"Why?"
"Save you from the bang. Do it."
The explosion came almost immediately, flat and dulled from being out in the open. Since the Armorer hadn't been able to use the confining force of the plas-ex, he'd been forced to use a lump the size of his fist. As the yellowish smoke cleared away Ryan wondered whether it might have been too much and brought the whole building down.
But J.B. had gotten it just right.
The doors had peeled back on their concealed hinges like wet cardboard. The reinforced concrete had been cracked just above the doors, bringing down the faded sign. But the main structure didn't seem to have been damaged.
"I confess myself somewhat at a loss," Doc said as he peered at the wrecked sec doors in confusion.
"Someone lost key," Jak explained, which seemed to satisfy the old man.
"Worth leaving a guard?" J.B. asked. "Bang like that'd be heard from here to the Lantic and back."
Ryan hesitated. Their party was so small that to reduce its size at all would be to greatly weaken it. And they hadn't seen any signs of recent humanoid life around the region.
"Stick together," he said, leading the way into the entrance hall of the cryonics center.
Everything was functioning perfectly.
It was an uncanny time capsule, sealed in 2001 and not disturbed until this moment. The lights were steady, pitched at a moderate level. The air-conditioning hummed quietly away, keeping the air clean, cool and circulated every forty-eight minutes, as per regulations for United States Government buildings.
There was almost no dust, and no trace of the green lichen that had seemed to stain everything in the area. They walked across to a desk marked Reception.
Krysty smiled. "Gaia! I swear I expect to see some nurse or doctor in a white coat come out to ask us what we want and would we mind leaving. It's just like being in an old vid."
Under a sheet of curling plastic was a staff rota for January 2001 and a red-typed notice giving the details of the final hasty evacuation. Filled with mistakes and showing all the signs of having been circulated at the shortest possible warning, it gave details of how all the automatic servo-systems should be switched away from Manual.
As soon as the state of ergency ends, the entire center will revert to all normal procedures.
"Never did," Ryan said.
"Let's go see if we can find some freezies," Krysty suggested.
The building was just about the best preserved that any of them had ever seen. Yet oddly, there was very little there to interest them. It was obvious that the cryonics complex had been fully staffed and functioning right up to the last moment, and that it had then been successfully evacuated. But it was such a sterile environment that nothing personal remained. It wasn't like a hospital with living patients, more like a totally disinfected laboratory.
The brittle pieces of paper tacked to boards didn't cast any light on what had happened or how people had been feeling. Someone was selling a '94 Chevy, and someone else had some rabbits for sale; there was a dance in the cryo-tech's quarters on the next Friday; the local branch of the Seventh-Day Adventists was holding a doughnuts-and-coffee morning to raise funds for some child with leukemia; a woman named Medina was selling her precious record collection and wouldn't refuse any reasonable offer.
"The trivia of living and dying," Doc commented. "They shouldn't have planned anything for tomorrow. Tomorrow was the yesterday you worried about... No, I fear that I have that a tad incorrect." He shook his head sadly.
Ryan caught Krysty's eye and rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. Doc kept showing tiny signs of recovery, then he'd go plunging all the way back down into the abyss.
"Look," J.B. said, pointing to a sign that hung at the far end of one of the corridors. "Seen it before."
Ryan remembered it too — in the redoubt where they'd met Rick Ginsberg: Cryo. Medical Clearance 10 or B Equivalent Only Permitted.
"Down there," Ryan said.
"Hope the freezies don't go triple-fucking crazy like last," Jak muttered. "Dreamed bad. Real bad."
Ryan fervently hoped that as well. Remembering the nightmare scenes in the last cryo-bunkers made his mouth go as dry as neutron bones.
They continued onward until they encountered a sec barrier that would once have been manned by armed guards. Now only the silken whisper of a crumbling spiderweb stretched across the wide passage. Beyond it stood a pair of doors marked Air Lock — Do Not Enter.
"If there's any freezies left, lover, they'll be through there." Krysty's hand dropped automatically to the butt of her blaster.
The tension was so strong it could almost be tasted, prickling on the tongue. With the exception of Doc Tanner, all of them were wrestling with bad memories.
Chapter Eleven
Nothing happened for several seconds after J.B. pressed the manual control on the air lock doors, and Ryan had a momentary, claustrophobic vision of being trapped between the ponderous, rubber-edged panels. Then there was the familiar hissing sound of equalizing pressure and the slight discomfort around the inner ears.
"Not another jump?" Doc queried with no more than mild curiosity.
"No," Krysty replied, patting him reassuringly on the arm. "Just going through the doors to see what's there."
"Who's there? What's there? When's where? Where's where? Men's wear. I swear." He stopped and looked at the puzzled faces of the others. "I do beg your pardon. Slight malfunction of the frontal lobes."
The second set of doors moved back silently, and they could all taste the chilled flatness of recirculated air.
"Anything, lover?" Ryan asked.
Krysty shook her head, her blazing hair swinging across her face. "Not a thing. Whatever lived down here once, lives here no longer."
"Cold." Jak shuddered.
"Think we'll find any freezies in here?" J.B. asked. "Complex was secure. Looks like they just switched it to auto and walked away."
The corridors were spotlessly clean and free from all dust. Doors lining both sides opened onto sparsely furnished offices. A long list of warnings and regulations was posted on a double pair of swing doors at the end of the corridor. Most were linked to the importance of keeping all germs at bay by wearing the right clinical uniforms.
"Not worth it," Krysty said quietly. "If any freezies leave with us, we'll be taking them into Deathlands. A few specks of dirt before then won't likely make a lot of difference."
A long way off, dulled by the thick walls, they could just hear the persistent sound of a security siren blaring the warning to guards long, long dead that there were unidentified and illegal intruders within the complex.
Noncorporeal Section.The sign was above yet another set of doors.
"What the dark night does that mean?" J.B. asked.
They all stared at it in silence. Finally Doc Tanner answered the Armorer's question.
"Without a body, Mr. Dix. A section for people who no longer have a body. A peculiar concept, I must admit."
"Just arms an' legs," Jak suggested, cackling with delight at the bizarre idea.
"Or heads," Doc said.
It washeads.
They walked into a huge control room, at least eight thousand square feet, that was packed with all kinds of sophisticated monitors. It made the control consoles for the gateways look like kiddie toys. But it wasn't the banks of comp-displays and flickering monitors that caught the eye first — it was what lay behind them, ranged along the back wall, each in its own Plexiglas capsule.
Heads.
At a rough count Ryan figured on close to a hundred: white, black, brown and yellow, and all the shades in between. All had been severed with a surgical neatness across the center of the throat, the lower section submerged in a viscous liquid. Wires and tubes trailed from each neck into a box of light green plastic, which in turn was connected to its own individual control console. Ryan assumed that the consoles would all be linked to the master boards.