Moonfeast (5 page)

“At least Millie didn’t have to make some more of her infamous boot soup.” J.B. chuckled, nudging the woman.

Trying to hide a smile, Mildred nudged him back. “Don’t complain, John. It kept us alive long enough to find real food.”

“Tasted like used sock.” Jak snorted, then felt his
stomach flip at the realization that that was an accurate description.

Past the last turn, the companions finally entered the top level of the redoubt. The garage was huge, fully capable of parking dozens of civilian wags, or half that number of bulky military vehicles. Except that the rows of parking spaces were empty, devoid of even an oil stain. Workbenches lined the wall, the pegboard covered with the silhouettes of tools to show exactly where each one should go. But the board was empty, along with tool cabinets and drawers. There wasn’t a spare fuse in the garage, much less any engine parts. Even the supposedly limitless fuel depot had proved dry. The pumps worked fine, but only delivered a stale air that smelled faintly of chems. Whether the stripping of the base had occurred when the military personnel departed, or long afterward by some intruder, nobody could say. It didn’t matter. Empty was empty, the details of who and when were thoroughly unimportant.

“I was looking forward to a shower,” Krysty said, stroking her flexing hair. “But we might as well jump, and then wash at the next redoubt.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ryan stated gruffly, rubbing his stomach. “Mildred, what’s the food situation?”

“Nine cans of stew, one self-heat of hash, four assorted MRE packs and a couple of smoked gophers that should be good for another week or so,” she replied, without even glancing into her backpack. “I was expecting to purchase more food at Hobart, but after seeing their slaughterhouse…” She gave a shiver and didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

“Gopher.” Jak frowned, putting a wealth of meaning into the single word.

“Agreed, my young friend. If our choices are gopher for dinner, or risk a jump, then suddenly a journey through the mat-trans sounds like an exceptionally fine idea,” Doc declared, casting a sad glance at a soda machine standing mute in the corner. Just like the fuel pumps, it still worked, but the hoppers were empty. “I always did like the odd taste of Dr Pepper,” he said unexpectedly.

“Me, too,” Mildred said in surprise. “Good Lord, we actually agree on something?”

He shrugged. “It had to happen eventually, mad am.”

“Not had,” Jak replied, dropping his backpack onto the floor in front of the elevator. “Taste like shine or caf?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, each completely unable to even vaguely explain the amazingly complex mixture of flavors of the delicious predark soda.

Tapping for the call button, Ryan was pleased when the elevator doors opened immediately, the cage having waited there patiently for them for the past few weeks. It was another good indication that the redoubt was totally deserted. Some of the underground bases had devices that provided protection from unauthorized intruders, and the companions were as unauthorized as they could possibly be. More than once they had encountered a sec hunter droid, a robotic guardian. The machines came in several different types, each more lethal than the next, and were hard to chill. True, J.B. had a stash of
pipe bombs, but it was highly doubtful those homemade bombs would be powerful enough to stop one of the deadly machines. Running away was usually the best tactic. Except that this time, the companions had nowhere to run but another redoubt.

Stepping over the threshold, Ryan waited until the rest of the companions had hurried inside before hitting the button for the middle level. The ride down was smooth, silent and uneventful.

Leaving the elevator, they proceeded down a long corridor lined with doors and entered a room full of comps. On the other side was another door. Stepping through the doorway, the companions closed the portal behind them and walked across a small antechamber to the mat-trans unit.

“Okay, this time we each take a drink before leaving,” Mildred directed, holding aloft a canteen.

The battered container sloshed as she removed the cap. There came a strong smell of coffee, shine and something sweet. For some time now Mildred had been working on a remedy for the jump sickness that always hit some of the companions after arriving at their destination. So far, the physician had achieved scant success, but she still tried.

“What is this, coffee and…honey?” Krysty asked, taking a sniff.

“Close enough. The best results I ever had against jump sickness was with a crude form of Irish coffee,” Mildred said apologetically. “I figure the relaxing effects of the shine, combined with the mental stimulant of the caffeine in the coffee, is what does the trick. But since I don’t know how these damn things work, it’s
just a guess.” She gave a wan smile. “For all I know it could be the water content that keeps us from getting dehydrated, and the sugar.”

“Credo qua ab, sur dom est!”
Doc announced dramatically.

Mentally, the physician translated the garbled Latin into, “I believe you, because the idea is absurd.” She wanted to snap back at the time traveler, but sadly, he was right.

