“Flintlock thinks a lot of things,” said Vargas. “Anyway, first thing the Guardians did when they got here was set the door back on their tracks and rebuild the wall.” He pointed to the panels. “Second thing was they started carvin’ those crazy slogans into the doors. Religious texts, Flintlock calls ‘em.”
“And you might think carvin’ into ‘em made the doors weaker,” said Angie. “But they’re each more than three foot thick, so you’d be thinkin’ wrong.”
I raised my gaze again to the tops of the doors. As crazy as the words on them were, the fact that the Guardians had managed to lift them up, put them in place and get them working again underscored the sort of dedication and fanaticism they possessed. And fanatics were dangerous. We’d found that out with Finster.
I shook my head. “So what you’re saying is, we’re not getting in.”
“Not through the doors,” said Hell Razor. “But look there.”
He pointed to the walls on either side of the door. They were made of poured cement molded to look like the face of the mountain, but parts of that thick gray cladding had fallen away, revealing cracked and rotten brickwork underneath.
“They may have got the doors up, but they weren’t exactly master masons, and the weight of these big brass bastards is slowly pulling their new walls apart. Could probably get through this mess with a pickaxe if we had the time. Fortunately, some of those party favors we picked up in Sleeper One will work a little faster.”
He started pulling explosives and fusing out of his satchel as the rest of us backed up and took up watch positions.
With nothing to do but watch him work, my mind instantly turned back to Athalia. I didn’t get it. Where had she gone, and why? It had been clear from the beginning that she didn’t like the idea of this raid. But why had she waited until we were all the way here and the fighting had started before she bugged out? It couldn’t be because she was afraid. I’d never seen anyone less afraid of a fight. But what else made sense? Why hadn’t she left as soon as she realized I wasn’t going to change my mind? Had she come all that way because she’d hoped I’d see sense when we got a look at the place? She had to know me better than that by now. Maybe she’d thought the rangers were going to give up when they met resistance. That was pretty foolish, too.
Or maybe she hadn’t left. Maybe she’d been taken. Maybe someone had sneaked up behind us and grabbed her. Maybe the damned Guardians had her locked up inside their citadel. Well, if that was the case, there were going to be a lot of dead Guardians once we got in there. I’d kill one for every hair on her head.
“Alright,” said Hell Razor, as he backed away from the doors and spooled out the fuse. “Take cover. This is gonna be big.”
We stepped back outside of the perimeter wall as he followed us, then knelt, cut the cord, and lit the end. It spit and hissed like an angry cat as the flame followed it through the door and out of sight.
“Cover your ears,” he said.
Vargas, raised his voice. “And check your guns! We’re going in on ‘boom’!”
– Chapter Five –
BOOM!
In we ran with the smoke still billowing towards us and bits of masonry and brick still raining from the sky. For a few steps the cloud enveloped us completely and we could see nothing, but then a triangle of darkness appeared before us — a hole at the bottom right corner of the big brass doors. It looked like the sort of hole a rat would chew in a baseboard, only big enough — just — for a man to crawl through.
And that’s what we are, isn’t it? I thought. Man–sized rats, scurrying around in the decaying houses of the giants that came before us. The Guardians were the packrats, hoarding everything they could get their greasy little paws on, and we were the desert rats, who…
Fortunately we reached the hole before I could think of an ending for that tortured metaphor. I squeezed in ahead of the others. The blast had sprayed a fan of debris into the entry hall and thrown the shattered remains of two guardians against the red–smeared walls. Three others were slowly sitting up and raising their guns, their gold–chased black cassocks torn and bloody from the rain of broken bricks.
I gunned them down with my AR and shouted back through the hole. “Clear!”
That, however, was a lie about two seconds later, as more Guardians streamed into the entryway, disbelief on their faces and a bizarre collection of antique weapons in their hands.
“They’ve breached the unbreachable doors!” shouted one. “Stop them!”
I flicked over to full auto and unloaded on them. Angie, who had just rolled in, joined me. Smoking brass shells cascaded from our guns and went dancing and tinkling across the cold stone floor while the sound of our gunfire drowned out the Guardians’ screams and echoed back to us from the shadowed ceiling.
“Fall back! Fall back!”
The survivors scattered back the way they’d come, leaving the dead and dying where they’d fallen. By the time the echoes faded, the rest of our squad was through the hole and lined up.
“Let’s hope it’s all this easy,” said Vargas.
Hell Razor grunted. “Tsk. Now you’ve jinxed it.”
Angie laughed. “I thought you didn’t believe in superstition.”
Hell Razor crossed his fingers. “I don’t. But there’s no sense pushin’ it.”
“What the hell is all this stuff?” asked Ace.
We looked around as the dust and the gun smoke cleared. The hall was high, wide and so deep that the far end was swallowed in darkness. Between us and that darkness, a heavy–duty freight elevator rose from a big square shaft in the center of the floor, and surrounding the shaft was a bizarre and bullet–chipped collection of bronze and plaster busts, statues, paintings, murals and portraits. I didn’t recognize even a tenth of the stuff. Most of the busts were serious–looking guys in suits and ties, hair neatly–groomed, and a lot of the statues were nude women holding torches or swords or scales, but some of them were stranger. Much stranger. There was a wax effigy of a dark–haired guy in a white jumpsuit covered in rhinestones. He was holding hands with a voluptuous blonde woman, also in white, who seemed to be trying to hold her dress down even through there was no wind. And in front of them, holding out a hamburger to them like it was some kind of sacred offering, was a pudgy little dwarf in red checkered overalls. It had the shiniest hair I’d ever seen.
The paintings were even more bizarre — landscapes of highways that soared and looped through the sky in impossible ways, a portrait, painted on black velvet, of Jesus holding a little white lamb and smoking a joint, a man with a chin–beard and a stovepipe hat leading an army of naked black men against a man wearing a goatee, glasses, and an old–fashioned white suit, whose army was a horde of white cowboys riding chickens; a big painting of a man whose hair looked a lot like the shiny hair on the dwarf in the checkered overalls tearing down a barbed–wire topped concrete wall with his bare hands while a bear tried to kill him with a hammer and sickle, a postcard from Roswell, New Mexico with a picture of a little green man next to a crashed flying saucer sticking his thumb out and saying, “Going my way?”
The craziest of all, however, was a long mural along one wall, which seemed to be an attempt to show all of human history in one picture. I don’t know how well they did. It certainly didn’t look like the past I’d seen in the helicopter simulator, but maybe Arizona was different from the rest of the world back then.
It started at the left edge of the mural with a guy in a top–hat and bushy beard walking arm in arm with an ape in a wedding dress. The painting didn’t record the ape’s name, but there was a fancy scroll over the head of the guy with the beard that said his name was Charles Darwin.