Ice and Fire

Chapter Five

It was a truly magical evening.

Krysty found some old wax candles in a tiny cupboard marked Emergency Illumination, and they dimmed the overhead neon strips and sat in the soft pools of spilled golden light. The Southern Comfort was as marvellous as Doc had said, brimming over with the taste of peach summers long, long dead and buried in wastelands of glowing ash.

The heated food was some of the best any of them had ever tasted. The soup was a little thick on additives and preservatives, though Lori had succeeded in scooping most of it from the top.

Doc had managed to get the range of concealed speakers around the angles of the room to function, digging out a set of ceedees to accompany the meal. Most of it what he called classical music. Ryan would personally have liked some songs with words, but he had to admit the gentle rhythm went well with the unhurried, peaceful meal.

"This is Vivaldi," Doc informed them, beating time to the music with his fork. "Four Seasons. Lovely, isn't it? There's a Mozart flute concerto next, and then some Gregorian chant. Monastic music." He looked around the table, seeing only a universal blankness. "Well, perhaps you'll like it anyway."

Toward the very end of the meal, as Jak was heating a can of coffee, the sound began to crackle and cut out in one of the speakers.

J.B. caught Ryan's eye. "Got a feeling our arrival here's starting to set some malfunction chains toppling over."

"Could be. Often happens. You find a place untouched since the big fires. I've done it. So've you. Mebbe pick something up and it works. Hasn't been touched in a hundred years. And it works. Ten seconds later it falls apart right between your fingers."

The candles were guttering. Lori had also gone scavenging and come across a box that had once held some chocolate-covered peppermint candy. But it had gone as hard as stone and nobody could eat any. The teenager had been upset by that, leaving the supper table before the others and wandering off to the room she was sharing with Doc.

"My lovely flower sure gets touchy these days," the old man said sadly, more to himself than those remaining. "Must be the generation gap. I daresay there must be something like eight generations between us. I hadn't thought about it like that before."

"Figure I'll go sleep." Jak stood up and stretched like a cat, muscles cracking. "That was one of the best times." He nodded to his four friends and went off to bed, a little way along the passage from the dining area.

Krysty topped up her mug from the pan of coffee that still bubbled on the stove, listening to the melancholy music in the background.

"It's sad, Doc. What is it? Violin or something deeper?"

"Cello, my dear lady. A piece by an Englishman called Edward Elgar. I met him once, as I recall. Slip of a man, yet he burned like a flame. That must have been... Oh, I disremember."

"You're like a living time machine, Doc," Krysty observed, sitting next to Ryan, letting her hand drop with an easy affection onto his wrist.

"There are times... have been times, when I have wished only that this time machine could grind to a halt, my dear."

"You got friends, Doc," Ryan said softly.

"I have a wife and I have two children. No!" The word was almost shouted. "No, Ryan," he continued more calmly. "I no longer have a wife. Emily Louise is dead and buried in the family vault in Deadwood. Mount Moriah, I think it was... up a steep hill, among trees, with a view across the hills. I went there once, with Emily, when we were young and so in love. There was a grave there, a young child's. The stone said 'We really miss our little boy.' Oh, sweet God, how I miss my own little ones! Rachel and Jolyon. Both resting with their Mama. One day, I would wish to be joined with them again, Ryan." Tears began to course down Doc's face, between the newly shaved furrows, dripping off the end of his chin onto the table. "You hear me, Ryan. If it is humanly possible, then I would wish to be buried with my wife and children in Deadwood. If it still exists. They showed me a photo of the grave once. So I know they are there. Do that for me, Ryan?"

"If I can, Doc. But you gotta know that it's not likely."

"No?"

"Not likely," Ryan repeated. "Chances of us being around that part when you finally buy the farm... Chances are, we'll all have gotten chilled before you. You old buzzard, Doc. You got more years left than the rest of us together."