One at a time, the companions took a drink, then stepped into the hexagonal chamber and found a spot to sit. There was an alphanumeric keypad set into the wall where a person could tap in the code for their next destination, but since they had never found a directory, Ryan, the last person in, closed the gateway door, which would automatically trigger a random jump.

White mist flooded the chamber, swirling around the companions, faster and faster. A powerful hum started to build as tiny sparks appeared inside the mist like a billion imprisoned stars, then the floor seemed to vanish and the companions dropped through infinity, accelerating beyond logic and reason. Each of them had related that it sometimes felt as if their skin pulled away from the bones, and that knives shot painfully through their bodies, piercing every organ. Other times there was no pain, but the companions experienced vivid jump “nightmares.”

Slowly, the noise faded, and there was only the sound of the friends’ harsh breathing. But a few minutes later a warm breeze started to blow from the wall vents, the sterilized air helping considerably to revive them.

“Eas…easy…jump.” Ryan coughed, then stopped
talking as his stomach roiled, its contents threatening to leave.

Concentrating on his breathing, Ryan managed to ride out the usual wave of nausea and carefully sat up to inspect the others. Everybody else seemed fine, just limp and exhausted, but that was how they always arrived. Except for Doc and Jak. For some reason the jumps hit them harder than the others, and Doc was sprawled on the floor, clearly unconscious.

“At least…not bad sick,” Jak panted, wiping some drool off his face. “New juice helped.”

“Th-thanks. B-but I h-have no f-fragging idea if it h-helped or not…” Mildred wheezed, laying on her back to stare at the ceiling. She knew the unit was motionless, but it felt like it was spinning around and around, and standing at that moment was completely impossible.

It was often this way after a jump, and it took the companions several minutes to recover, during which they were almost completely unable to defend themselves. As a physician, Mildred thought this was a purely natural reaction, merely random synapses firing in their brains from being reduced to their component molecules being disassembled. Doc philosophically considered it merely a side effect of their disintegrated bodies being without a soul for a little while until it found them again at the new destination. Mildred considered that total nonsense, of course. However, as a scientist, she was forced to honestly admit there really was no way of knowing for sure which answer was correct. Or if the truth was somewhere in the middle, a sublime combination of both answers, with maybe another element unknown to either science or religion.

With a low groan, Ryan forced himself to stand, one scarred hand pressed to the smooth wall to help him remain upright. In a sheer effort of will, the one-eyed man took a shuffling step forward, then collapsed inadvertently on the lever that opened the door to the mat-trans unit. The portal opened, spilling Ryan into the antechamber. Blinking hard to clear his vision, he looked up to see that the armaglass walls of the mat-trans were colored a pale flesh tone with a diagonal black stripe. The theory was that each mat-trans was different so that a traveler instantly knew where he or she had arrived, but that was only a guess. The redoubts were as jammed full of the mysterious as they were advanced technology.

“Peach and black,” Ryan muttered, brushing back his damp hair. “We’ve never been here before.” A quick look showed no one lying in wait, but oddly the door leading to the control room was a closed oval hatch.

Sluggishly joining his friend, J.B. removed his glasses from the shirt pocket where he always put them for safekeeping during a jump.

“Yeah, this is a new redoubt,” he said, a gloved hand resting on top of the Uzi machine pistol. The man wasn’t sure if he had the strength to control the bucking 9 mm Israeli blaster, but it was better to have a blaster ready and not need it than the other way around.

Surreptitiously, Mildred made a note of the colors in her journal. Someday the information might come in handy.

“Something’s wrong here,” Krysty said with a scowl, a hand going to the blaster at her side. The woman
seemed perfectly normal, but then she had always recovered faster than anybody else.

“Yeah, I feel, too,” Jak said, a knife dropping into his palm from a sleeve as his other hand drew the .357 Magnum Colt Python. “Sound wrong.”

“Then let us…” Doc began but broke into a ragged cough that drove the old man back to his knees. “Proceed…with care…” he whispered, using both hands to draw the huge LeMat and clumsily cock back the trigger.

“Better stay in the mat-trans,” Ryan decided, feeling the strength returning to his body. “If we come back with a droid on our ass, I want a backup here.”

“C-consider me…Balador on the…rainbow bridge…” Doc wheezed, then managed a smile. “None shall…pass.”

“Crazy old coot,” Mildred snorted, then passed the man the canteen again. “Here, finish it off, the coffee will do you a world of good.”

