"Make for the door!" Ryan yelled, going to help Finnegan cover Henn's retreat. Hun got there first, stabbing the nearest of the attackers so hard that the steel snapped and she withdrew only the hilt, grinning at the shocked and puzzled expression on the bronzed face of the man she had just killed.
Doc, Krysty, Henn and Finnegan were through into the anteroom, watching anxiously as their friends still battled on. Nine or ten of the Indians were down, dying or dead. But four more had come in, two armed with bows and arrows.
"Back!" shouted Ryan again, pushing Hunaker in front of him, parrying a lunge from a feather-tipped spear, turning and spilling the man's guts in loops of greasy intestine around his feet.
Okie stood, legs braced, to one side of the doorway, the M-16 steady in her hands, waiting a chance to open fire at the enemy without harming the electrical equipment in its serried banks.
J.B. followed Hun through, then Ryan was in the doorway, tapping Okie on the arm. At the far end of the control room, more of the Sioux came pouring in, screaming and shouting. An arrow hit the wall at Ryan's side, and he snapped off a 3-round burst at the man who had loosed it. The rounds kicked the man onto his back, knocking others over with the violence of his dying.
Another arrow clipped Okie's right shoulder, pinning her to the wall by the material of her jacket. "Bastard!" she hissed, reaching and snapping the shaft of the arrow, and throwing it contemptuously on the concrete. Then she ripped in half the man who had wounded her. His body jerked and danced, held up by the force of the bullets that stitched him apart. As she took her finger off the trigger he fell sideways, crashing into one of the consoles, where sparks flew and a siren began to howl deep in the recesses of the Redoubt.
"That screws it," hissed Ryan, grabbing Okie and pulling her after him. There wasn't time to close the intervening door. The rest of them were already in the glass-walled chamber, beckoning to Ryan.
More arrows sliced by them, one plucking at the hem of his coat. J.B. yelled for them all to get down. The armored door began to close the moment they were all inside.
Ryan was last. A final shaft missed his left elbow by a hairsbreadth, hitting the control panel to the gateway, splintering one of the numbered buttons, breaking the plastic cover, revealing all the mass of tangled multicolored wiring beneath. As the door closed, Ryan's last glimpse of the Redoubt in the Darks was a worm of smoke inching from the damaged control.
An arrow pinged against the glass, but the thick plate held fast. The fog rose about them and the metal disks glowed brightly. Ryan felt himself being sucked into the maelstrom and fought against losing consciousness. But the physical disturbance was too severe, and the darkness swamped his mind.
Ryan opened his eye.
As before, his seven comrades were lying all around him. J.B.'s glasses had become dislodged from his thin nose and lay on the floor. Finnegan was snoring, flat on his back, revealing a mouthful of teeth that overlapped and jostled one another like a view into an excavated graveyard. Hunaker was curled into a fetal ball, eyes blinking as she began to recover. Henn held his leg, the blood still trickling steadily from it. Okie was also bleeding, crimson rivulets threading from between her fingers as she clamped her hand over the superficial flesh wound in her shoulder. Her other hand held the M-16 tight. Krysty was sitting up, shaking her head to clear the mist from it. The front of her overalls was soaked with blood from the Indian that Ryan had decapitated.
Doc was groaning, with a small pool of yellow bile near his feet. As he sat up, he looked toward Ryan. "Upon my... I am becoming too old for this sort of foolishness, sir. Indeed I am."
"If they wreck the Redoubt up in the Darks, then what if we tried to get back?"
"Not a wise idea, Mr. Cawdor. I will alter the setting so that the automatic return is negated. That is, if we should decide not to remain here."
"Where is here, Doc?" grunted Hunaker, standing up.
The glass was a pale gray color, and as Ryan stood he noticed that there was a network of very fine cracks lacing the plate. He took a deep breath. The air smelled bad. He could taste the oily flavor of methane on his tongue, and some other, bitter chemical.
"Don't like this. J.B., you come with me. Rest of you stay here. Doc, you'd best alter the control."
"You do appreciate that I can change them so we don't return, but I have no control over where we might eventually finish up?"
"Yeah. Just do it, Doc. Ready, J.B.?"
"As I'll ever be."
As soon as they left the trans-mat chamber, Ryan sensed something was wrong. Gravely wrong. The bitter flavor of the air was stronger and it was very warm. The door to the anteroom was already ajar. There was no furniture there at all, and the walls were marked with deep gouges and scratches, with smears of burned ash across the ceiling. The outer was also partly open, showing nothing but a great darkness.
"Don't like it, Ryan," said J.B.
"I know what you mean."
Ryan moved to the door and peered out. The darkness was not total. The sky glowed an unimaginably deep red, with flashes of lightning scattered across it. But each bolt of lightning stayed in place for several seconds as though frozen there. Distant thunder rumbled. The land seemed flat and sandy, from what they could make out in the strip of light that spilled out through the open doorway.
On a sudden deadly impulse, Ryan flicked on the small geiger counter in his lapel. Immediately it began to crackle and click louder than he'd ever thought possible.
"It's a hot spot! "said J.B.
"There's enough milli-rads here to fry a war wag. Let's go."
As he turned, Ryan glimpsed something moving out in that seared desert. Something blasphemously huge, lumbering toward the remnants of the Redoubt. He hadn't made out the shape of the entity, except that it had seemed in that single glimpse to have no true shape at all.
With the knowledge of that horror at his heels, Ryan pushed J.B. ahead of him, past the banks of machines, many silent and blind. He saw the others, gathered in the door of the chamber, and the look on his face propelled them into instant action. Guns sprang into hands.
"No. Just get out!"
"I've altered..." began Doc, but Ryan elbowed him aside, pulling the door and slamming it shut behind J.B. and himself.
The lights came on and the thick mist rose about their feet.
"Here we go," said Krysty softly. "Where to this time?"
"Somewhere better," Ryan began to say, but he felt the suction of his mind and the atoms and molecules of his body being displaced.
But even as the displacement occurred, and in spite of it, Ryan Cawdor knew with a profound and gratifying certainty that, in fact, they had already achieved, truly achieved, what he and Krysty had set out to do. They had broken from the bonds that were at the heart of the Deathlands, they had entered the forbidden places, deep into the Darks, and they had found... something, something other than their dreary experience in the Deathlands, something that by its very newness spelled hope for a different life, a different future.
That was what they had always yearned for, quested for, put their lives on the line for. Now Ryan and his woman and J.B. and their warrior allies and the strange character called Doc were free at last of the deadening reality of the Deathlands, free to live anew even if the new life was hazardous and unknown.
Through love and through death they had come this far, and they had seen so much, and now they would conquer...
And the darkness fell once more over them all.
Epilogue
Ryan opened his eye.