Prodigal's Return
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Firing the scattergun with one hand, Doc thrust out his wounded arm. Floundering in the slippery mud, Jak grabbed the man’s hand and just managed to make it onto the shore before an expanding ring of greenish water reached the bank. Instantly, the lily pads began to turn brown and the frogs went silent.
“Incoming!” J.B. shouted, lighting the fuse on a pipe bomb.
Moving with purpose, Jak and Doc sprinted into the bushes. Once they were clear, J.B. tossed the pipe bomb into the discolored water, then turned to join his fleeing companions.
As the howler approached the shore, the water erupted into a boiling geyser of flame, mud and dead fish. Violently thrown backward, the mutie was blown out of the pond, to smack against the rocky base of the cliff. The sandstone facade shattered, sending out cracks in every direction like earthen lightning bolts. The ever-present cloud began to thin as the howler slid back down into the water, and the glowing nimbus of greenish light faded away.
“John, you got him!” Mildred shouted, coming to a stop.
“Mebbe, but I’m not going nearer,” J.B. said, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.
“Besides, I don’t trust that bastard thing any farther than I can piss in the wind,” Ryan growled, working the slide on his blaster to eject a misfired round.
“Distance doth make the heart grow fonder,” Doc expounded, easing his right hand into the pocket of his sodden coat. “And my dear Jak, please allow me to apologize for not rendering more swift assistance.”
“No prob,” Jak replied, straightening the collar on his jacket making the deadly razor blades hidden among the feathers and random bits of metal jingle slightly. “How arm?”
“It has been better,” Doc admitted, fumbling to reload the scattergun.
“Mildred can fix you up once we’re able to stop running,” Krysty said, taking the weapon from the wounded scholar. There was a row of spare cartridges sewn into loops along the strap. She eased one free and pulled down the pump to thumb the fat round into the breech on the bottom.
Just then, a low moan sounded from somewhere.
Lurching into action, the companions took flight, pelting through the bushes and shrubbery. In the distance was a proper forest of trees, pine, oak and white birch stretching to the horizon. But the woods was a two-edge blessing. It meant the companions were that much closer to their goal of safety, but going through the trees would also slow them significantly.
“I just hope the howler is chilled and not merely knocked out,” Mildred grunted, holding on to her med kit while jumping over a fallen log.
The crumbling wood was alive with termites, and that triggered an old memory from high school biology class. A termite. That was what the howler vaguely resembled inside that bizarre cloud; it looked similar to the intermediate stage of development when a newly born termite briefly possessed both an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton. Bones inside and outside, with muscles anchored in each. Double protection.
My God, no wonder the thing was bulletproof, she realized in growing horror. In the intermediate stage, the insect was virtually unkillable, and a thousand times stronger. Increase the size of the insect from a quarter inch to nine feet tall, and the strength would be multiplied that much more. Bullets and grenades would be no more than minor annoyances to such an abomination. The companions would need an antitank rocket, or even an implo gren, to have a chance of damaging the adamantine creature.
“Don’t waste any more time shooting!” Mildred bellowed, redoubling her frantic speed. “Just run! Run for your motherfucking lives!”
It was her profanity more than anything else that spurred the rest of them to increase their speed, and they were almost at the trees when a greenish light began to pulse into being from the direction of the pond. Then came an inhuman moan, more of a growl this time, followed by the previous low keening.
“Sounds pissed,” Jak muttered in an almost conversational tone.
But nobody replied, the rest of the companions saving their breath for the all-important task of leaving the area immediately. When they entered the woods, it took a precious moment for their sight to adjust, but they never stopped moving. They merely slowed a little until able to see clearly again, and then resumed full speed.
The going was tough, with low-hanging branches threatening to knock them unconscious, and exposed roots trying to trip them. But the companions raced on, knowing that death followed on their heels.
Never pausing to rest, the howler relentlessly continued after them through the forest, leaving behind a swatch of decaying trees, the bark turning black before peeling off the trunks. Squirrels and birds dropped lifeless from the crumbling branches, and the leaves fell in droves as if it was late autumn.
“Dark night, what I wouldn’t give just now for a bazooka!” J.B. snarled.
