Moonfeast

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.

Affectionately patting the leather bag, J.B. proudly started back to find Ryan when he saw something twinkle out of the corner of his sight. Twinkle? Oh shit.

Frantically grabbing for an implo gren, J.B. sniffed hard for any trace of ozone, but the air in the armory was warm and flat, sterilized and purified until it was completely without any taste or flavor.

With the gren clenched tight in a fist, J.B. crept around a pallet stacked high with plastic boxes containing M-4 rifles, to stop dead in his tracks. There was a small alcove directly ahead of the man, thick metal bars sealing it off from the rest of the armory. Set into the metal was an alphanumeric keypad similar to the type used to open the redoubt’s door, and behind the bars were a dozen crystalline containers, inside of which was a swirling white cloud filled with sparkling lights. The sight almost made him drop the gren.

“Cerberus clouds,” J.B. whispered, the soft words somehow sounding louder than thunder.

Backing away slowly, J.B. tried not to breathe, the terrible sight of the inhuman slayers filling his world. Just for a second, the man looked at the implo gren in his hand, then realized in cold reality that if the charge didn’t chill all of the clouds at once, he and the rest of the companions would be in for the fight of their lives.

When their old boss the Trader had first discovered the existence of the redoubts, the entranceway had been guarded by a cloud that bit, and chilled. Over time, the companions learned the inhuman guardian of some of the redoubts was called a Cerberus cloud, and aside from an implo gren, the friends knew the things were virtually indestructible. The clouds were sentient, or at least they acted that way, but if it was only a software program running into their vaporous minds, or if they were truly alive, who knew? Certainly no one alive in Deathlands. What was known for a fact was that they ruthlessly aced unauthorized personnel inside a redoubt.

Going back around the pallet full of M-4 rifles, J.B. never took his sight off the crystal jars while he softly whistled like a nightingale. Immediately everybody else in the armory stopped talking, and soon the others were alongside the man, their weapons primed for combat.

“Trouble?” Ryan asked, looking around.

“See for yourself,” J.B. whispered, indicating a direction with his chin. The implo gren was still in his fist, the tape removed from the arming lever, a finger in the safety ring.

Starting forward, the companions paused at the first twinkle of light. While Ryan and Jak sniffed hard, Krysty tried to sense anything unusual, Mildred held out a mirror to see around the stack of boxes, and Doc stepped onto the pallet to sneak a peek over the top.

“By all that is holy, a Cerberus cloud!” Doc whispered in a strained voice. “No, by thunder, it is six of the Hellish constructs!”

“Jars of Cerberus clouds,” Mildred said in awe. “This must be how they transported the damn things.”

“Use implo gren,” Jak suggested. “Use all.”

“And what if there are more of these things that we haven’t found yet?” Mildred asked, trying to ignore the tingling sensation on the back of her neck. The physician knew it was only a psychological reaction to the tense situation, but her hackles still wanted to rise in preparation of immediate flight.

The teenager scowled at the possibility, and hunched his shoulders as if getting ready to charge the clouds.

“Okay, people, fall back by the numbers,” Ryan commanded softly, walking backward on the toes of his combat boots, trying not to make any noise.

The rest of the companions closely followed his example, and the group carefully retraced its path through the massive armory until reaching the entrance again. Quickly, Ryan and Krysty removed the old bones from the threshold, and anxiously waited while the massive door cycled shut then rotated slightly to firmly lock.

“All right, if those clouds come alive, this’ll buy us some time,” Ryan said, slinging the Steyr over a shoulder. “But we better haul ass out of here, just in case.”

“Jump?” Jak asked succinctly.

“No,” Ryan decided. “We’ll check outside first. See where we are before we do another blind jump.”

“A wise choice, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “To be honest, I am still feeling somewhat queasy from our last impromptive sojourn through the ethereal void.”

“And without any more of Millie’s juice, we’ll probably arrive puking out our guts this time,” J.B. added, glancing at the ceiling. “Mebbe we can drive out of here. Should be lots of wags in the garage upstairs just waiting to be used.”

“Wherever the nuke we are,” Krysty retorted, starting for the elevator banks in a long stride.

Along the way, J.B. passed an implo gren to each of the others. That way, in case he got chilled, they would still have a fighting chance to survive.

Piling into the cage, the companions started for the top level of the redoubt, each of them feeling slightly more at ease the farther they got from the armory. Six Cerberus clouds. They would have been happier finding a roomful of rampaging stickies.

Arriving at the garage, the companions were delighted to find the place full of vehicles: civilian wags, vans, trucks and some motorcycles. There was even a score of military wags: trucks, Hummers, several armored-personnel carriers, and even a couple of LARC amphibious transports. Even better, the worktables were covered with equipment, the pegboard walls festooned with tools of every description. Unfortunately, each APC seemed to have been undergoing some serious maintenance on the transmissions. There were numerous skeletons in greasy coveralls bent over the exposed diesel engines, tools and spare parts scattered across on the floor.

Over by the fuel pump, skid marks on the floor revealed that a big GMC truck had clearly come out of the tunnel too fast and lost control, desperately trying to brake to a halt before crashing. However, the driver failed, and the big Jimmy had plowed into an SUV, the two vehicles then smashing a Hummer into the wall.

“And there is the source of the nerve gas,” Mildred stated, running stiff fingers though her beaded plaits.

In the rear compartment of the crashed Hummer was a large equipment trunk securely strapped into place. But the crash had snapped the restraining straps and popped the locks, allowing some of the containers inside to tumble out. Their broken valves lay nearby, the concrete severely discolored from the escaping contents. The containers were small, hardly larger than a fire extinguisher, and painted a very bright yellow with a black skull and crossbones painted on the side, along with the universal logo of a biohazard.

“I stand corrected. It wasn’t nerve gas, but some type of a plague.” Mildred scowled in open hatred. “It must have been airborne to spread so quickly through the entire redoubt before the scrubbers cleaned the air.”

“Germ warfare,” Doc snarled. “The most foul and cowardly of weapons!” Doc had read hundreds of books during his stay in the twentieth century, and he had been astonished by man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

“We safe?” Jak asked in an even tone. If the teen was frightened, there was no sign of it in his calm demeanor.

“Safe? Oh, absolutely,” Mildred stated, her shoulders easing. “There’s not a plague in existence that could survive a hundred years in such a sterile environment.”

“That you know about,” Krysty countered, her hair coiling protectively around her face.

Without comment, the physician shrugged. The world was full of unknown dangers. That was just part of life.

“Any way to check, see if the plague is still live?” J.B. asked, taking the stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket and tucking it into the corner of his mouth.

“No, John. Afraid not.”