James Axler - Ice and Fire

The steel shutters had been carefully dropped and locked during the evacuation of the redoubt. The main control was a simple, counterweighted green lever, which had to be lifted to raise the doors above their heads.

It was an unusual setup. The gateway section of the redoubt seemed to be stuck out on an isolated wing of its own, with no other passages opening off the main corridor.

They passed under a half dozen of the metal doors before they began to notice some changes.

"Seismic damage," Doc observed, pointing with his cane at several narrow stress fractures in the ceiling.

Everyone stopped and gazed up, seeing rippled furrows in the stressed concrete. The floor under their feet was no longer perfectly regular. There were chunks of loose grit and larger pieces of stone, some as big as a child's thumb. They also noticed that not all of the lights were functioning. About one sol-strip in five was darkened.

"Nukes?" Jak asked.

"I would hazard a guess that we are still too deep for any primary effects of missiles," Doc replied. "But there is no doubt that the effects of heavy nuclear activity can affect the earth for many miles, exposing frailties in its crust and causing shock waves to run far and deep."

Beyond the next barrier the roof was much worse and parts of the walls had split and fallen. The floor was corrugated in tiny waves. Now three in five of the lights were out.

"Don't much care for the way this is looking, lover," Krysty warned. "I've got a feeling that there's something in this place, 'part from us."

"Something? Or somebody?"

She shook her head, closing her eyes and trying to focus the mutie "sensing" powers she'd inherited from her mother.

"No. Weird... not humanoid, and not mutie, either. Some sort of animal." She shook her head. "No. Not really animal. Just... something."

They reached another of the barriers. Jak was leading and he glanced at Ryan, hand resting on the green control lever. Ryan nodded to the albino boy, keeping his own finger on the trigger of his G-12. If Krysty could feel something wrong, then it likely meant something was wrong.

"Mechanism rough," Jak said. "Sticking bad." He didn't need to tell the others. They could all hear the grating sound from behind the crumbling walls of the passage.

When it reached about two and a half feet in the air, the door stopped moving, with a final, inexorable metallic jolt.

For a moment, in the stillness, Ryan thought that he could hear something moving on the far side, a faint rustling noise, like a breeze moving crumpled pieces of dry paper.

"A ghastly smell," Doc observed, "like old vinegar. It's most unpleasant."

Jak stooped and peeked under the rim of the jammed door. "Can't see much. Nearly all lights gone. Think there's a fork in passage ahead."

Though bright lights affected the white-haired boy's sight, he saw better in semidarkness than any of the others.

"Must be where this spur joins on the main redoubt," J.B. guessed.

"We might as well go take a look," Ryan said. "I'm getting to feel as hungry as Jak. The living and sleeping quarters are where we'll find any eats that are still around."

"Careful," Krysty whispered, licking her lips nervously. "There's... Just take care through that door."

"Go first?" Jak asked.

"Sure. We're right behind you. Watch what you're doing."

The boy flashed a fearless grin and ducked under and out of sight, closely followed by the rest of the group. Jak was the first to find the cockroaches — or rather the cockroaches found him.

Throughout the Deathlands there were many varieties of genetic mutations, mostly prompted by the effects of intensive radiation, combined with the use of chemical toxins. Ryan had seen some quite appalling examples of human or semihuman muties, sometimes made worse by each succeeding generation. Animals that bred much more frequently had sometimes mutated to a literally unrecognizable degree. And the insects, with their infinitely shorter cycle of life and reproduction...

The first roach dropped from its perch high in the tumbling wreckage of the old ceiling, landing on Jak's shoulders, its clawed feet hooking into the white spray of his hair. There was precious little light in this part of the passage, and Ryan, seeing the "bug" fall, was puzzled rather than worried. The thing was a coppery-blue color and almost a foot in length.

The boy screamed, high and shrill, echoing through the maze of linked passages. "Get the fuck off!" he yelled, beating at the creature, but it was snagged to him.

"Gaia! This is what I saw!" Krysty exclaimed at Ryan's elbow, the disgust dripping from her voice. "There's hundreds."

"Thousands," J.B. contradicted her.

"Millions," was Ryan's own conclusion.

Everywhere he looked he could see the metallic sheen of cockroaches, scuttling across the ceiling and down the walls, a sinuous, undulating wave of scraping, scaly legs and bodies. Eyes on stalks, seeking out the scent and taste of the intruders.

The insects dropped all around the companions, on top of them. Ryan felt one trying to probe beneath his collar and he shuddered at the obscenity of the thing.

Lori was starting to slide into a noisy panic, drawing in harsh, rasping breaths and letting them out in choked mewing noises.

The combination of the darkness and the endless rustling attack was nearly too much for the friends, even for hardened fighters like J.B. and Ryan.

"Hang on! Everyone, keep control!" Their leader's order held off the fear for a few vital beats of the heart.

Each of them was reacting in a different way. Doc was hopping around, crunching the cockroaches beneath his boots, flailing at others with his swordstick, muttering to himself under his breath, trying to get near enough to Lori to help her, as well.

Lori stood still, hunched over, hands clasped over her face, shoulders shaking in terror.

J.B. responded to the mutie insects' attack by running on the spot to prevent any of the roaches from climbing his legs. At the same time he brushed at his hat, shoulders and chest, sloughing off any attached insects. He was keeping amazingly calm.

As the first victim, Jak had suffered the worst shock. His greatest problem was to get the voracious mutie insects out of his long, fine hair. More and more cockroaches landed on him, nipping at the skin of his neck, biting at one another. From behind, it looked to Ryan as though the young boy were wearing a magical, shifting helmet of some mystic coppery material.

Krysty's hair had coiled in on itself at the first presentiment of danger, forming a hard scarlet knot that repelled the attempts of the cockroaches to get a grip on it.

Until he felt a savage bite on the back of his hand, Ryan wasn't sure how much of a threat the giant mutie insects presented. The pain and the spurt of blood brought home to him with a dreadful clarity that they were likely to be utterly overwhelmed by the roaches if they didn't act swiftly.

"Everyone get in line, follow me!" he yelled. "J.B., you got the hat. You come last. Rest keep on knocking the scaly bastards off the guy in front. Let's move it!"

For the rest of his life Ryan Cawdor would remember the ceaseless sound of the cockroaches being cracked apart under their feet as they walked steadily toward an uphill section of the passage. Ryan had glimpsed another closed metal sec door and built his plan around their being able to reach it, open it and get through.

And find no more roaches on the other side.

"Keep going!" he shouted. Krysty was immediately behind him, batting the scrabbling horde off his wiry mat of black hair, beating them to the concrete floor. Lori, weeping loudly, was performing the same service for Krysty. Doc, half carrying her, was pushing next in line, spitting out words with violent fluency in a language that nobody had ever heard.