“’A horse…a h-horse…m-my k-kingdom…f-for a horse,’” Doc wheezed, his face unnaturally pale and shiny with sweat. His right arm flopped loosely as he ran, the coat sleeve dark with blood.
Seeing his state of near exhaustion, Krysty made a hard decision and called upon Gaia, the Earth Mother, for additional strength, repeating a special mantra. Almost instantly an inhuman power surged through her body, and the woman no longer felt tired or weak. Renewed, she scooped up the much taller man as if he were a small child, and darted ahead of the others, disappearing into the shadows ahead.
“May God grant they make it in time,” Mildred whispered, straight from the heart. She knew that Krysty could summon amazing strength in times of extreme need, but it faded quickly, and afterward she would be as weak as a kitten.
“So let’s buy them some time!” Ryan snarled, pausing to turn and fire his blaster a fast five times.
In the high branches of a pine tree, a nest exploded with the arrival of the 9 mm rounds. Through the broken twigs, yellowish egg yolk dribbled out as a mother stingwing rose into view screaming for revenge. Launching herself forward, the deadly mutie streaked through the tangle of branches to flash along the nettle-covered ground, searching for the unknown transgressor.
Keeping strategically mum, the companions ran on. But a few seconds later, the howler moaned loudly. Screaming in unbridled fury, the mutie abruptly changed direction and dived at the hellish cloud with both needle-sharp talons arched for a kill. Silently, it vanished into the glowing fog, and never came out again.
“Son bitch ate stingwing. And that was a big one!” Jak gasped in disbelief, glancing over a shoulder.
The trees unexpectedly thinned to reveal an irregular plain of dark crystalline material that gently sloped away. Fireblast, Ryan thought, that’s a nuke crater!
“This…isn’t on…my map,” J.B. huffed, barely able to keep abreast of the others.
“Oh, yes, it is!” Mildred yelled in delight, looking far ahead.
A squat black structure appeared at the bottom of the glass bowl, the satiny smooth metal completely unscratched by the nuke strike from a hundred years ago. It looked to be a redoubt, an underground fortress designed to withstand even a direct strike from a thermonuclear weapon. Lying near a titanic door were two tiny figures, one with flame-red hair and the other with longish silvery locks. Neither was moving.
Glancing at his rad counter, Ryan started down the slippery incline. He nearly fell twice, even his U.S. Army combat boots having trouble finding purchase on the smooth fused earth. Then the companions grabbed one another by the arm and began to glide along like ice-skaters, helping to keep each other moving. It was touch and go in a couple areas, but they finally reached the bottom of the crater.
Scrambling across the glassy surface, Ryan went straight to the blast door. He found a small keypad set into the wall beside the entrance, and slowly tapped in the access code. The one-eyed man breathed a sigh of relief as the colossal door began to ponderously move aside.
But as if on cue, the glowing mist appeared on the slope and began to descend rapidly.
“Here comes,” Jak announced, hefting his blaster.
“Screw it, help me with Doc!” Mildred commanded, struggling to hoist the limp scholar over her shoulder.
Reluctantly holstering his piece, Jak moved to lend some assistance, while Ryan simply lifted the supine Krysty in his powerful arms and stood impatiently near the slowly opening door. Live or get chilled; it was all just a matter of timing.
“I’ve got your back,” J.B. stated, pulling out the last pipe bomb, then flicking alive a butane lighter.
Licking dry lips, Ryan wanted to say something to his old friend, but nothing came to mind.
When the crack between the door and the wall was just barely large enough, Ryan roughly shoved Krysty through, then squeezed inside himself, ripping his shirt and losing some skin in the process. Jak went through next, with less damage, and Mildred easily passed him Doc, then followed. Clean air blew from a wall vent. The interior was brightly illuminated by clear fluorescent lights set into the high ceiling.
With a dull boom, the blast door finished opening completely, paused, then began to slowly close once more.
“Come on, John!” Mildred pleaded, watching as the howler reached the bottom of the slope and came directly their way. Somehow, it seemed larger now, and ever faster than before. Then the physician realized that it was merely a fear-induced panic that was altering her senses. Not that it really mattered. Only a moron wouldn’t be scared shitless in this situation!
“Not yet, Millie,” J.B. answered, biting the fuse on the pipe bomb and leaving only a nubbin.
