Crater Lake

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was a hideous passing.

Over the bloody years Ryan Cawdor had seen many men and women meet their Maker. Few of them had gone peacefully into that long night. But he had never seen anyone chilled in such an appalling way as his friend Finnegan.

The blind perversity of the fates had dictated that the laser rifle of the sec man functioned perfectly — for just long enough.

Unlike a single bullet, the beam of light from a high-power military laser acts more like a directional, narrow strip of extreme heat. A bullet drills a hole through flesh, the exit hole generally markedly bigger than the entrance wound. Not so with a laser. It is precisely the same size as it exits the human body as when it entered.

Also, light has no mass, so there is no impact. As the laser struck Finnegan, it didn't lift him off his feet, or throw him backward, nothing initially as dramatic as that.

But the power was so awesome that in the instant the blaster came to life its vivid blue beam had penetrated clean through the helpless Finn, hitting the wall only a couple of paces to the left of J.B., who immediately threw himself flat on the floor, hands over his head as chunks of liquid concrete and charred wood fell from the side of the corridor.

Along one wall, Ryan watched the termination in impotent horror, seeing that nothing could be done for the doomed man.

Stinking smoke erupted from the front and back of Finn's coat, tiny flames flaring red and yellow. Every staggering movement of the dying man only increased his horrific suffering. His skin was scorched black, the flesh broiled by the immense power of the blaster. The heat was so intense that the wretch's intestines began to explode and melt, and his blood boiled instantly where the laser had touched him.

As Finn dropped, his own blaster clattering on the tiles, the sec man kept the trigger down, almost slicing the beefy man into segments with the blaster's ferocity.

"Oh, no, no, no, no..." Krysty moaned softly, one hand resting lightly on Ryan's arm.

As the body lay smoldering on the floor, the blue light stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sec mutie looked down at the blaster and banged his fist on the control dial, frustrated that the weapon had ceased functioning.

"Mine," Ryan said. He stooped and put his G-12 caseless down, placing the SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol alongside it. Then he moved out of cover, and walked toward the helmeted guard, loosening the white silk scarf from around his neck.

"Don't, lover," Krysty said, trying to pull him back around the corner.

"I'll chill him from here," J.B. said.

"No," Ryan said very quietly. "This is what the good Dr. Tardy might call a hands-on termination, revengewise. Got to be."

He shrugged off their warnings and stepped toward the sentry.

Closing in on the mutie, Ryan carefully avoided the stinking corpse, where bodily fluids still bubbled and seeped. The guard backed clumsily away until his helmet rang against the door.

Ryan looped the silken scarf in his hands carefully, his eyes locked on the reflective visor of the sec man's black carapace. The lower edge of the mutie's helmet didn't quite settle on his squat, muscular neck, leaving a couple of inches of pallid flesh exposed.

The muzzle of the blaster rose to cover Ryan's groin and lower belly. Despite his limitless courage, the one-eyed man winced. Having seen the shambles that Finnegan had become would have been enough to make any normal man fall to his knees and bury his head in his hands, weeping.

Not Ryan Cawdor.

"You just chilled one of the best, bravest men I ever knew," he said in a normal, conversational voice. "Friends are rare. Good friends rarer. And you chilled him, you heartless mutie bastard!" he shouted in sudden anger as he stepped closer.

He swung the weighted end of the scarf so that it lashed out and whipped around the guard's throat, the end coming back into Ryan's ready fingers.

The sec man tried to get his gauntleted hands up, but he was too slow. The scarf tightened and began to bite into the tender flesh of his neck. Ryan jerked hard at it, pulling the guard forward, so close he could smell the rank sweat on the mutie's body. The helmet bobbled off, and he looked into the dull eyes of the creature who had butchered Finn.

"Die, you fucker." Ryan kneed the guard in the groin, feeling the satisfying jarring as he caught the mutie's genitals against the bone. As the man slumped, Ryan crossed his wrists, making the silk tighten like fluid steel, immovable, inflexible.

"Die."

The mutie's tongue swelled, his hands fell limp, and his eyes burst from bloodied sockets. A thread of bright crimson blood wormed from his lips and nostrils, and as the creature's body relaxed, Ryan could smell the noisome voiding of bowels and bladder.

Ryan unwound his scarf from the guard's neck, prizing it from the deep furrowed folds in the corpse's flesh. He wrapped it back around his own neck, feeling better for the killing, not stopping to mourn for Finnegan. There'd be time for that.

Later.

A piece of plas the size of a button, a five-second fuse and a tiny copper detonator, that was all it took for the six to blast their way inside the holy of holies at the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement. The small explosion shook their ears, and then the outer door swung back.

