"Everyone ready?" J.B. yelled. "Then here we go."
The snick of the knife cutting through the wire was followed immediately by the deafening boom of the explosion.
Despite having followed his own instructions, Ryan felt the pressure against his eardrums, the plas-ex blowing and filling the room with noise and fine white dust.
"Fireblast!" he coughed. "J.B.! Hey, you all right there?"
Jak moved first, darting toward the entrance doors, ducking under the blinding cloud. "He's here, out cold. Blood on him."
Ryan was the second one there, stooping alongside the white-haired boy, seeing the slight figure of John Barrymore Dix lying like a child's discarded doll, one arm crooked, legs doubled under him. His glasses were hanging on one ear and his beloved fedora had vanished. Blood oozed from J.B.'s ears, nostrils and open mouth. The Tekna was still gripped firmly in his right hand.
"Breathing," Jak pronounced, feeling for the pulse beneath J.B.'s right ear. "Strong beat."
"Roll him onto his side so that he doesn't risk choking," Doc suggested.
"Leave him be!" Krysty demanded, leaning over Ryan to look at J.B.
"Shoulder's out," Jak observed. "Put back now or big problem. See it 'fore."
J.B.'s eyes flickered open and rolled in their sockets. "Kid's right. Put back now, Ryan. Do it for me." His eyes closed again and his body tensed, anticipating the pain to come.
"Could be he's snapped a rib or two," Rick said worriedly. "Try anything and you could hurt him real bad."
"Already hurting real bad, freezie," J.B. muttered, keeping his eyes shut. "Listen, Ryan, before you do it. There was a second charge. Never seen it. Cut the wire and it blew. Must've lost most of its power. Should have taken me off at the shoulders. Okay. Now do it."
Riding with the Trader, Ryan Cawdor had seen most every kind of wound or sickness or injury known to man or to woman.
Traveling over rough terrain, often on broken-down highways corrugated by the ripple effect of nukings, meant some bumpy journeys. A sudden turn or lurch could cause sprained wrists, broken ankles and, often, dislocated shoulders. The cure for that was fairly simple.
Painful, but simple.
While Doc and Krysty each held a leg still, Jak took the Armorer's other arm and locked it tight in his hands. Ryan sat on the floor, putting his right foot into J.B.'s armpit, gripping the wrist of the damaged arm in both hands. He wriggled around to get comfortable and make sure he had enough purchase to do what had to be done. If it was left more than a few minutes the repair of the dislocation was going to be a major operation and could leave J.B. with a permanent weakness.
"Ready?" Ryan asked.
"Do it, Ryan," J.B. gritted from between clenched teeth.
Ryan braced himself and tugged hard on the wrist, feeling the damaged joint snap back into place with an audible click.
Ryan let go and stood up. "How's that?" he asked. But J.B. didn't answer him.
"Fainted," Jak said. "Shouldn't have called me 'kid.' Told him."
Fortunately, apart from some pain and stiffness in his shoulder, the Armorer wasn't too badly damaged. His ears were ringing and his head ached. The blood from his mouth was the result of biting through the tip of his tongue as the explosion hurled him off the chair. He was bruised around the kidneys and down the outside of the right thigh.
"Good news is that my hat's fine, glasses aren't broke, and pants aren't torn. Never got much good at mending. And all the weapons are fine."
"And the doors are open," Rick finished.
Ryan laughed. "They were open before J.B. got to playing with them."
The Armorer gave him the finger.
In all of the other redoubts they'd entered, the ponderous double sec doors had always opened onto an expanse of wide, brightly lit corridor that was part of the main military complex.
But not this time.
Ryan cautiously pushed the left-hand door, careful to make sure that the previous tenants hadn't left yet another plas-ex calling card to greet them.
"Fireblast," he spit.
"What is it?" Krysty asked at his shoulder, her own Heckler & Koch P7A-13 blaster at the ready. "What?"
Ryan loudly sucked in air. "This fireblasted triple-rad tooth of mine gave me a crack. Gotta get it pulled some time. Hole feels bigger than a three-hundred-pound gaudy whore's..."
"Ryan," she warned, lifting the barrel of the silvered pistol.
"Well. Hole feels big, and that's the truth, lover. It's bad."
"Never mind your black-dust tooth, Ryan! What's out there?"
Ryan looked around the edge of the door, turning back to face the others.
"Not a lot."
The walls were made of dirt, not concrete dusty brown earth, packed tight, supported by thick wooden beams. Up in what once had been Pennsylvania, Ryan had come across an abandoned coal mine. It had been used as an emergency nuke shelter, but the bombing had caved in the entrance. A century of wind, rain and shifting land had opened it up. Ryan had never seen so many desiccated corpses, piled and tangled one upon another. The corridors had been supported in the same way as the room outside the gateway control.
There was no illumination at all, but Ryan spotted a neat plastic box-switch by the doors. He clicked it down and a few bulbs flickered into hesitant life. The room was barely eight feet across, with a ceiling that couldn't have been more than seven cramped feet in height. Some sort of barred gate was set in the far wall.
"Looks like the first redoubt ever built," Krysty said.
But Rick disagreed. "No. Can't be. I know this looks like someone's backyard but the mat-trans technology is... like I said. It's state-of-the-art. Miniaturized circuits, the works. So, this stuff outside doesn't make any sense."
The air tasted cool and damp, like the cellar of a long-abandoned house, a smell of kerosene and old bicycles, of empty bottles and piles of rotting newspaper tied up with twine.
"What do you feel, lover?" Ryan asked. "Anything bad around?"
Krysty shook her head. Her long red hair was still curled tightly around her nape. The effort of forcing the door had taken a toll, and she could barely stand unsupported.
"Don't know, lover. Truth is, I don't feel anything but bushed out. Sorry."
Ryan nodded. "Sure. Let's go find a way out of this tomb."
He led the way, blaster probing the air in front of him like the tongue of a cobra.
The barrier in the far wall was high-quality vanadium steel, made from bars as thick as a man's index finger, with a space between them of less than a half inch. The crossbars were set three inches apart. It was an impressive security device, its quad-lock and bolts set in a steel insert drilled right through into concrete. There was no gap in the door, either at the top or bottom.
Cautiously Ryan reached out and pushed it, and the barred door swung silently open.
"Unlocked," he said, unable to hide his relief. It wouldn't have been easy to blow.
Beyond it was another wall switch. He considered the possibility that this could also have been wired, but rejected the notion. The charges planted back at the gateway had all the hallmarks of a last-minute decision. Maybe in the final minutes of the withdrawal from the redoubt someone with a few yards of wire and a handful of plas-ex decided to make it tough for anyone trying to break into the mat-trans section of the complex.
The overhead neon strip stuttered into life. They were all in a small stone-walled chamber, ten feet square. The smell of damp was much stronger, and the earth beneath their boots was moist. The walls were streaked with fungus and slime-green lichen.
"Look." Jak pointed to a rusted metal cabinet screwed to the wall by the barred door. "Open it?"
"Yeah. Slow and easy," J.B. said.
The door wasn't closed and the boy levered it open with his fingers, wincing at the screech of corroded metal from the hinges.
"Blaster," he said, hooking it out and holding it to show the others.