The disturbing keen of the howler echoed across the irregular expanse of fused earth, making it sound as if a dozen of the creatures were present, and the greenish glow of the cloud reflected off every shiny surface, creating a scintillating display of emerald flashes.
The overall effect was hypnotic, as he lit the tiny fuse and rolled the explosive toward the mutie, J.B. wondered if that was a deliberate ploy of the creature.
Undaunted, the howler flowed over the pipe bomb, which reappeared behind the creature, completely undamaged, the smoldering fuse extinguished a hair away from the lead cap.
“Son of a mutie bitch!” J.B. snarled, stepping back into the mouth of the access tunnel. Swinging up the Uzi, he emptied the blaster into the glass just in front of the howler, sending a spray of broken shards into the cloud.
Appearing alongside him, Ryan, Mildred and Jak opened fire with their blasters, hammering the approaching howler as the massive door continued its slow progress.
Out of brass, Jak started throwing knives into the cloud.
When her ZKR target pistol clicked empty, Mildred backed away. As the SIG-Sauer ran out, Ryan dropped the blaster to grab the S&W M-4000 from alongside Doc. Pumping the choke on the scattergun, Ryan chambered a 12-gauge cartridge and thrust the barrel past his friends to discharge the weapon inside the green cloud. The muzzle-blast of the scattergun sounded oddly muffled, but the howler actually stepped backward as the blast door slid past them to close.
But at the very last second, the writhing tip of a glowing tentacle stabbed through the ever-narrowing opening. With a living being blocking the way, the door automatically paused, then began to rumble open once more.
Chapter Two
Snarling a curse, Ryan triggered the scattergun at the limb, doing no visible damage. Then J.B. lunged forward to attack with a sizzling road flare, and the mutie quickly retreated. However, the blast doors were already in motion.
Rushing to the internal keypad, Jak punched in the access code to try to stop the process. Sometimes that worked, but this time there was no result, and the armored portal continued to open.
On the floor, Doc feebly twitched, and his ebony sword stick rolled over to Jak. The albino teen snatched it up and twisted the silver lion’s-head grip to extract a length of shining Spanish steel. As the glowing cloud inched closer, he wildly slashed through the allotropic mist, going for the head, while J.B. did the same with the road flare, much lower. The howler voiced strong displeasure at the attacks, and something shifted about inside the impossible mist, never ceasing its effort to get closer and gain entry.
Inexorably slow, the blast doors finished their programmed journey inside the wall, then once more started across the twenty-foot span to cycle shut.
Finding his pockets empty of brass, Ryan drew his panga, the curved blade gleaming brightly in the fluorescent lights.
“Mildred, drag Krysty and Doc to the elevator!” he snarled, thrusting and jabbing at the terrible mutie. “If we’re not there in five, or you see green, get in the mattrans and jump without us!”
Shocked at the very idea of leaving the group, Mildred started to object, then reluctantly saw the wisdom of the heroic act. If the companions were separated, but still alive, there was always a slim chance of them finding each other someday.
“John, I love you!” she shouted, taking Doc and Krysty by the collars of their jackets.
“Heaven or hell, Millie, I’ll see ya there!” J.B. yelled over a shoulder, igniting a second flare with the dying flame of the first.
His heart beating wildly, Ryan started to add something for Krysty, but there was no need for words, and she wouldn’t hear him anyway. The two of them were more than lovers and friends, they were soul mates, and he would find Krysty again.
That is, Ryan thought grimly, if I’m still alive in thirty seconds!
As the stocky physician hauled the unconscious bodies around the first turn of the zigzagging tunnel, the howler had to have noticed the departure, and forcibly advanced, uncaring of any damage it might have been receiving from the flame and steel. When the greenish cloud got closer, the three men guarding the door began to feel ill, dizzy and disoriented, their sweaty skin prickly painfully.
“You’re not getting in!” Ryan bellowed defiantly, ramming the long barrel of the Steyr into the cloud. He hit something hard, and his hands instantly felt as if they were on fire. A wave of incredible pain rushed up both his arms, stealing the last of his flagging strength. Knife and longblaster tumbled to the floor, and Ryan reluctantly retreated, fighting against the agony racking his exhausted body. His stomach heaved, his vision blurred and he crumpled to the floor, still trying to rise and rejoin the fight.