The scientists, finally realizing they were under serious attack from the primitive outsiders, had taken precautions.

A handful of sec guards, blasters ready, were lined up to meet the intruders. There were six of them, but not one managed to fire his laser rifle. Each was gunned down on the spot in a hectic burst of shooting from the corridor.

Leaping over jerking corpses, nearly slipping in the spreading pools of turgid blood, Ryan led his friends in.

"Fireblast!" he exclaimed, stopping dead inside the doorway, the others nearly knocking him over.

They'd realized the research part of the complex must be enormous, but even in their wildest imaginings they hadn't figured on anything quite as massive as this.

Spidery scaffolding rose thirty stories high, interlocking in a delicate tracery of dulled metal. A viper's nest of colored conduits and pipes wound in and out, so far above them that they seemed like thin wires. Red and green and orange and vivid blue. There were three basic sections within the research area, marked simply Land, Sea and Air & Space. Each one seemed to vanish into the diminishing distance. Each was bigger than fifty aircraft hangars.

A long list on the wall showed the innumerable subsections of research.

A catalogue of inhumanity and megadeath:

Chemical.

Medical.

Nerve toxins.

Sight.

Audio-destroyers.

Neural synapse breakers.

RPV.

"What's that?" Ryan asked.

"It stands for Remotely Piloted Vehicles," Doc Tanner answered. "It was big around the end of the century."

Sensors.

Avoidance.

LAMPS.

"Tell me, Doc."

"It means Light Airborne Multipurpose Systems. Mainly antisubmarine stuff."

Battle-Support Missiles.

Air-Defense Missiles.

Surface-To-Air Missiles (Fixed Emplacement).

Forward-Area-Guided Projectiles.

The list was seemingly endless, and it was color-coded and had a variety of letters and numerals after each item. By far the largest number of entries was under the subhead Antipersonnel Weapons.

"Don't tell us, Doc," Krysty said in a subdued voice. "It just means lots of ways of killing ordinary people. By Gaia, but this has to be wiped clean!"

But with Finnegan dead, only J.B. and Ryan had the basic explosives knowledge to start a chain reaction that would destroy the whole complex. Jak was fine on small, localized sabotage, but nothing bigger.

"Split up," Ryan told them. "Krysty and Jak with me. J.B. to take Doc and Lori. Check chrons. I have 11:13... now. Meet back at the bottom of the main elevators in... How long, you figure, Doc? J.B.? How long?"

The old man shook his head, as if overwhelmed by the pressure and the killings. "This gilded palace of sin, my old friend... It's walls of sardonyx and chrysoprase. Its mighty towers of sapphire and chalcedony, inlaid with wondrous lapis lazuli." His voice was dreamy. "Is that not the most wonderful name for a gem?" He drew it out slowly, savoring it. "Lapis lazuli."

Ryan shook him by the arm. "Don't fuck us up now, Doc. Not fucking now!"

His eyes cleared and his jaw set. The old man squared his shoulders and stared Ryan straight in the eye. "My most humble apologies, my dear friend. What can I have been thinking of? You were asking?"

"How long? How long to try and find the right places to blow this dump out of the world?"

"Their security is lax and almost useless against fighters with intent. It's odd, is it not? They have been locked in here for a hundred years, doing nothing but researching ways of killing the planet. Yet in all that time the poor devils have quite forgotten how to fight."

"So it'll be a slide, huh?" J.B. asked.

"I think not. They will eventually gain access to their own defense systems. Dr. Avian spoke of hordes of sec muties locked safely away, waiting only the press of a button to release them all. No. I think we can spare no more than an hour."

"Where's best to go?" Krysty asked, pointing at the massive board.

Doc sighed. "Missiles, I suppose would be best. Find some good old-fashioned dynamite or nitro and place it right. Should be enough. An explosion down here has nowhere to go. Could bring the roof in. Then the lake. Blow down and set off the volcano." His eyes turned dreamy again. "That would be a wondrous consummation — to be born in fire and to end in fire."

Ryan turned away. "Fine, then. We'll split up like we said. Both groups will head toward the missiles, one left and one right. Kill anything moving. I now have...11:15. Meet back at the base of the elevator at 12:20. First there waits, if they can, until 12:25. Then they go. Up and run. Head back through the ville for the gateway. Wait there twenty-four hours. Then..."

"Then, goodbye," Jak finished.

Most of the next hour passed like a dream of action and death for Ryan and his two companions.

By his calculations they'd taken out three of the sixty-one scientists and a sizable part of their sec men. Unless some of the hordes of mutie sleepers had been released, there couldn't be more than about seventy living humans within the entire Wizard Island complex — a tiny number in that rambling techno vastness.