Suddenly conscious that he'd been weeping, the old man dabbed at his eyes. "Good of you to say so, my friend. But ask not for whom the teller bowls? He bowls for me. I believe that my memory has played some scurvy trick with me. That sounds to be a little awry. No matter. I should go and join my sweet bird with her youth. Good night, sweet friends. May choirs of angels sing you to your rests."

Doc made an unsteady bow and tottered off toward the room he was sharing with Lori, the other three watching him go.

It was Krysty who broke the long, thoughtful silence.

"Bastards who trawled him from his family set up a damned big debt. I just hope they died slow, cold and alone."

J.B. stood up. "Odds are they died hot and fast, Krysty."

"And alone?"

He nodded. "We all do."

With a nod of the head he left Ryan and Krysty, closing the door quietly behind him. The music had ended, and there was only the faint, muted hiss from the speakers.

"You and me, lover," she said.

"Best there is," he replied, leaning back and sighing.

"Handful of jack for your thoughts?"

"Been a great evening. One of the best. That peach drink. Good food. Doc's classic music. Just the six of us. Times we've seen. Places we've been."

"Getting old, lover. A sure sign when you start getting... What's the word I want? Nostalgic. That's it. You can't look back at yesterday, Ryan. Tomorrow's the one really counts."

"Guess you're right. How d'you feel about going to bed?"

Krysty found some packets of deconstituted egg and cooked them in powdered milk, adding some shreds of freeze-dried bacon for something that approached an old-fashioned breakfast. They could wash it down with reheated coffee.

"Stove's blinking on and off," she said. "Looks like some of the auxiliary power sources are giving up. Mebbe even the main power. Be bad news for the gateway if it's that."

Ryan brushed his fingers through his hair. "Yeah. Could be real bad. After we've eaten we'll get everyone together and talk about it. Most times we've ended up in a redoubt we take a look outside. Could be for once we should think about making another jump out of this place."

Krysty sighed. "Another jump? Need it like a rad shot in the head. Come to think of it, lover, that's just what another jump would feel like."

Jak and J.B. appeared ten minutes later, followed by Doc. He apologized for Lori's lateness, explaining with blushing cheeks that it was her time of the month and she had stomach cramps.

The discussion didn't take very long. Everyone was interested in going to find the freezing section of the redoubt. There was a general agreement that it was only fairly minor bits of electrical equipment that were failing, most of them coming off unimportant sections of the main power grid for the huge fortress complex.

While the others were eating, finally joined by a pale-faced Lori, Ryan decided that he'd go and freshen himself with another shower.

The immaculate white tiles and the mirrored chrome taps and controls heightened his anticipation of the steaming water.

Fortunately Ryan turned on the taps before he stripped and stood under the needle-jets.

There was a distant, sinister gurgling, amplified by the metal pipes. Ryan quickly stepped back, hand dropping to the blaster on his hip. The noise became louder, an obscene bubbling sound, surging toward the shower room.

"Fireblast!" Ryan moved away, hissing between his teeth at the appalling stench.

It was a black liquid, streaked with vivid green, like rotting molasses. Oozing from the gleaming metal nozzles, it crept down the walls, staining them with its glossy filth. It flowed over the main control taps before Ryan could get anywhere near them, making it impossible for him to stop the outpouring.

He heard the door open, and Jak called out to him. "You here, Ryan? We... what fuck's stink? You okay, Ryan?"

"Stay where you are, Jak. Yeah. Looks like it's end of the line time for hot showers. Power unit just pulled the plug on us."

Despite the new evidence of the redoubt beginning to run down, everyone agreed that they should at least take a look at the cryo section.

Following the light blue pattern on the fortress map, they headed north, through areas of the huge redoubt that had been more carefully evacuated and cleansed. Only once did they find any region that proved interesting.

"Map said there was a small arms and plas-ex module out this way," J.B. said. "Be good to find it and see if mebbe there's anything left that we could use."