After kicking the panga back to the trembling man, Jak swung his leg around to slash a sideways kick at the unseen thing inside the cloud. There was a crack as the steel-reinforced toe of his Army boot contacted something breakable, and the howler cut loose with a strident wail that told of serious damage.
“The sides!” J.B. shouted in a burst of sudden understanding. “Dark night, the rad-blasted thing is only armored in front! We gotta hit it from the sides!”
But he was speaking to himself. A shuddering Jak was on the floor, using the sword to frantically hack at the laces of his boot. Half of it was dead white, the military leather crumbling away to reveal the steel support inside, the metal heavily corroded and dissolving.
Torn for a moment between helping his friend and keeping up the defense, J.B. wavered, and the howler slipped into the redoubt.
However, just as the mutie crossed the threshold, the overhead lights instantly changed from a pleasing blue-white to a flashing dark red, and a Klaxon began to sound somewhere deep inside the subterranean fortress. Unexpectedly, dozens of small vents snapped open in the smooth walls, and thick columns of white foam blasted out to slam into the howler. In perfect synchronization, additional vents opened in the floor and hissing torrents of superheated steam exploded forth.
Steadily moving back and forth, the sweeping cascades of foam and steam bodily forced the determined howler back outside, and sent the glowing cloud tumbling along the glassy floor of the ancient bomb crater.
Rigidly, the redoubt maintained the double assault, concentrating on the narrowing opening of the blast door until it finally boomed shut and audibly locked.
Stunned beyond words, J.B. lowered his flare, and was trying to process what had just happened, when the foam and steam abruptly cut off. It was replaced with a medicinal-smelling orange gel that squirted all over the men from new wall vents.
Sputtering and coughing, Ryan awoke. The three companions struggled to get out of the way, but the gel followed along, drenching them thoroughly until every inch of each man’s body was soaked. They tried not to get it in their eyes and mouths, but hit from every direction, they found no escape, and soon the gel was everywhere. Oddly, it didn’t taste that bad, sort of like overly sweet orange juice, and inevitably some of it even went down their throats.
On and on, the deluge continued unabated, until the Klaxon finally stopped and the ceiling lights returned to their normal color. Then the gel turned off, and down from the ceiling came a gentle shower of soothing, lukewarm water. As the antiseptic gel was sluiced off their bodies, it sluggishly flowed along the floor, to vanish into gurgling drains hidden in the corners. In only a few minutes, the companions were clean again, and soaked to the skin.
“What that?” Jak demanded weakly, looking like a melting snowman. What remained of the bedraggled boot was still on his foot, but the material was no longer disintegrating.
“Musta been one of those antiradiation protocols that Millie theorized about,” J.B. said with a weary laugh, casting aside the extinguished road flare.
“Guess so,” Ryan muttered, feeling oddly refreshed from the strange cleansing. Actually, it made a lot of sense. The redoubts were designed to survive a nuke war. Mebbe the whitecoats had showed some smarts for once and included some autosystems to keep out anything too hot with rads.
“Never knew could do.” Jak sighed, putting his back against the cool armarglas wall. Glancing down, he saw his foot and wiggled the toes. That had been close!
“There’s tons of stuff we don’t know about these places,” J.B. replied, removing his streaked glasses. He tried to wipe them dry, but everything he wore was absolutely soaked, so he was reduced to trying to shake them clean, which accomplished nothing at all.
Just then they heard the sound of running boots. Pulling knives, the men braced for an attack. But it was Mildred who came into view around the corner, her ZKR in one hand and a crowbar in the other.
“Hey, Millie,” J.B. said, lifting his chin in greeting.
“I heard the siren…?.” She sniffed at the strong smell of sweet oranges. “Now, where in the world did you find some antiradiation foam?”
“Gel,” Ryan corrected wearily, tucking away the panga. “Came out of the ceiling.”
“Protocols,” Jak added, as if that explained everything.
“I see you had a close encounter of the third kind,” Mildred said, noting his partially dissolved boot.
“Not aced,” Jak replied with a philosophical shrug.
Moving closer, she cupped his face with both hands and checked his eyes, then put two fingers on the carotid artery in his throat. The pulse was good, as was his color, pale as it was. “You seem okay,” she said hesitantly. “But if you have any stomach pains, or sudden hair loss, let me know right away.”