"Someone," Jak Lauren hissed, running a little ahead of Ryan and Krysty.

It was the frail dwarf scientist in a spidery frame of plastic tubing. Its silent motor allowed him to be suspended a few inches above the floor. Seeing them, he stopped his machine.

"Take him," Krysty said.

Ryan put the G-12 caseless on single-shot and aimed at the center of the scientist's great spongy nodding head between his moonish eyes. Just as he had when they'd last seen him, the scientist managed to control his trembling features long enough to smile at them — a wonderful, warm smile that filled Ryan with a wave of almost magical happiness. He smiled back and lowered his gun.

"Ryan," Krysty said.

"Can't. Not to... to that."

The wheelchair floated nearer, the tiny flipperlike left hand working intricate controls. The head nodded, the smile unchanging. Ryan glanced at Jak and saw him grinning helplessly at the scientist.

The delicate, harmless little...

Then there was the sharp crack from the mirrored H&K P7A-13 pistol in Krysty's right hand. A small ruby hole, black-edged, appeared miraculously in the dwarf's massive forehead above his glittering left eye. His chair weaved and stopped, and the scientist slumped dead in it, the smile still stuck in place.

"Krysty, we could..." Ryan began, shaking himself as though he were covered in cold water.

"Lover, we don't have the time," she said, pushing past him, edging Jak out of the way and taking the lead.

Word had finally got out among the scientists that death had come stalking them. Ryan and the others saw lab coats of pink, green and light blue scurrying away from them, up stairs and into rooms that opened off the main part of the complex.

Oddly they saw no more sec men.

"Here," Ryan said, pointing to a section marked with a skull and crossbones and the words over the doorway: All Personnel Caution. Explosives. Alpha-Sec Only. Others Quadruple Negative Entry.

They entered a laboratory filled with glass vials that bubbled and hissed. There was more scientific equipment in the room than Ryan had seen in his entire life. Strapped into a peculiar upright wheeled chair was the huge giant they'd seen previously, this time without his mutie escort. His face, with the distorted, swollen features of an acromegalic, turned incuriously to look in their direction. Then he glanced back to the bench where he was working on an experiment that seemed to involve whirling steel spheres in a huge vacuum jar.

"They said he was an astrophysicist," Krysty whispered. "What's he doing in here?"

"Don't know," Ryan replied. "And I don't care."

His first bullet drilled clean through the giant's torso to the left of his twisted lordotic spine. The bullet smashed into the apparatus, causing a gigantic implosion that sucked the retarded giant forward, his face and upper body almost disappearing into the whirling inferno of splintered glass and metal. They heard a bull-like roar of pain, interrupted by a choking, drowning cry as the body slumped across the bench.

Without giving the massive corpse a second glance, Ryan led them on.

"This is it," he said.

They were in a wing of the sprawling building only forty paces of so from the body of the gigantic scientist, along a corridor that ran parallel to the center aisle of the research section.

Jak smiled, running a tongue over bared teeth. "Look at that. Blow up the world with that."

"What they intended, kid," Ryan replied, shaking his head at the sight. If any baron in Deathlands had access to power like this, he could rule unchallenged. It had to be the largest collection of explosives anywhere.

Row upon row of shelves, with crates upon crates. Thousands of tons of every kind of explosive in raw and refined form, lots of it with long chemical names that Ryan didn't even recognize. Some of it, like good old unstable nitro, he knew well enough. There were miles of wires of varying thickness and hundreds upon hundreds of detonators.

"Timers," Jak said, leaping about the store like a child surrounded by a paradise of dream toys.

"Time's passing, lover," Krysty warned, glancing at her wrist chron.

"Keep watch," Ryan said. "Got to link this up with some of that napalm we saw back yonder. Get everything tied in so it blows together."

She clicked away, the heels of her designer western boots ringing on the stone floor. Watching her, Ryan felt one of those unexpected waves of great affection that come between people who are very much in love.

"Project Eurydice is under threat," the loudspeaker suddenly blared. "All personnel report to HQ section. Central must be obeyed always. Sec men reactivated. Move toward research section where intruders are believed to be." It was the unmistakable little-girl tones of Dr. Tardy. "In event of action take any steps, terminationwise, in lethal mode to protect all."

The speaker clicked off as suddenly as it had come on.

Then it returned to life. There was the noise of coughing, then labored breathing. "Ryan. Doc Tanner here. Do you read me? Over." A pause. "Sorry. My apologies. Course you can't answer, can you? No. Well, we've found what we wanted. Linked in some of J.B.'s best to some of our chum's demonic little games. See you back where we said at the exit. Over and out."

