moved into defensive positions as the Deathlands warrior holstered his pistol and unslung his longblaster. They had once found sentinels hidden in the redoubts, armed robots designed to protect the military bases from exactly what the companions were doing.

  “If its a tin can,” J.B. muttered, using their slang name for the machines while extending the wire stock of his Uzi and nestling it into his shoulder for greater stability, “aim for the mouth. Once it’s down, we can chill the machine easy.”

  Holding the LeMat pistol firmly in one hand, Doc grabbed the hammer and pulled back until it clicked solidly in place. The big-bore blaster was deadly at close quarters. The soft lead miniball hit like a sledgehammer.

  Ryan glanced at the others and held up three fingers. They nodded. He took a breath, counted to three and threw open the door, diving to the side.

  Chapter Two

  Everybody paused, braced for an attack as the door hit the wall with a crash. Only darkness was beyond. The light streaming in from their side illuminated only a small section of the concrete floor and several dark lumps of what could be anything.

  Rummaging in her med kit, Mildred unearthed her old battered flashlight and squeezed the handle a few times to charge the battery inside the handle. The survivalist tool was a recent acquisition for her, a precious find, but was unfortunately already starting to show signs it was dying. It took more and more squeezing to get the light to work, and the weak beam was taking on a more pronounced yellowish tinge, marking the end of its service. The physician had a single spare bulb as a replacement, and then it was back to oil lanterns and candles.

  She played the feeble beam about in the darkness, illuminating nothing. Then suddenly there was an audible crackle of electricity, and the room beyond exploded with light as banks of halogen bulbs in the ceiling came to brilliant life.

  “Holy shit,” Jak said, lowering his .357 Python.

  “Eureka,” Doc shouted happily. “The eagle has landed!”

  The tiny room was full of gun cases and ammo boxes.

  Piles and piles of them. Rows of lockers lined the back wall.

  “Excellent. There has got to be food here,” Mildred said in delight, and she started forward, but then abruptly stopped.

  Ryan nodded in approval as J.B. moved among the boxes and crates looking for booby traps, his expert hands touching nothing but caressing the air itself as if deciding where to lay the traps himself.

  “Clear,” the Armorer announced after a while. “Come and get it.”

  Shouldering his weapon, Cawdor whistled for Krysty and Dean to join them as the others converged on the supplies, ripping open boxes and cases in grim concentration.

  “What was this?” Krysty asked, appearing in the open doorway behind them. “Somebody’s private stash?”

  “Not know,” Jak stated, placing aside a box full of Claymore mines. “Dean, look for grens.”

  The boy rushed forward. “On it!”

  Sliding his Uzi out of the way, J.B. went straight to a wall locker and began to rearrange the boxes inside. He figured this had to have been the stash of a Navy SEAL or Green Beret team. There were military-style disposable garrotes, the kind that locked once you pulled them closed and couldn’t be opened or removed without a knife. Excellent stuff. He hadn’t seen its like in decades.

  Under a pile of flak jackets was a flat box lined with screw-on acoustical silencers for U.S. Army Colt .45 pistols, but no pistols. However, there was an unlocked steel box the size of a shoebox packed with oily cloths and a good dozen Ruger .44 derringers. Very illegal blasters in predark days, and he wondered how the base commander got his hands on them. A squat red plastic box bearing the emblem of the Air Force contained a Veri-Pistol and some flares. Useless.

  On the next shelf down, he found a collection of what resembled wax-covered bricks. But under closer inspection, they proved to be ammo boxes, the cellophane wrapping under the layer of wax still intact. Triple sealed, he marveled, the ammo would be in perfect condition! There was
a good assortment of the standard calibers, but no .44 rounds for the derringers. Damn.

  “Jak, .357 ammo!” J.B. called, and tossed the teenager a box.

  The albino teen made the catch, shoved the box into the hip pocket of his fatigue pants and went straight back to his search for explosives.

  “Any 9 mil?” Ryan asked, looking up from a stack of crates covered with shrink wrap. The military markings on the crates identified the contents as light antitank weapons, a 75 mm, single-shot, disposable bazooka called a LAW. The deadliest handheld weapon in existence during its day, and even more so in the present.

  “Nine millimeters?” J.B. rummaged among the boxes. “Yep, regular and Parabellum.”