Once more, Jak shrugged. If he ever got rad-poisoning, he was already carrying the only known cure. It was holstered at his hip.
“Where are the others?” Ryan asked, craning his neck to see behind the stocky woman. There was only empty corridor in sight.
“I shoved them into the elevator and sent it to the bottom floor,” Mildred said, resting the crowbar on her shoulder. “I figured that even if the howler got inside, it wouldn’t be intelligent enough to press the call button.”
“Smart move,” Ryan told her, rubbing his missing eye with a fist. He honestly couldn’t recall ever being this tired before in his life and still be able to move. “Let’s go join them. If we don’t get some sleep soon, we’re going to fall over.”
“What about mutie?” Jak asked, looking at the blast doors.
“Sleep is more important,” J.B. countered, fighting back a jaw-cracking yawn. “Dark night, right now we’re so dead tired we can’t even jump out of the redoubt! If we tried to use the mat-trans, the jump would probably ace us.”
“Damn near does anyway,” Ryan growled, starting forward, his combat boots squishing juicily.
Past the last turn of the zigzagging tunnel, the companions entered the parking garage of the redoubt, which housed several different types of vehicles. Everything was parked randomly, completely ignoring the neatly painted yellow lines on the smooth terrazzo floor, as if the staff had been racing to get inside the redoubt when skydark was about to hit. The companions scowled at the metallic chaos. Whatever had happened in those final moments of civilization had clearly come without much advance warning.
Several of the vehicles were smashed into one another, the windshields badly cracked and the concrete underneath badly discolored from the hundred-year-old fuel spill. There was a LAV-25 armored personnel carrier that had obviously been hit hard by something, the dense plating gashed to reveal the crushed engine.
Only a couple of large black sedans seemed to still be airtight. Grinning skeletons were slumped behind the wheels, their nylon shoulder holsters carrying the rusted remains of what had once been sleek blasters. In the backseats were more skeletons, the tatters of their neatly tailored military uniforms draped over bony shoulder blades. One skeleton had a severely cracked skull, and a burnished steel briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, a pitted Desert Eagle .50 blaster in a bony hand, the slide kicked back to show that it had been fired until the magazine cycled dry.
Annoyed, J.B. grunted at the sight. The poor bastard had managed to fight his way into the redoubt, then got aced in a car crash. Sadly, the companions wouldn’t be able to recover anything from that wag, or from any of the sedans. Each license plate bore a row of stars showing the vehicle was reserved purely for generals, which he knew from experience meant the sedans would be heavily armored, NBC class, proof against any form of attack.
“Think should do sweep?” Jak asked, as they headed down the corridor.
“No need,” Ryan stated gruffly.
When they reached the elevator, the one-eyed man pressed the call button. It took two tries. “If there’s anybody else in the redoubt, they would have heard the siren and shown up by now.”
“True enough,” Jak said. Then purely on impulse, he went to a nearby stack of fifty-five-gallon drums and clumsily rolled one over in front of the door as a crude stop. It never hurt to plan for the unlikely. Mildred had an old word for that, paranoia. But to him it was just plain common sense.
The companions had to wait only a few minutes, checking their meager assortment of weapons as they did so, before there was a musical ding and the elevator doors opened. Sprawled on the floor inside were Doc and Krysty. She was missing the belt from her pants. It was cinched around Doc’s wounded arm as a makeshift tourniquet, a blood-streaked handkerchief sticking out the sides.
“Damn, you’re fast,” J.B. said with a strong note of pride in his voice.
“Had to be,” Mildred replied, kneeling to check her patients. Each was fine, just so deeply unconscious she felt she could have safely performed major surgery on them without the benefit of anesthesia.
As Jak and J.B. got comfortable on the hard metal floor, Ryan went to the controls and sent the elevator down again, but after only a few seconds of operation, flipped the emergency button, stopping them between floors. The alarm started to ring, and he disabled it with a thrust and twist of the panga into the controls. Done and done. Now if anybody wanted to reach the sleepers, they’d have to pry open the steel doors, or else come through the roof hatch. Either of which would make more than enough noise to wake the companions. He admitted this wasn’t a perfect bolthole, merely the best available at the moment. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.