"Fuck," Ryan said, finishing looping a dozen strands of wire into one detonator. "Doc's blown our meeting. Hope nobody was listening in."

But he knew they needed an awful lot of luck for no one else to have heard.

So, with time running out, Ryan hurried Jak and Krysty along through the weapons complex. The timers had been set to go in just thirty minutes. It didn't leave them much of a margin, but it would also make it hard for the scientists to manage to defuse everything. And he'd even scattered a few clever boobies in the shelving, ready to be triggered if anyone was careless. Either way, the subterranean redoubt should go up around 12:40.

There wasn't much time for any delays.

J.B., Lori and Doc Tanner had returned to the base of the main entrance elevator. The bodies of five sec men lay in a tangled heap at the mouth of the corridor that led toward the scientists' living quarters.

The Armorer looked carefully at his chron. "I make it 12:16. I don't hear them coming yet."

Everything was set and ready.

"Twelve-sixteen," Jak said.

If the explosives did their stuff, a devastating chain reaction would occur in the stores of lethal weapons. The first bang would lead to others, eventually spreading fire and destruction throughout the whole complex.

All the three of them had to do now was rejoin the other trio near the single exit to safety.

They were only a couple of turns in the corridor from their destination when Dr. Ethel Tardy appeared from a side door and waddled into the center of the passage. She was holding a chromed handblaster, which was connected to wires that trailed away out of sight. The muzzle was slightly bell-shaped and was pointed in their direction.

The tiny woman smiled, beaming eyes hugely distorted by her thick spectacles. Her sweet, lisping little voice showed no trace of anger.

"You have been busy, sabotagewise. We lost track of our surveillance mode operation on Dr. Tanner and the others in your party."

"Tough shit, lady." Ryan hesitated about trying to blast the diminutive scientist, the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck at the sight of the outlandish weapon she held. What was it, and what might it do?

She answered the unspoken question. "One move from you and I shall use this. It is one of our prize items of research, tested thus far only on our mutant experimental personnel."

"Bitch," Krysty muttered, too quietly for Dr. Tardy to hear her.

"It is listed as an emdee. Which stands for a Molecular Destabilizer. I eagerly anticipate using it upon you three and examining the results."

"What's it do?" Jak asked.

Ryan was wondering whether he should try to snap the G-12 onto continuous and rip the poisonous dwarf into bloody ribbons of flesh. But she was too far away — and her finger was on a button that had to be a firing trigger.

"Your tissue, bone, blood, skin are all composed of molecules bonded together. This will remove those fragile bonds." She could have been lecturing to a class of students.

Only Krysty had even an inkling of what she was trying to explain. "But if you do that..."

Dr. Ethel Tardy positively twinkled at her. "Yes, you see it! The entire structure dissolves. You melt into a billion, billion particles. Total disintegration." She smiled broadly. "And it is so painful. The element of consciousness remains surprisingly long. It is one of the best of my own inventions."

"You death-crazed lunatic," Ryan said, unable to control his loathing for the insane woman.

"No. Central bless you. We are the saviors of the world. Only through death can you come to a new life. That's how it's always been in the rules."

"You're sick," Krysty spat. "Sick and fit for death."

Dr. Tardy wasn't to be convinced. "Wrong, wrong, wrong. Quadruple negative. Central has always wanted what we can now give them. Now we can finally destroy it all. The evil will be purged, the land cleansed by fire and by the horsemen of disease and pestilence."

Now she was beginning to sound like some biblical prophet, drawing on the Book of Revelation.

"You'll wipe out the few survivors of the madness of the long chill?" Krysty asked.

"They will welcome our redemption."

"A vile death!"

Dr. Tardy shook her little Buddha-like head. "They are not worth the saving."

"Some are," Jak said, hand sliding around toward a concealed dagger.

"Move your fingers another micrometer and you're instant dusty soup," the scientist said. "Good. Now we must know what you've been doing. We know you've terminated our sec men, but we lost you as you came to the research section. What have you done? What can you hope to do? Why check us in our Central-blessed designs? Do you not see how grand is our aim here?"

Ryan took a half step forward. "Me an' my friends go around the Deathlands and there's times we do us some chilling. There's those needs it. And I like to figure the world's a touch better as we pass on by. I heard someone once talk about the darkness on the land, how he hoped to hold it back some, like carrying a sword into the sunset. Mebbe even carry it on through to a dawn. A new dawn. Sounds fucking stupid to you? Sure it does. But I'm for life. You're not."

"I'm for..." Dr. Ethel Tardy began, when Dr. Theophilus Tanner appeared like a ragged angel of vengeance and shot her carefully through the back of the head with his two-hundred-year-old Le Mat pistol.

"Rot in your own hell," he said.