  “I’ll take those,” Ryan said, and he filled his pockets with spare ammo. “Any clips?”

  “Lots, but just for Colt autos,” J.B. replied, tossing another box to Dean. “Nothing for a nine.”

  “Any .38s?” Krysty asked, walking around a .50-caliber machine gun on a tripod.

  “Not yet, but I’m still digging.” Lifting an empty grenade tray off a stack, he found only more empties underneath. “Crap, they took all of the implosion grenades!”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Ryan asked, dusting off his hands.

  The Armorer gave a half smile. “Yeah, still annoying, though.”

  “What about food packs?” Mildred asked, shoving away a big box stuffed full of a coiled ammo belt for a .50-caliber machine gun. If they still had the Leviathan, this would have been a major find, but now it was deadweight.

  “No MRE packs, not even a box of K-rations,” J.B. answered sourly. “Just ammo. Hey, .38 bullets!” He threw a box to Krysty.

  “I have located a stack of MRE crates over here,” Doc announced in jubilation, ripping off the tops barehanded. The man stared for a moment, then sighed. “Empty, as expected.”

  “Damnation!”

  “Agreed, madam. Agreed. We cannot eat blasters.”

  “Or a Hafla,” Jak announced, tossing aside the canvas tarp from a stack of canvas backpacks. Each pack was stuffed with six elongated tubes strongly resembling a LAW, except for a fluted nose and different markings on the pipe.

  “What’s that?” Dean asked, coming closer.

  “A sort of LAW rocket,” Ryan said. “Only loaded with napalm instead of high explosives.”

  Jak dropped the tarp. “Trade a month eating for one these.”

  Shifting through the empty boxes hoping to find a few packs missed, Doc paused to smile at the outpouring. For the Cajun, that was a long speech.

  “Leave them till later,” Ryan directed. “We don’t know if there is a ville within walking distance outside.”

  “Be just the thing to convince a stubborn baron we mean business,” the Armorer suggested.

  “True, but for the moment, we have no need of them.”

  As the others ripped through the military stash, Doc gave up his search among the MRE crates and started to check the back areas of the room. According to the Trader, the U.S. government had stocked the redoubts with the idea in mind that there was no telling how low civilization might fall after the nuke war. When the, troops emerged, they might find savage cannibals wearing wolf-skin breechclouts and armed with wood clubs roaming the streets of New York and Chicago. So aside from clothes, medicine, wags, fuel, weapons and the like, the Trader claimed there were also very basic supplies, plows and seed, swords, crossbows and black-powder weapons, to help rebuild America from the ashes.

  In a corner, Doc found a large unmarked trunk and smashed off the padlock with the butt of his pistol, then was forced to rip away a plastic tape running along the edges of the trunk doubly insuring it was airtight. Lifting the lid, Doc dodged the exhalation of inert gas and then gazed inside with unabashed glee. The top tray was full of luxury items for trading-packs of chewing gum, cigars, butane lighters, hairbrushes and boxes of condoms. Lifting that aside, he found strings of cheap beads, fake jewelry and plastic mirrors. Pure tosh, a nice antiquarian word from his grandfather’s time meaning utter and complete crap. So the predark government had also included trinkets to bribe the simple natives, eh? It was embarrassing to think that whole nations had been stolen with such trash.

  Underneath the junk tray was a third filled with bundles of Bowie knives, graphic crossbows and quivers of arrows. Better, but not quite what he needed. However, the bottom area contained tiny kegs of black powder, cotton wadding in plastic jars, lead bars and balls for ammo and a collection of muzzle-loading pistols, huge .75-caliber horse pistols with flint firing mechanisms. Doc knew from experience that he could utilize the black powder, wadding and lead in his own LeMat.

  Then with a cry of delight, he unearthed a tiny cardboard box of copper primer nipples and a brace of Remington muzzle-loading revolvers. They were the standard .44-caliber, exactly the same as his hog-leg LeMat, but heavily gilded with swirls and filigree. Choosing carefully, Doc filled the leather pouches on his ammo belt with more powder and shot than he’d seen in years.

  “Hey, Doc!” J.B. called out.

  Standing slightly off balance with the unaccustomed weight of a full pack, Doc turned to grin widely with his oddly perfect teeth. “Speak, Horatio, I am rapt attention.”