"Always use a few spare rounds for the G-12," Ryan agreed.

A torn poster on a side wall proclaimed that Volvos Are Best — Forget the Rest.

"This way." Jak pointed to a side passage. A neat yellow sign warned all B8 or lower cleared personnel not to proceed farther without signed sec permit. The armored door was half-open. Spray-painted on it were the two words Raiders Rule.

"Gridiron team," Doc explained as they stooped beneath it.

Lights shone brightly ahead of them. Most illumination units in redoubts operated on proximity-trembler systems. Sensors picked up the vibrations of anyone moving along the corridors and would switch on the lights for a couple of sections ahead. So, no matter how quick you were, you could never catch a functioning length of corridor in the dark. To try was as futile as a man spinning around in front of a mirror, hoping to snatch a glimpse of the back of his own head.

The corridor opened without warning into a massive room, at least as large as an aircraft hangar, divided by partitions and pallets like some vast warehouse.

"Black dust!" J.B. exclaimed. The use of this rare saying told his companions how truly amazed J.B. was.

Most of the shelves were full of cartons, tins and boxes of all manner of ammunition and explosives. Spilling out over the floor, the munitions gave every evidence of something near to panic, of people scrabbling to survive despite the odds.

"Let's go, guys," the Armorer said, his sallow face alight with eagerness, eyes sparkling behind the lenses of his glasses. None of the others, except for Ryan, had ever seen him so animated. Ryan had once seen J.B. more excited, but it had been in another time and at another place.

"Could be boobies?" Jak suggested, stopping J.B. cold in his tracks.

"Could be, kid. Sorry. Didn't mean to call you that. Could be, Jak. Good point. But we've never seen nothing in any other redoubt. No, I figure we're safe. Just take a little care, is all."

Mostly they ran into booby traps out in mutie country. Then a lot of care had to be taken about what was picked up or moved. Four of the young blaster team from War Wag Three had gone to buy the farm together, around five years ago, Ryan figured. They'd stumbled into an encampment of stickies, out toward the Darks. One of them had seen a tiny crippled baby, bawling its eyes out and had stooped to pick it up and comfort it. He'd snagged a thin fish line linked to a simple detonator and a pound of plas-ex. It'd taken over an hour to collect the shredded flesh and bone of the four adults and the infant out of the surrounding trees and bushes.

Krysty had plenty of ammo for her own 9 mm Heckler & Koch P7A-13. She wandered around the huge storeroom, hands in her pockets, feeling the cold smoothness of the jet-black stone Apache tear. She watched as Ryan, Jak and J.B. darted around like children in a candy store. Not that Krysty had ever seen a candy store, except in old vids and mags.

Ryan was delighted to find an unopened wooden box of rounds for his caseless rifle. Ammo was becoming increasingly scarce throughout the Deathlands, particularly for rare guns like the G-12. It was a fifty-shot automatic, able to fire on single shot, triple or continuous burst. The rounds had no metal jacket, being molded into the case of the actual propellant. They were 4.7 mm by 21 mm. He eagerly loaded one of the pockets of his coat with the unusual rounds. The SIG-Sauer pistol fired standard 9 mill ammo, which was still being made, in unreliable bastardized forms, in any ville with a decent machining plant.

Krysty strolled up and down the aisles, carefully avoiding stumbling over the hundreds upon hundreds of loose rounds scattered everywhere. There were neatly typed cards thumbtacked to the shelves, telling her what was in the cartons. And what had once been there.

Lists of death-dealing names, some of which she recognized and some she didn't, the endless fugue of the long-gone megacull.

Lori took a handful of .22 rounds for her pearl-handled PPK, and Jak stuffed another couple of dozen .357 slugs for his Magnum cannon into his pockets.

Not surprisingly, there was nothing there that Doc could use in his nineteenth-century Le Mat handgun, with its central .63 caliber scattergun barrel and the nine-chamber revolver barrel, firing straight .36s. So the blaster remained in the hand-tooled Mexican holster rig.