Nodding his gratitude, Doc holstered his weapon and accepted the canteen to start sipping at the contents with obvious pleasure. Slowly, some color began to return to his pale face.

Turning away, Ryan saw that J.B. was already at the oval door hatch, checking for traps.

“Clear,” he reported.

“Okay, friends. Triple red.”

Pulling out his SIG-Sauer, Ryan pressed down the lever that operated the oval door and it silently swung aside. Then with a snarl, the man instantly stepped backward, dropping into a crouch.

In the next room several big men in U.S. Navy uniforms operated the controls of the humming comps, M-16 assault rifles slung across their backs.

Ryan swung up his longblaster, but before he could fire, the sailors at the work stations began to sag, then shrivel, their bodies wasting away in moments until there was nothing left of them but some grinning skeletons in perfectly preserved uniforms.

Giving a low whistle, Ryan waited until J.B. took a position behind him, his Uzi at the ready. Moving slowly forward, Ryan eased into the control room, his eye sweeping the interior for anything suspicious. But everything was as it was supposed to be, aside from the uniformed skeletons.

While the air vents sucked away the swirling cloud of dust, Ryan studied the comp. He had no idea what the twinkling lights on the console meant, but after so many jumps, he could tell when they took on a new pattern, which always meant trouble. Thankfully, it was the standard sequence.

Going to the opposite door, Ryan listened for any movement in the corridor. Hearing none, he tapped the standard code into the keypad. The door slid open and he sneaked a peek outside. Dozens of corpses wearing Navy uniforms were on the floor, each in the process of crumbling from the infusion of fresh air coming from the vents.

Ryan then turned to find the rest of his companions
already in the control room. Krysty and Jak were standing guard, while Mildred and J.B. checked the clothing and blasters.

“This man…excuse me, this woman, was a lieutenant in Navy Intelligence,” Mildred said, fingering the rank insignia. “While this fellow was a corporal in the Navy SEALs and the other man was a pilot in the Navy Air Corps.”

“If this isn’t a bastard ship, then we must be at a Navy base,” Ryan stated, thoughtfully rubbing his jaw. “Or at least, damn close to a base.” That was good news. The Navy always stored tons of extra supplies in their bases. With any luck, dinner would be beef stew, not gopher surprise—surprise, it’s gopher again.

“These weapons are in fine shape,” J.B. noted, working the arming bolt on one of the M-16 assault rifles to cycle a round out the ejector port. “The springs in the clips are weak, but still functional, and aside from that these rapidfires should work without any trouble. There’s no rust at all on the brass from the dry air.”

“Dead air,” Mildred corrected him. “I suspect that in this redoubt, when the sensors don’t detect anything alive inside, the computers flood the base with inert gas to retard any corrosion or chemical decompositions.”

“Which is why the bodies were in such good shape until we activated the life support system,” Ryan guessed.

“Quite so,” Doc rumbled from the other side of the oval door. “Apparently even the conqueror worm is humbled before the iron law of science.”

“Amen to that,” Mildred said with a half smile.

Bemused, Doc grunted in reply.

“Any spare clips?” Krysty asked.

“Plenty,” J.B. replied, opening an ammo pouch on the belt. “Five, no six. Mixed rounds, solid lead, HEAT and tumblers.”

“Expecting trouble,” Jak stated, holstering his Colt Python. “Still might come. I take.”

After adding a few precious drops of homogenized gun oil to the rapidfire, J.B. passed two of the rapidfires and ammo pouches to Jak and Krysty, then gave another to Mildred. With sure hands, the three companions checked the assault rifles for themselves. The action was a little slow, and the trigger kind of stiff, but aside from that the weapons were in fine shape and ready for battle.

“Damn, barrel blocked,” Jak said, looking through the weapon at the ceiling lights. Shaking the assault rifle, he saw a slim roll of tightly wound paper fall onto the floor. Why hide cig? the albino teen wondered, then took a sniff. This wasn’t tobacco, but maryjane! Jak started to tuck the joint into a shirt pocket, but the pressure of his fingers made it crumble into loose leaves and ancient dust.

“No loss. It would have tasted awful,” Mildred said with a knowing wink. “Wine and whiskey age well. Weed does not.”

“And exactly how do you know that, madam?” Doc asked accusingly.

