Doc was still pulling a lever inside the panel.
'Inside!' yelled Ryan, as soon as the crack was wide enough for them to slip through.
Henn went first, then Finnegan, struggling to squeeze into the darkness. Okie and Krysty were next. Hun waved at Ryan to go, but he gestured angrily with the stubby barrel of his gun and she ran in.
'Now us, Doc. You done real good.'
As soon as the old man released the control, the door stopped its movement. Behind them Ryan was aware of angry screams and shouts as the Indians saw their prey disappearing into the mountain. Doc vanished through the gap and Ryan followed him in, pausing to look back. He was shocked to see how many attackers there were now. Better than a hundred men, all racing toward them. He gave a quick burst that sent six or seven tumbling like disjointed dolls, blood bursting into the cold air and smoking on the ground from the scattered corpses.
'You can close it up, Doc, right?'
The yellowed eyes turned incuriously to him, veiled as though beeswax lay across them, and Ryan glimpsed the closeness of Doc's insanity. But the threads held together a while longer.
'Indeed. There's the panel.'
'How come them bastard mongrels didn't get this open?' asked Krysty.
'Code, my dear titian girl. A simple three five two to enter and a two five three to shut her up tight again. Like so.' He waved his hand like a magician pulling off a particularly clever trick, although this particular audience did not know what a magician was.
Doc's answer raised a whole mass of questions, but now was not the time. Ryan, with the door grinding tight shut behind him, had a chance to take in their surroundings. Of all the Stockpiles he had seen, this one was the largest and the strangest. Others had been what the name suggested: places where enormous, even staggering, quantities of food and supplies were stored. Like mighty warehouses, packed with... who knew what?
But this was different.
Dim lights came into hesitant flickering life and Ryan figured they had tripped some kind of beam, still active, perhaps of uranium, that switched on the electrics of the place.
Sometimes you found corpses. Mummified and dried, like the husks of cocoons after the butterfly's gone. The air tasted familiar to him from breaking into similar establishments, sealed for a century. Dry and flat, with a hint of iron.
'There another way out of here, Doc?' asked J.B., reloading the Steyr.
'No.' There came a cackle of laughter that often signaled one of Doc's period of craziness. 'Not like you mean, Mr. Dix. Oh, dear me, no.'
'This ain't like no Stockpile I ever seen,' muttered Hunaker, glancing around at the huge curved roof. The room was in fact an immense tunnel, the ribbed metal ceiling like a cylinder above them that curved away into a dense mass of largely empty shelving.
'That, ma'am, is because it is not a Stockpile. Oh, there were many of those, most still hidden beneath swamps or earth slips or hot spots. But this is a Redoubt. There are many of these also, but I do not believe many have ever been discovered. They would appear valueless to those who do not know.' He shook his head, the stringy hair bobbing about his scrawny shoulders. 'And those who did know are so long gone.'
'Make sense, Doc. We're trapped in here. If that's the only door and those sons of bitches are waiting for us... then how do we get out? Are there food and arms in here?'
'No. Perhaps some water, but it will be brackish and foul. Perhaps some eater tablets. No arms. That is not the purpose of the Redoubt.'
'Then what is, Doc?' asked Ryan, hunching his shoulders against the oppressive feel of the place. Buried underground with nowhere to run was a bad feeling.
'This is the gateway to Hades, Mr. Cawdor. Look upon the wall where Cerberus himself stands watch. The gateway to the river to the deeps to the darks to the high mountain. All is dust...' And he turned away, tears streaming down his lined cheeks.
J.B. caught Ryan's eye and shook his head. 'Let it lie, friend. No more help there for a while.'
'We can't go out,' Ryan said, 'so we best go in.'
Hun took Doc's arm, leading him along in the middle of the shrunken party. First Ryan, then Okie and Henn. The green-haired girl and the old man. Krysty and Finnegan. And J. B. Dix at the rear.
Eight of them, bearing the faint torch of the future, into the past.
Ryan led them past the picture that had caught Doc's gaze. Garishly painted with a crude skill like a comic book illustration, it showed a slavering black hound. Three heads grew out of a single corded neck, their jaws wide open, fire and blood gushing between yellow teeth. The eyes were crimson, the colors bright despite the creature's age. Underneath, in an ornate Gothic script, was written the single word: 'Cerberus.'
Apart from that one picture, the place was bare. Ryan had seen Stockpiles that had been ravaged, but they were always a total shambles with rotting food and torn containers everywhere. This was different. It was as if a team of men had carefully gone through the entire place, stripping everything off walls, removing every stick of furniture. Nothing remained.
Nothing beyond the stale, flat air and the echoing sound of their own boots.
The walls remained curved, with strips of corrugated steel supports running clear over the roof. Behind them Ryan heard the distant sound of a shell hitting the closed door, but he knew the door to be strong enough to withstand anything short of an antitank shell.
They headed inward, toward the bowels of the mountain. The tunnel that they followed ran straight for several hundred paces with about a dozen chambers opening off it. Each one was stripped bare. Some of the walls showed the faint marks where cabinets or desks had once stood against them.
Out of habit, Ryan flicked on the rad counter clipped to the inside of his long coat, by the lapel. It murmured and cheeped a little, with the background crackling it always gave out in the Deathlands. But nothing here to worry-about.
Nobody spoke as they moved cautiously on. There was a deadliness in the Redoubt that oppressed the spirit. Doc was mumbling to himself, a quiet string of nonsense. Ryan wished to the bottom of his heart that the old man hadn't lost so much of his mind under the tender care of Teague and Strasser. He was absolutely certain that Doc held the key to limitless secrets. How could he have known about the fog and Cerberus and the code to the door that had saved all their lives?
'Should I call in to Cohn?' asked Henn. 'If we go much hellfired deeper they won't be able to hear it.'
Ryan shook his head at the suggestion. 'No point, Henn. That door and this concrete will stop anything gettin' out.'
The corridor reached a T-junction. It was a momentary temptation to split the party, but Ryan elected to keep together. Eight wasn't a big enough group to divide and then hope to survive a firefight. Despite what Doc had said, there might be another entrance. Or the Indians might be able to force the main door, now that they had the added incentive of pursuing them inside.
He led them to the left, wandering along a snaking passage for some minutes until it ended abruptly in a rock-fall. It looked as if half the hill had come bursting in through the roof.
There was a doorway partly buried under the stone, and Ryan scrambled up to push it open. It moved back uneasily on warped hinges and he glimpsed light and some wooden pallets. 'Somethin' here,' he called.
'Old stores. Left behind,' said Doc.
Ryan beckoned for Krysty and J.B. to follow him, leaving the others immediately outside; there was no obvious danger of a fight, and they would give warning of any attackers. It was a corridor with a rounded ceiling, made of rows of stressed metal ribs. On the right were dozens of stacked boxes, with a few more piled loosely on the other side. At the farthest end he could see the red and silver of the sky, patched with purple chem clouds; the end of the cave was open to the world. Some of the boxes had been opened, and Ryan and J.B. began to investigate. Krysty walked to the opening, less than fifty paces away.
'Blasters,' said J.B., sitting on one of the containers, peering at a bizarre weapon by his feet. It was like a large pistol with a massive ammunition drum that had chambers for a dozen rounds.
'What the hell does that fire?' asked Ryan.
