Prodigal's Return. James Axler
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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.
As sleep began to claim him, Ryan remembered learning that sage bit of wisdom from his father, Baron Titus Cawdor, and then teaching it to his own son, Dean. He wondered if the boy was still alive. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think about his son, or wonder why he’d run off with Sharona after all they’d been through together. He hadn’t even said goodbye. It had been about three years since he last