Overlooked on a back shelf, behind some tumbled boxes of Mark Seven ball, J.B. discovered a dark green metal container, stamped in an endless string of white letters and numerals. He hauled it down, letting it crash to the floor, then levered the spring clips open along one side.

"Hey! Come look! Anyone want a real good new blaster? With lotsa rounds?"

Everyone gathered by the crouched figure of the Armorer, peering over his shoulder. He was pulling sheets of brown waxed and oiled paper off a dull black gun.

"Heckler & Koch full— and semi-auto," Ryan said. "Don't know the model. Never saw one like that. Integral silencer."

"And laser-optic sight," J.B. said with a note of reverential awe in his voice. "It's one of the MP-7 SD-8s. Only made a few, according to what I've seen. Supposed to be a good gun for anything up to thirty yards."

"Going to change that old Uzi of yours, J.B.?" Ryan asked, not really expecting Dix to agree with the suggestion.

"Why not?"

"Hey, I was only..."

J.B. picked up the blaster and cradled it, feeling for the button to activate the laser sight, aiming it across the room. Everyone watched the tiny ruby dot of light. "Yeah. Like the feel."

"You fire it from the shoulder?" Krysty was puzzled by the strange double sight on top of the short muzzle.

"No. Not at all. Close quarters you press the trigger and spray. Aimed shots you can use the laser spot. Then hold it braced against the hip and let go. No need to aim from the shoulder. Not with a baby like this."

Without a sign of regret the Armorer laid down the battered mini-Uzi that he'd carried for so long over so many miles, walked away and began to rummage through the box that contained equaloy 9 mm ammo, emptying his pockets of the old bullets.

Jak picked up one of the guns and hefted it, shrugging and putting it back again. "No. Slow down close fights. No."

"Saw some grens racked up over that side," Ryan said.

"Yeah. And some plas-ex. Be right there with you, I when I got enough ammunition."

Jak and Krysty followed Ryan across to the far side of the weapons wing of the redoubt, with Doc and Lori trailing behind them.

"Here. Look colors!" the albino teenager exclaimed, standing, jaw gaping, at the serried rows of different kinds of hand grenades.

They were much smaller than the type used in the conventional wars of the twentieth century, only half the size of a baseball, but relatively heavy. Some had two-step button firing pins and some had flip-top detonator releases. All were silver or black, with bright strips of different paints. Labels told what each one was.

"Scarlet and blue is imploder. Met one of those before," Jak said, remembering a close call on the Mohawk River. "How they work?"

"Like an explosion, only it works on a kind of antimatter principle. Sucks things in as it goes off," Ryan explained.

Krysty ran a long finger down the row of printed labels. "Stunners. Burners. Frags. Lights. High-alts. Shrap. Nerve. Smokers. Grounders. Low-ex. Delays, various. Remotes."

"Take an implode, stun, burn and frag each. Others are too specialized for us. Basically we'll just want to stop or chill. Nothing else."

They all stashed away four grens. Ryan pocketed a couple of extra implodes for good measure. Lori complained that they were too heavy for her.

"What's the pointing for?" she asked. "Got blasters and they do any job."

Doc shook his head. "I fear that when in Rome... I mean, when in Deathlands, one must look first for survival. Anything above and beyond that is somewhat of a bonus, my dear child."

Lori pouted and swung away, the bells on her spurs tinkling with their usual thin, bright sound. As she stalked off she tripped over some loose ammo, cursed and nearly fell.

"She'll break her rad-blasted ankle with those heels one of these days," J.B. stated.

Ryan nodded. "Could be." He looked around. "We all got what we want? Enough to chill a mutie army, I guess."

"After the chill, we can go and look at the freezing," Doc said, smiling broadly. "Get it? That was a joke, was it not?"

"Very nearly, Doc." Krysty sighed. "Very nearly."