  “Found a brand-new Webley .44,” the Armorer said, displaying the top-break wheelgun. “She’s a beauty. Want to upgrade from that Civil War museum piece of yours?”

  “What? Never. It is impossible. Unthinkable!” Doc said resolutely. Then he eased his tone to add, “However, I sincerely do appreciate the consideration, old friend.”

  Watching the exchange, Ryan draped a bandolier of 5-shot clips for the Steyr across his chest. “Reminds you of home, doesn’t it?”

  Fondly, Doc stroked the carved wooden handle of the massive weapon. “Indeed, it does, and more.” He spoke softly as if lost in remembrance. “In its own curious way, this is my home.”

  Ryan understood. Both weapon and man were from the 1800s. To Doc, it was a direct physical link to his family, as dead as ashes now, but still living in another time. The old-style blaster helped keep them alive in his mind.

  Pragmatic as always, J.B. shrugged in response and went back to his hunting.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Dean called out, holstering his Browning and lifting an oddly shaped blaster into view. It was an angular rectangle, with a thick holding grip on top, and a pistol like grip on the bottom. A safety switch was on the left, and a fire selector on the right. Aside from the muzzle, there didn’t seem to be any other openings in the weapon.

  “ ‘Heckler & Koch G-12 4.7 mm caseless,’ “ Dean read from the lettering on the breech. “You used to have one of these didn’t you, Dad?”

  Ryan looked up from unpacking the Hafla rockets. “Yeah, I did, although a slightly different model, and it’s a damn fine blaster. Holds a hundred rounds and weighs next to nothing. Put a hole through a flak jacket at five hundred yards.”

  Curiously, Dean turned the weapon over and upside down.

  “There’s no ejector port.”

  “That’s because no brass comes out. The ammo is caseless. There’s only propellant and lead in the stock. No brass. That’s why it is so lightweight.”

  The boy loomed at the sleek blaster, impressed. It sort of reminded him of the laser weapons they had faced on Wizard Island, except that it didn’t have a dial to adjust the burning power of a beam.

  “Why did you stop carrying it if it’s so great?” he asked bluntly.

  “I have the Steyr, which has a longer range, and ammo is easier to find. And I can save the brass and do reloads if necessary. The HK can only be reloaded with blocks of caseless ammo. Nothing else. When you’re out, that’s it. She’s deadweight.”

  Getting the balance of the odd rifle, Dean tried the weapon at port arms, then shoulder arms, like he had seen predark soldiers do in the videos the redoubts sometimes had. “I like it,” he stated, slinging the blaster over a shoulder.

  The elder Cawdor came over and placed it in his h
ands. “Okay, then I’ll teach you long-range tactics. The Browning is good, but only at short distances. Keep this on the first setting, single shot. One trigger pull fires one round. The next is burst, one trigger pull, three rounds damn near instantly. Sounds like a single round firing.”

  “Wow.”

  “Last setting is full-auto, the HK fires so fast-“

  “Six thousand rounds a minute,” J.B. chimed in.

  Impressed, Dean raised both eyebrows. “This would empty in seconds!”

  “So stay on single shot, remember that. Reloads fast, but you have got to keep the ammo blocks sealed in plas until just before you slide them in. The block gets wet, it’s dead.”

  He released the catch on the stock and lifted up the top of the magazine. “When you’re done, there’s nothing inside to dump, and no spent brass to collect or get underfoot. You drop in the new block, close the top and go.”

  “Mebbe we should find you another one,” the boy suggested.

  “I’ll stick with what I have.”

  “Nothing,” Mildred reported from the doorway, her expression a mixture of disappointment and anger. “We have enough weapons to stage a war, but there’s not a single scrap of food here.”

  Ryan looked over the assemblage of his friends, noticing how thin they were becoming, faces haggard and belts tightened. Short rations for a month had turned them into skeletons.

  “Okay, everybody load up on ammo,” Ryan ordered brusquely. “First, we’ll do a recce of the base to make sure we’re alone, then we go shopping. There has to be some supplies here.”

  In perfect synchronicity, his stomach loudly rumbled.

  “Let’s go find them,” the one-eyed man stated, starting for the exit.

  Fully armed, the companions started at the bottom level and worked their way upward. Reactor room, maintenance, offices, barracks, were deserted. Not a sign of life, not even a mouse seemed to have breached the integrity of the underground bunker.