James Axler - Red Equinox

"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.

"Smith & Wesson .38," J.B. observed. "Or what's left of it."

The penetrating damp had reduced the handgun to a fragile orange skeleton. Jak dropped it to the floor where it crumbled apart, the brass-jacketed rounds spilling out.

"I never seen a redoubt like this one," Ryan said to nobody in particular.

"That way?" Rick asked, pointing to a plain door on the far side of the small room. "Stupid question, Ginsberg. Where the hell else are we going to go? Back to the torture chamber again? Thanks, but no thanks, guys."

Ryan gripped the handle and pressed it, part of his mind waiting for the starburst of an explosion that would tell him he'd made a poor calculation. There was the click of the lock turning and the door opened. Light spilled from the room behind him, illuminating the bottom of an iron spiral staircase, the treads and rails coated with a patina of reddish rust. There was no other exit or door.

"Up," he said.

"Wow!" Rick panted about five minutes into the climb. "This is what we used to call a whole lot of no fun."

He and Krysty were finding the going very hard indeed.

Ryan tested the stairs, worried that a hundred years of the bone-chilling damp might have rotted the iron. Though the surface flaked away, the main structure seemed sound. The light switch at the bottom of the ladder didn't work, so they ascended in almost total blackness. It wasn't even possible to see how far they had to climb, or if there was any way out once they reached the top. Ryan sympathized with the freezie's comment. It was a lot of no fun,

"Fifteen minutes." J.B.'s voice echoed around the concrete stairwell. "Reckon we've climbed around two hundred feet, allowing for the stops."

"You talking about me, J.B.?" Krysty asked, pausing for breath.

He didn't reply.

"Can't... sorry, folks. I'm utterly... I'm fucked up hill and down." Rick sat on the cold steps, nearly weeping, his face a pale blur in the darkness. The others gathered around him. Krysty was also near the outer limit of exhaustion, head in her hands. Doc was bearing up surprisingly well, his cane tapping away on the sonorous metal, ringing in the sighing space below them.

Ryan, J.B. and Jak were capable of climbing on forever.

But it was an eerie feeling. The light from beneath had almost vanished, just a tiny circle of palest yellow, so faint that to blink was to lose sight of it.

"I swear that this is akin to swimming in the ether, lost between heaven and earth," Doc muttered.

"Reminds me of Pontchartrain Causeway," Rick said, fighting to gather breath. "Long bridge that brings you into New Orleans. Guess I should say that it used to bring you in. Must be gone now. It was so damned long that when you were driving across and you were around the middle..." A coughing fit cut off the words. "Sweet Lord! Oh, better now. Yeah. In the middle you could look to both sides and see nothing but water. Look ahead and you couldn't make out the city. Just water. And you looked behind and the land vanished. Just more of the same water. Scared the shit out of me when I was a kid."

Ryan leaned on the rail, feeling it give a little under his weight. He straightened, looked down, then up, trying to make out an ending of the spidery staircase. "Yeah, Rick. Know what you mean."

"Here!" Jak called, his faint voice floating down from the angelic heights far above the others.

"Door?" Ryan shouted.

"Yeah. Can't move. Shall?.."

"No. Wait for the rest of us!"

He climbed swiftly, J.B. at his heels, leaving the other three to fumble their way up after him as best they could.

There was a platform, big enough to hold a dozen men, but as Ryan set his foot to it, he felt the tremor of movement and turned to the Armorer, behind him. "Stay there! It's swaying some."

"They can't have done this trip every time they wanted to use the gateway," J.B. said, no more out of breath than if he'd taken a stroll around a garden on a spring morning. "Got to be an elevator someplace here."

"Could be it got wrecked during the nukings. They put this in as a standby."

"Mebbe. Tell you, Ryan, this is the damnedest place I ever did see."

Doc was closing in on them, his voice ringing like a cathedral bell. "Oh, if my love were in my arms..."

"Take it easy," J.B. called, silencing the song. "Platform here's not that safe. Tell the others behind you."

They heard the old man relaying the message down the spidery staircase.

Ryan felt his way toward the albino boy, grateful for the avalanche of snowy hair that guided him like a beacon.

"Got it. There's..." He ran his hands over the whole door, feeling two small sec bolts at top and bottom. He slid them both open, turned the handle and pushed the door away from him.

A rush of bitingly cold air swept over him, air so fresh it almost brought tears to his eye.

"We're out," he said, looking into a wintry night.

From the delicate coral pink of the eastern sky, dawn wasn't far off. The six friends huddled together for warmth. Ryan, arm around Krysty, looked around and tried to make sense of what he saw.

The door had been cunningly concealed as a part of a chimney flue, so cleverly camouflaged that it was no surprise it had been hidden for a century. But this was no redoubt.

They were in the ruined attic of a large house, almost a mansion from what they could see of it. Some of the roof tiles had disappeared, revealing the star-spangled heavens, though scudding clouds made it impossible to recognize any of the constellations. Snow came in fine showers between the stark rafters, piling under the eaves.

Jak was all for exploring, but Ryan told him to sit still and not risk moving around in the dark. Ordered him, pointing out that the state of the outer roof spoke of serious damage. And who knew what worse damage was lower down.

Doc and J.B. fell asleep and Krysty dozed a while in Ryan's arms. Jak was sulking at being told off. Rick, on Ryan's left side, was still awake.

"What d'you figure?" he whispered.

"Fucked if I know, Rick. It's no official redoubt, that's certain."

"Could be a private sec center. I heard some rich folks — seriously rich, you understand — had their own cryo centers."

"Private freezies?"

"You hear of someone called Walt Disney?"

Ryan nodded. "Course. Invented Mickey the mouse. Seen old vids."

"Sort of. Well, the word was old Walt had himself frozen — he had the big ''C — and he was kept on ice in a sort of fun fair, in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Kind of appropriate, isn't it?"

"Sure." Ryan had no idea what Rick was talking about.

Soon as the first light of the sun appeared, J.B. took out his minisextant and computed where they were.

He repeated the procedure and shook his head. He did it again. And again. By now they were all awake and watching, puzzled. Ryan asked the question.

"Where are we?"

J.B. swallowed hard. "Something wrong with this," he said, shaking the sextant. "Either that, or we're smack in the middle of Russia. Somewhere near their old city of Moscow."

Nobody said a word.

"Could be."

"Never."

"Why not?"

"My dear Richard, it must surely be obvious even to someone whose brains have been addled and whipped into a cold collation."

"Up yours, Doc. Just tell me why we couldn't be in Russia."

"A gateway!"

"Yeah. A gateway. A mat-trans unit. Jumps for the making of. Why not?"

Doc shook his head, the rising sun glinting off his silvery hair. "Because it's absolutely out of the question, Richard, that's why. You hardly think our Communist brethren would have allowed such a thing, do you?"