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frozen water, interrupted occasionally by bulky equipment that thrust up from
the level surface.
"How far down, Jak?" Ryan asked.
"Fifteen feet, mebbe twenty. Light not good. Hard judge distance."
"Yeah."
"You can figure there's probably thirty feet of ice before you reach the
concrete bottom of that room," Mildred said. "This must be where they were
storing the nerve gas."
Ryan silently agreed. His eye scoured the walls, seeing signs where explosions
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf had ripped into the metal. Huge gouges lay
under the sheets of ice, disfigured by the depth.
"I get bad feelings about this place," Krysty said in a soft voice. "A lot of
people died right here."
"Took a lot of water to fill this room, Dad," Dean said. "Kind of curious
about where it came from."
"Me, too," Ryan said, but he felt a gnawing certainty that he knew where it
had come from. He'd had to knock ice from the handkerchief around his lower
face three times since they had begun to walk. Every time he had tasted the
ice through the material, and every time it had carried with it the distinct
taste of salt.
Salt water could only mean a sea or an ocean. But there were a lot of those in
the world. It also meant that wherever they were, it was cold by a damn sight
because salt water took longer and colder to freeze than fresh water.
Another rumble shook the ground. Metal creaked this time, and huge sheets of
ice ripped free of the walls in the room. Some areas had already been bared by
the earlier quakes, but not all of them had torn free.
A sheet almost twice the size of a man crashed onto the railing in front of
Ryan.
The impact reduced it to fist-sized pieces that pelted them with bruising
force and smashed into the walls around them.
Then the quake finished with a final spasmodic quiver that sent ice chunks
skittering across the frozen surface.
"Getting worse," Jak commented as they pushed themselves up.
"Didn't feel any worse than the last one," Ryan said. He held a finger to the
side of his nose, stemming blood flow where ice had hit him.
"Mebbe," Jak said. "But was." He pointed at the floor.
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf
Fractures ran through the inches-thick accumulation beneath their feet. Ryan
guessed that a few had been there from earlier, but in no way were they as bad
as what he was looking at now. "Let's get a move on," he growled, "before this
whole fire-blasted place comes tumbling down around our ears."
"THE EXPLOSION MUST have taken place around the time of the nukecaust,"
Mildred commented. She ran her hands through the pockets of the dead man they
found in the corridor. More of the ice lining the floor had buckled, making
footing even more treacherous. "Got paperwork here with a January 18, 2001,
date on it."
"What paperwork?" Ryan asked. He moved forward, squinting in the dim light to
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look at the paper she offered. She gave him three sheets, all covered with
feminine handwriting.
"Personal letter," Mildred said, shivering from the cold. She ran her hands
along her arms, her gaze still captured by the young corpse on the ground
before them.
The man looked to be in his early twenties. His hair was crew-cut blond, and
his staring, dead eyes were hazel. A dimple centered in his chin gave him a
look of arrogance, but the ice pieces clinging to his frozen flesh stripped
him of that full effect. Sergeant chevrons marked his short-sleeved shirt.
Some decay had set in before the freezing temperatures, and the ice had
preserved what was left of his corpse. His body showed a watermark where blood
had settled into his exposed limbs and the back of his neck.
The letter was just that, a message from home, written by a young wife who
hoped to see her husband in two weeks for the first time in nearly eight
months.
Sections of the letter were covered over by black marker. From reading the
text, Ryan knew the references had to do with where the young soldier had been
stationed.
"Evidently this place stored a lot of war chems, lover," Krysty said. They had
turned up more of the canisters. Some of them, however, hadn't been broken
open. Ryan had given the order to stay away from them. If any nerve gas got
released, the breeze blowing by them would have blown the gas cloud farther
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Deathlands 42 - Way of the Wolf down the tunnel, killing them, as well as the
others. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]