Hell Road Warriors. James Axler
his hand on the lever to open the mat-trans chamber. His companions had cleaned themselves up from the jump, and everyone was geared up and ready to go except Doc, who was coming down from his postjump shudders. The one-eyed man waited while Doc pulled himself together. The walls of the mat-trans chamber were an amber color densely veined with black. Ryan had never seen one colored like that and it made him uneasy. He didn’t know where they were, but it had to be better than the swamps, and Haven. “Ready, Doc?”
Doc took the hand off the wall he was using to steady himself. He drew his huge Civil War-replica model LeMat revolver and set the hammer to fire the shotgun barrel. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!”
Doc looked like a stiff breeze would knock him over. His mind and body were damaged by being torn through time from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Proving to be a difficult subject, after a period of time they shot him via mat-trans into the future that was the Deathlands. Having his matter transferred from point A to point B never did him any favors.
Being discombobulated was something no one ever got used to, but looking around, Jak, J.B. and Mildred were post-regurgitation and ready to go. Ryan’s eye came to rest on the love of his life. Krysty raised one eyebrow. “Lover, if you don’t pull that lever soon I’m going to pull yours.”
A grin ghosted across Ryan’s face. “Okay, everyone. Triple red.” His companions spread out and leveled their weapons at the door as he pulled the lever. The door hissed open. Ryan’s eye narrowed. The lights were on, and he could hear the hum of a generator. One glance told him this redoubt was unusual. Most were built to a pattern. The architecture here was all wrong. Ryan looked back at the mat-trans and then into the odd little redoubt. His instincts told him the mat-trans they had just stepped out of had been a last-minute addition. The party moved into a long, low room filled with workstations.
Mildred put her fists on her hips and stared around herself indignantly. “Okay, have we traveled back in time or something?”
Jak shook his head warily. “Hope not.”
Doc’s voice was very quiet. “I dearly hope so.”
“What are you talking about, Mildred?” Ryan asked.
“Look at this place!” Mildred threw up her hands. “I mean, look at it!”
Ryan looked at it. The ceiling was low and supported by squat pillars. Everything seemed wrong. The floor was an odd checkerboard of green and white. “And?”
Mildred sighed. “You see the floors? That’s linoleum. Have you checked the puke-green walls? The workstations are top-notch, but check the watercooler and the other stuff.”
Mildred had been cryogenically frozen over a century earlier and, like Doc, was an unwilling citizen of the postapocalyptic Deathlands. Ryan knew she was on to something. “What about them?”
“This place? It’s kitsch.”
Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Jak and Doc stared at Mildred blankly. When she went predark in her speech, no one knew what she was talking about. Mildred gazed heavenward for strength. “It’s totally retro.” Mildred was rewarded with more tolerant looks. She plowed on anyway. “I’m saying this place was built in the 1960s. During the cold war. It’s some kind of bomb shelter, and it’s like it got refurbished fast and dirty at the last second.”
Ryan nodded. He’d read old books about the cold war in his youth. Having a library of books was just one perk of being the son of an East Coast baron when he was growing up. Mildred was confirming his suspicions.
“Reactivated,” he said. “Probably added that mat-trans at the last minute.”
Jak shrugged. None of that meant much to the young man from the bayous of Louisiana. He had more immediate questions. “Where?”
Everyone turned at the sound of Doc tapping his cane on the wall. He tapped a painted flag over the door to the mat-trans chamber. It had two red stripes, one on each side and a white center. A stylized red maple leaf dominated the middle. A second smaller flag was painted beneath it. Ryan recognized the Union Jack in one corner of the flag and some shield off to the side.
Doc cocked his head. “I am confused.”
That was news to nobody.
Mildred shook her head. “We’re in the Great White North.”
“A Mari Usque Ad Mare.” Everyone stared at Doc. When it came down to being predark obscure, he had Mildred beat hands down. Doc sighed in defeat and translated from the Latin. “From Sea to Sea.”
“So where are we?” Ryan asked.
“Canada,” Doc concluded.
Ryan grimaced. He had been north of the Deathlands a few times, usually against his will and mostly in what had once been Alaska or Siberia. What little he knew about Canada was that it was vast and bastard cold.
“Where?” Jak repeated.
Doc tapped the smaller flag painted beneath the maple leaf. “That is what confuses me. At first glance the flag below is the Canadian Red Ensign, but upon consideration I believe the coat of arms is incorrect.”
“It’s the flag of Ontario,” Mildred said. This garnered her more uncomprehending stares. The physician shrugged. “I dated a radiologist from Toronto once.”
Ryan and his friends walked through the redoubt, clearing it room by room. They found a dormitory, an infirmary and a lavatory all in order. They looted supplies from every room. Mildred found a treasure trove of medical supplies, but it was the sight of toilet paper still in its packaging that nearly made her burst into tears.
Jak raised his head and sniffed the air. “Food.”
“Damn!” Mildred swore. “No freakin’ way! I smell pizza!” Blaster out in front of her, she made a beeline toward the smell of pepperoni and cheese. Ryan didn’t know what pizza was, but he found himself salivating at the scent.
“Triple alert, people!” He kicked open a set of double doors. His longblaster pointed at an empty kitchen. Beyond it lay an equally empty cafeteria.
“Just missed whoever was here,” J.B. observed. “We better take a look around here. Bastards might creep up and attack.”
A recce of the immediate area revealed nothing. The companions went back to the kitchen.
“We just missed pizza!” Mildred was agitated at the loss. Ryan took in several receptacles stuffed to the gills with plastic packaging. A sea of plastic eating utensils lay in the sink. Whoever they had just missed, there were a lot of them. Other people were using this place.
Mildred scoured the kitchen. “Look at this!” Ryan looked. It was a freezer unit. A wall full of them, and walk-in size. It was more than a freezer. It was literally a kitchen cryogenic unit. Mildred picked up a white binder with the Canadian flag on it and began flipping through it. “Jeez! This thing is more sophisticated than the unit I came out of.” She scanned pages of inventory. “Look at this, hams, venison, sides of beef, vegetables, fruit juice concentrate… Man, they even managed to freeze wine and beer!” Mildred closed the binder. “Someone went to one whole hell of a lot of trouble to stock this place, and not just with those crappy MRE packs in the redoubts, but with real food that would be as tasty as the day as it was frozen, even if that was a hundred years ago.”
“Just like you?” J.B. observed.
Mildred’s lips quirked. J.B. was a man of few words but every once in a while he said something sweet. “Something like that.”
Ryan looked at the food vaults and then Mildred. “Can you unfreeze something?”
The physician tapped the binder. “The thawing process seems to take four-to-six hours, depending on the foodstuff, and that’s not counting actual cooking time.”
Ryan wasn’t sure they had four-to-six hours. No one would