"Here," J.B. said, putting his hand against an illuminated rectangle set flush in the wall to the right of a door. The door slid silently open, revealing a foyer. On the wall there was a sign.
"Do not touch exhibits. Ammo filed beneath under cross-refs," read Krysty.
"Look there," said Ryan, pointing to another sign, hand painted, not neatly printed like the other one.
It's nice to come, if you've got your pass.
But if you don't we'll bust your ass.
The double doors at the far side of the foyer had small circles of glass set in their tops. Ryan pushed them open, stopping so suddenly that Hennings walked into him.
"Fireblast!"
"What the... Oh, fuckin'..."
The museum stretched out ahead of them, dim lights brightening in the large hall as sensors detected their presence. It wasn't the array of weapons that caught everyone's eyes. It was what was nailed to the floor just in front of them.
All of them recognized it as the mummified corpse of a young child. Either it had been assembled by a crazed and skilful surgeon, or it was one of the worst mutations that any of them had ever seen. Despite the dried, leathery skin, it was possible to make out scars from what had once been suppurating sores all over the body. The umbilical cord dangled like a knotted brown string, and a shrunken penis revealed the original sex of the child. Though it looked to be only a few weeks old, it had a full set of needle-sharp teeth, and its fingernails were long and curved like claws. Ryan counted nine fingers on the right hand. The left hand sprouted from near the shoulder. It looked like a little paddle of lacy skin and had at least a dozen fingers on it. The legs were less than three inches in length, ending in toes that lacked nails.
At the shoulders there were the stubs of what looked like the wings of a prehistoric flying reptile. The crucified baby had two heads, one with only a residual stump of a skull, hardly visible in the shadows. The ribs were appallingly distorted, running more from top to bottom than from side to side, and the pelvis was strangely tilted, obscenely large for the rest of the torso.
A long thin dagger with a hilt of twisted silver wire was pushed through the crossed feet. A second blade pinned the right hand. A third was pressed through the scrawny throat. Blood darkened the tiles all around the body. Hunaker touched it with the toe of her new tan boots, watching it crumble to powder.
"Been here for years. Mebbe twenty or more. Could be plenty more."
There was a message that had apparently been scrawled with a finger, using blood that was still warm and fresh. The words misspelled and the letters clumsy, it was difficult to read, but clearly a warning:
"Kep oute for ewer ore dy." It was signed, "The Keper."
"You said Quint couldn't read or write," Ryan said to Krysty.
"Yeah. No reason to lie, was there?"
Ryan shook his head. "Guess not. So, if he's as fuckin' old as he looks, an' he's the Keeper... who was the Keeper who wrote this?"
J.B. pushed past him. "Who cares, friend? Let's go look at some guns."
And what guns they were.
Some of them were at least three hundred years old, looking frail and dusty inside cases of Plexiglas. The party split up to wander around, and the huge room echoed with their cries of amazement at the wonders. Ryan walked with Krysty and J.B.
It wasn't just a boggling array of blasters. There were all kinds of daggers and swords and axes. Many of the guns had descriptive cards under them. One card read, "Pair English flintlock night pistols, circa 1712, made in England by James Freeman. Screw-barrel guns fired buckshot instead of conventional ball, making it easier to hit a target at night, hence their name."
"What kind of range would that have, J.B.?" asked Ryan.
"I guess about twenty feet on a good day, or night," replied the Armorer, and moved on to explore on his own.
In the next case was a delicate sword with a blade that tapered to a needle point. Krysty put her arm on Ryan's, squeezing against him. "When do we go, lover?" she asked.
"Soon. Mebbe tomorrow. Day after for sure. Sword like that wouldn't be worth mutie shit in a firefight."
The card read, "English small sword, officer's. Circa 1765, steel hilt, with colichemarde blade. Grip bound in silver wire. Pierced pommel and guard. Blade length, thirty-two inches."
"Look at the length of this mother, J.B.," yelled Okie, her face pressed against a case across the hall. The long dark hair in her ponytail swung back and forth with her excitement. Dix joined her, reading slowly from the card.
"Model eighteen-forty-two rifle-musket. Fired the seven-forty grain Minie ball. Sights up to... up to nine hundred yards."
"Over a fuckin' half mile," gasped Okie. "That right, J.B.?"
"I'd back it up to about eighty yards."
"Look at the barrel on it," said Ryan, joining them. "Must be over five feet long."
"Couldn't get that inside your coat," grinned Krysty.
"Wouldn't want to."
"You goin' to change that LAPA now?" asked J.B. "On through there, under that arch, is an armory of modern stuff. Get somethin' new."
"What?"
J.B.'s sallow face warmed with a smile, and his eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses. "Go see. I saw somethin' you might like."
Ryan walked quickly away, hearing the click of Krysty's dark blue cowboy boots following. He slowed down and waited for her, passing Finnegan and Hennings, immaculate in their matching blue jumpers.
"How's the hand, Ryan?" asked the fat man.
He inspected it. A little dried blood was crusted around the cut from the mutie's spear tip, but it looked clean. Ryan knew that out east there were villages of "dirties" who lived in mud huts and used poison on their arrows. The Trader had told him about them.
"Better, thanks, Finn."
On either side, rows of cases were stacked one above the other. He knew that J.B. Dix had a few precious booklets and pages torn from mags that showed some blasters from before the Chill. Now those blasters were in front of him and he read the names on the cards.
"Colt. Remington. Walker. Sharps, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Le Mat, Luger, Catling, Maxim, Walther, Browning, Kalashnikov, Thompson, Mannlicher, Schmeisser, Uzi, Mauser, Tokarev, Webley, Deringer and Deringer, Tranter." His voice faded in wonder at this staggering array of arms. "J.B. could stay here all his days, Krysty. This is what his life is all about. Blasters in all shapes and sizes. Look at 'em. Just look."
He never even noticed the tiny vid camera hidden in the shadows near the ceiling, its tiny lens darting from side to side, following the movements of the group.
Just as they'd raided the clothes stores, so everyone took their pickings from the section of the museum beyond the arch, where there were rows and rows of greased and oiled blasters in all sizes and shapes and calibers; grenades and bombs and mines and rockets; bayonets and gren launchers; strangling wires and bazookas; machine guns and poison pistols.
Hunaker replaced the broad-bladed dagger that she'd broken fighting the Sioux in the Darks; barely a week earlier, it seemed like a dozen lifetimes. On J.B.'s recommendation, she took a 9 mm Ingram submachine gun that pared everything down to the minimum. Despite its small size, the light bolt action gave it a staggering rate of fire close to fifteen hundred rounds per minute. The card said it was the model 12. She also took a supply of the stick mags.
Okie kept her M-16A1 carbine with the collapsed stock, adding to it an IMI Mini-Uzi submachine gun. It weighed just over six pounds and was less than fifteen inches in length.