“Ah…I had glaucoma in high school.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Dead air, or not, we still need to do a sweep of the base to make sure that we’re alone,” Ryan stated,
entering the code to open the door, as it had automatically closed behind him. He entered the corridor again. As expected, the vents had finished their task and the clouds of desiccated human flesh were gone. Now, only loose clothing and skeletons dotted the entire length of the corridor. One figure lay blocking an open doorway, a petrified doughnut in his hand with a single bite taken.

“These folks died fast,” Ryan stated, scowling at the grim sight. “Think it was some sort of plague?”

“No disease I know kills this quickly,” Mildred said, hefting the assault rifle to try to find a comfortable position. “Not even the genetically created plagues.”

“Rad leak?” Jak asked nervously.

Both Ryan and J.B. checked the rad counters clipped to their lapels.

“Clear,” J.B. announced. “Not even a trace of rad.”

Mildred bit her lip. “My guess would be that a gas of some kind did this.”

“Nerve gas took out an entire redoubt?” Doc asked, shocked. “Is that even theoretically possible, madam? I mean, with all of the automatic safeguards of a redoubt?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” J.B. added, pushing back his fedora to scratch his head.

“Well, the gas must be long gone by now, or else we’d be facedown on the floor,” Krysty stated, the rapidfire balanced in her hands. “Where next, lover?”

“Armory,” Ryan stated, heading for the stairs. “If this was done by nerve gas, that’s the most likely storage place. We better make sure that whatever leaked is completely empty.”

“Before we, too, join the choir invisible,” Doc rumbled, glancing nervously at a wall vent.

Nobody commented on that dire possibility as they followed Ryan along the corridor. The skeletons were everywhere, and the companions had to exercise care to not tromp on any of the bony hands. Every room they passed had more bones, some of them merely scattered piles, while others were lying neatly tucked into their beds, holding a clipboard or working at a comp or listening to music.

Once, very long ago, the companions had found a redoubt with eerie sounds playing over the intercom. But instead of a half-crazed survivor, it had proved to only be a music CD still trying to play reveille after a century. But this redoubt was disturbingly still. Quite literally, the quiet of a grave.

In the ward room, five sailors in pants and T-shirts were sitting around a table, a game of poker in progress. Several more were on a sofa watching a TV monitor now showing only static. One fellow wearing glasses was reading a paperback novel, while another died on the toilet, a yellow newspaper lying nearby bearing the precise date of the nuclear doomsday.

“Brass by ton,” Jak said happily, noting the countless array of sidearms worn by the skeletons. Most of the officers seemed to carrying 9 mm Glock blasters, but the guards were armed with Colt .45s, the regulation gunbelts holding a standard four spare clips. Those were the best; the Colt was a brutal little manstopper that could blow the head off a stickie at fifty yards.

Unfortunately the stairs were choked with uniforms, or rather, loose piles of bones that were still tumbling
down the steps now that the last vestiges of flesh holding them in place were gone. With no choice, the companions took the elevator to the armory level. Two of the cages were full of skeletons, but the third was empty.

“This is rather unnerving,” Mildred said, watching a sec camera in the corner of the ceiling steadily move back and forth. The people were all aced, but the machines continued to function on whatever was their last setting.

“Be a lot worse if somebody had activated a sec hunter droid before collapsing,” J.B. countered, pulling out a pipe bomb and tucking it into his belt for fast access.

Without comment, Ryan reached up and yanked out the power cord of the vidcam, the red indicator fading to black.

“How many of those do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked pointedly, gesturing at the explosive charge with the barrel of his LeMat.

“Just the one.”

“Then pray, make it count, my friend.”

“That was the plan, Doc.”

Reaching the fifth level, Ryan and the others found the main hallway clear of bodies. But that was only to be expected. Combat personnel didn’t lounge around the armory for fun.

Located at the end of the hall was a massive armored door, a truncated cone of layered steel and titanium that not even a laser could burn through. Luckily, the formidable barrier was ajar, a skeleton lying across the threshold, holding a clipboard of ancient papers, a CD player clipped to his belt.

“Hmm, he had good taste in music,” Mildred said, reading the title through the clear plastic.

“Beethoven?” Doc asked curiously.

“Billy Joel.”

The companions stepped over the bones and into the armory.

“Good God!” Mildred gasped.

Turning fast, Ryan had his blaster out and ready, but then he blinked in surprise and slowly smiled.
Jackpot.

Many of the armories the companions found were completely bare, not even a scrap of paper remaining behind. Sometimes they found a few loose rounds under a shelf, or a single live gren left behind when the base personnel departed before or after skydark, heading for, well, wherever they had gone a hundred years earlier. None of the companions had ever discovered where all of the people had gone, or even had a plausible theory. But this armory seemed to never have been touched. It was completely full, literally stocked to the rafters.

The companions couldn’t speak for a minute at the miraculous sight of dozens of pallets filling the room, the wall shelves jammed full of supplies. There were also endless racks of M-16 assault rifles, M-203 combination assault rifles, 40 mm gren launchers, M-60 machine guns, even bulky .50-machine guns too heavy for a person to carry, much less fire and remain standing. There were entire rows of plastic drums marked as containing ammunition, and pallet after pallet of sturdy plastic boxes that the companions knew contained grens, and even LAW rocket launchers. It was
the military might of the predark world spread out in front of their astonished eyes like a holiday feast.

“Nuke me, this redoubt was never emptied after skydark!” J.B. cried happily. “The people must have died just before the evacuation order came.”

“Fully stocked redoubt,” Jak muttered. “More than we dream finding!” For the normally laconic teenager, that was an extraordinarily long speech.

“Thank you, Gaia,” Krysty whispered.

“Not even that deep storage locker in New Mex had this much ordnance,” Mildred agreed, already looking around for any medical supplies. Sometimes, field packs were stored in the armory along with the weaponry.

“All right, fill your pockets, but nothing more,” Ryan ordered brusquely, resting the stock of the Steyr on a hip. “Krysty and I will stand guard. Don’t weigh yourself down for the rest of the sweep. We can come back later and take what we want.”

Instantly the rest of the companions separated, walking swiftly through the stocks and piles, checking the numbers on the countless sealed containers and mentally translating those into descriptions. Boots, combat, size ten, for use of. Milk, powdered, vitamin fortified, for daily consumption. HazMat suits, Level 10, hazardous materials: antinuclear, antibacteriological, antichemical.

Going to a wall cabinet, Mildred pulled it open to find a stack of boxes full of MRE food packs. Grinning widely, she went to a nearby pallet and grabbed a nylon duffel bag, then returned to start packing the shiny Mylar envelopes. There was beef stew, veal parmesan, meat loaf and mac and cheese. Pausing for only
a second, the woman removed the smoked gopher from her backpack and unceremoniously deposited it into a waste chute.

Eagerly, Doc went in search of trade goods. Among the thousand and one things stored in the redoubts, the predark government had considered the fact that some sort of crude civilization might arise from the nuclear ashes of America all by itself, so the base personnel would need trinkets to trade with the survivors outside. The companions had found such things before and they were always tremendously useful, such as unbreakable pocket combs, Swiss Army knives, Bowie knives, plastic mirrors, pots and pans, rain ponchos, fishing hooks and, of course, lots of weapons. Mostly battle axes, shields and swords. The Pentagon had clearly expected civilization to fall all the way down to true barbarism, but sometimes there were also black-powder weapons, which was what Doc wanted. Especially the tiny copper nipples full of fulminating mercury that the Civil War–era .44 LeMat used as primers. He never had enough of those.

Unfortunately, Doc was unable to find any such items on this initial pass, and consoled himself with a Webley .44 revolver and a cardboard box containing fifty live rounds.

Meanwhile J.B. was having trouble restraining himself from taking everything in sight, and was snagging only a few choice items, several sticks of TNT and a box of detonator caps, a small coil of primacord, a fistful of waterproof timing pencils and items for pipe bombs. Then the man paused at the sight of a wall safe. A safe inside a vault?

Mentally crossing his fingers, J.B. went to work on the combination lock and soon it yielded with a soft click. Turning the handle, J.B. opened the door and stopped breathing. A portable lockbox filled the safe, and he removed it as gingerly as if defusing a land mine. Placing it on the floor, J.B. used his knife to trick the lock, then lifted the lid. There nestled in the soft, gray foam, were six implo grens, the most powerful predark weapon invented by the human race. It worked just like a regular gren: pull the safety pin, release the arming lever and throw. But instead of an explosion, the gren created a gravity whirlpool, an implosion that could condense an Abrams tank to the size of an orange in less than a microsecond. With these at their command, the companions no longer had to worry about sec hunter droids, or much of anything else, for that matter.

Quickly rummaging in his munitions bag, J.B. found some duct tape and securely attached the arming lever of each gren before transferring it to his bag. The weight was considerable, but the man had never seen this many implo grens.